I hold the frantic moth inside the cage I form with my fingers. It flutters around and beats its delicate wings against my hand as I watch from the outside world – my eye that of a giant peering in upon its prisoner; my captive. I unfurl my fingers just enough for it to make its panicked escape. On my palm is the powder it left behind when its wings scraped against my skin. I blow and it, too, flies away, dissipating through the chilling air – growing colder as the sun fades.
I live in the Texas countryside with my grandparents. At least for the summer, while everything calms down. Somewhere in between mom hitting dad with the jeep, my sister attempting suicide, and our house catching on fire, my grandparents decided it would be a good idea to get us out of there for a while. I can’t say I disagree.
Texas is different from New York. I think that goes without saying. But it’s different in ways you wouldn’t expect. Sometimes there is actual silence. Especially in the evening – like right now. Sometimes everything stops, as if the transition between day and night requires the atmosphere to reboot itself. It shuts off for a while before the crickets come out. And this isn’t silence like a New Yorker would call it; where there is still the faint crackle of tires on pavement down below your apartment or a mumble of some couple’s late-night argument, followed by their boisterous display of “rekindling love” as they will refer to it the next day. No. This is real silence. The breeze is intermittent, and aside from the light brushing together of the dry wheat stalks every few minutes, there is nothing else. I can hear myself breathe. I feel like the whole field can.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the rest of the world. I sit here and watch the shadow from the rocking chair on the porch shrink into nothing and then elongate and disappear with the passing of each day while everyone else makes phone calls and sends memos and makes love and changes diapers. My life plays in slow motion. Someone somewhere cuts shiny red tape with oversized scissors and a smile to the soundtrack of giddy applause while I concentrate so hard on a distant blue jay that my eyes water. How can the earth turn at such different speeds? Would that man with the scissors even be able to sit still long enough to hear the crickets after dark?
I look up at the porch roof. A nail bends outward from a peeling white plank and I picture its tip sinking further and further into that rotted piece of wood with each knock of the hammer head. That was important to someone, at some time. Making that roof was someone’s entire day. What would Mr. Businessman say to that? While he runs around giving fake speeches and rehearsed smiles, my grandparents hammer in a few nails, paint a few boards, and then wait for the crickets.
And yet the world is said to turn at the same pace for everyone. I don’t believe it.
A little later I find myself perched on the roof, hugging my knees to my chest. My sister sits next to me in the same position. I run my fingers along the rough sloping shingles and look up at the stars, free from the prison created by so many city lights. The only lights out here are the flickering bulb-like abdomens of winged beetles skirting around the wheat stalks. But the stars don’t mind them.
“You can’t see this in New York,” she says to no one, looking up at the sky.
“Not a chance,” I say.
She lays back and stretches her arms out above her, along the roof.
“How long you think it’ll be before we see it again?”
“I don’t know,” I say, laying back as well. “A while probably.”
“Yeah,” she sighs. “Getting used to the city again is gonna be fun.”
“I don’t think I want to.”
“I don’t want to. Everything here is perfect. This summer has been perfect.”
And she’s right. So right it’s frightening. Somehow, after sixteen years in the city, I have fallen in love with the countryside. I love the silent swarms of finches at dusk faintly silhouetted against the purpling sky, darting and diving together as one organic shape – one whirlwind of controlled chaos and little fluttering wings. I love the symphony of frogs at the lakeside, playing their throaty notes each night with steady recurrence, plopping quickly through the pond’s surface to chase after water gliders.
And I love the pace of things. There is no urgency. No haste and no hurry. There is only the sun’s constant journey through the sky and the gentle, drifting grace of puffy clouds.
The people are real, too. They listen and they respond and they care about what you care about. They never hold up an apologetic finger as they interrupt your stream of unwanted words to reply to a quick text. Eye contact isn’t a treat, it’s a necessity.
Gradually, just over the span of a couple months, I have begun to see the town as one entity. It wasn’t difficult. Unlike the city, this place isn’t composed of scattered fragments and shards that would never fit together. Understanding it was like looking at a finished puzzle. Back home, no one cared enough to start putting their puzzle together.
“It’s like this wonderful little world is being taken away from us,” she says.
“Or we’re being taken away from it.”
“Yeah. ‘Cause it’ll still be here,” she pauses. “I wonder if it’ll miss us.”
I stare at the stars and think of far away worlds. Send me to a strange planet. Ship me away with aliens and a blindfold. Just don’t send me back to the city.
Our little Texan bubble of impenetrable serenity is about to be popped.
It’s the morning of the same day, a whole twelve hours earlier. I awaken to the careful shutting of a door and the barely audible squeak of the hinges. It’s not her fault though – I’ve always been a light sleeper.
My toes sink heavily into the shag carpet lining the stairs as I descend, trying to clear up my blurry vision. I had come from a dream; one of strange green men with double-pronged spears. They jeered at me through the bars of a cage, thrusting their weapons inside, hissing and growling and spitting.
My mind completes the bumpy transition back to reality precisely when I hit the tile floor at the bottom of the stairs.
With the cold of the floor shooting up my leg comes the realization of what day it is. My last day. The last day in this distant paradise. My heart plummets and I suddenly lose the urge to make my way to the kitchen. Instead I unlatch the front door.
I find her sitting on the top step of the porch, her elbow resting on her knee and her chin in her hand. I sit down beside her and say nothing.
There is an inexplicable stillness in the mornings. Somehow speaking seems offensive. All motion – as an unspoken rule – must be limited until the sun can finish stretching, too. There is never any wind; the air just hangs, stalled in time, waiting for something. All things are softened and innocent. The trees and blue-gray sky are pastel sketches waiting to be brought into focus.
I take her hand in mine and look at her wrist, running my thumb along the new scars.
“It’s looking better,” I say.
She slips her hand from mine and hides it under her other arm. “Thanks.”
I trace a grain of wood with my finger along the painted white steps. I can’t think of anything to say. Mornings are usually like this – where words just don’t come as easily – but today is especially bad. What is there to say?
“What do you want to do today?” I finally decide on.
She stares out into the field, unblinking eyes locked on some unknowable spot in the distance. “Have you had breakfast?” she says at last.
“No, not yet. I came straight out here.”
“Let’s go get something in town,” she says, standing up, keeping her gaze fixed on that same spot. “Gran and Gram aren’t up yet.”
“Yeah, okay. Berry’s?”
“Of course.”
Five minutes later we walk down a long unpaved road; a familiar trip. The dry dirt is swept up before us by the occasional breeze and my sister’s dress is tossed around her ankles. She wears a great sun hat and I have a stained t-shirt I have cut the sleeves off of; we look like we belong here.
I catch her eye and smile. The corners of her mouth curl just barely and she continues to stare at the ground. Making a big display as if I was winding up for some great leap, I charge towards her playfully. She skips forward just in time and I dramatize the fake impact, glancing off her shoulder as if I had run into the face of a mountain. I hear her giggle and look back to see the remnants of a smile. It’s more than I expected.
The town is barely awake and yet we still see faces we know. As we step from the dirt to the sidewalk we exchange waves and brief greetings with the early risers. The streets are void of cars. The sun sharpens the pale colors of the yawning town as we float down several blocks. By the time we make it to Berry’s the heat is already upon us.
“Hey Berry,” I say as we push through the door. A little bell chimes above us.
“Hey kids!” Berry exclaims, far too enthusiastically for a pre-afternoon greeting. But that’s Berry, and we love it. He rests heavily in an arm chair with his feet kicked up on the counter and a newspaper – dog-eared and folded in several places – propped open in his lap. “How are we doing today?”
Berry’s diner is small, but the perfect size for the town it’s in. There are a few tables with red and white checkered cloths and two booths to one side. A single fan swivels above, a little off center. The blinds are cracked just barely, each one letting a sliver of golden light onto the polished wooden floor.
I look at my sister. She looks away. “We’ve been better, I suppose,” I say with a small sigh.
“Ah,” Berry says, setting his crumpled paper on the back stove and hoisting his plump figure out of the chair. “Last day – is that right?”
“Yeah. It is,” I say. My sister sits down at the counter, spinning in her stool, around and around while Berry and I talk casually about the thing that has been haunting her all summer. “And we aren’t too pleased about it.”
“I don’t blame ya,” Berry says. Then, seeing that this has caused my sister to stop spinning, he adds, “But hey, you can always come visit, right? Maybe next summer you can do the same thing! There will always be a table for ya both in here.” His husky voice saturates the air and wraps us in a warm embrace of familiarity. Tomorrow it will be as if it never existed.
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks, Berry.”
Berry smiles his crooked smile and walks over to the counter, across from where my sister has resumed her chair spinning. “So what’ll it be today?” he booms joyfully.
“Oh, just some pancakes for me, and…” through her spins I see my sister’s head tilt up and down one time. “The same for her. And OJ-”
“-With ice and a straw,” Berry finishes.
I nod.
“Well, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve cooked up a little something different for the both of you.” My sister stops spinning and looks at Berry for the first time since we walked in. “And I think you’ll find it a bit more… satisfying.”
My sister and I exchange puzzled looks and then turn to watch Berry waddle over and ring the bell sitting on the counter. A sharp ding fills the place and for a moment nothing happens. Berry stares at us and grins.
For a brief second I consider the possibility of a stampede coming at us from the back room as the distant sound of thunder emanates from the kitchen. The low rumble grows louder and before I can come up with a rational explanation the swinging doors burst open and dozens of people flood the room, showering us with hugs and kisses and big, toothy smiles and pats on the back; so many voices fill the diner at once that I can’t bring myself to make out a single word. An older gentleman comes up and shakes my hand and I instantly recognize him as Howard, the first person I met on my first day in town. His glossy eyes shine blue through the wrinkles outlining them. I am suddenly spun around and pressed firmly against the bosom of a large woman as she wails dramatically about our departure and how much she will miss us. Several little kids come up to me and force a wooden sword into my hand. I find myself dueling the youngsters as we make our way in and out of the crowd. The spectators laugh and whoop and holler as I take a blade under the arm, feigning a slow, exaggerated death and falling gently to the floor. I bring myself to my feet with the help of two young men who pat me on the back in unison. I clasp hands with each of them and we give our usual ‘guy’s embrace’.
And then I feel a tender hand grip my arm and pull me away to a far corner. Soft lips press against mine and I look deeply into pair of hazel eyes as we come apart.
“Jasmine,” I start, unsure of how to continue. She says nothing, and so neither do I. With a forced smile she turns my palm up, places a folded scrap of paper in it, closes my fingers within hers, and departs; some beautiful, elusive wraith, darting through the onlookers doing a terrible job of averting their eyes.
I venture back into the crowd, trying to find my sister. I see her locked in an embrace with Howard, her eyes glazed over, staring at the floor, expressionless, her arms at her sides.
And then she begins to cry. No amount of concerned wails from the big lady can stop her; she bolts out the door, wiping the tears away with the sleeve of her silk dress as they pour down her face. The little bell chimes and then all is silent.
I remember the first time I saw her smile since her accident – the second day with our grandparents. It had only been two weeks since she got released from the hospital and I wondered if we had just brought a time bomb into the most uncomfortable climate in the U.S. I also remember thinking I wouldn’t blame her for doing something drastic again; the heat was so oppressive it would drive anyone mad.
We went to the lake on that day. Neither one of us was too excited or expectant, despite the promise of a means to cool off. All the same, our grandparents reassured us that it would be much better than we thought. And they were right.
As we neared the lake, making our way through the surprisingly dense crowd of trees that surrounded it, we heard the laughter of kids and their intermittent cannonballs into the water. The parents whooped and cheered and small, joy-filled screams from the children perforated the thick summer air.
We broke through the trees at last. A short pier poked out above the lake and held several giddy kids, leaping off the creaking planks and holding their noses as they splashed beneath the surface. Parents sat in lawn chairs at the shore, clapping and picking from a tray of sandwiches and cookies.
“Linda!” one mother exclaimed to my grandma as we made ourselves visible. “You made it!”
“Yes we did,” she replied. “Stacy – everyone – these are my grandkids who will be staying with us for the summer.”
“Welcome! Welcome! Please, have a smoothie!” My hand was suddenly cool and dripping as I received a tall glass with thick, pink liquid inside.
“Strawberry!” an anonymous voice said. “You’ll love it!”
And I did.
The first time I hit the water, pale skin and all, a strange sensation took over my mind. Back home this would never happen. There was always something to do; something to worry about or take care of. There was practice tomorrow or a recital that night or homework taunting me from my backpack I had shoved under my bed. My parents needed me to take out the trash or do the dishes while they argued in the backyard over some money issue I didn’t care to try and understand. I never had a moment to breathe.
As I floated there, suspended underwater, millions of bubbles tickling my chest and arms and my feet digging into the soft mud beneath me, I felt like I could breathe for the first time in my life. What a funny thing; my first real breath was taken underwater.
An hour later I was standing on the pier with a small boy on my shoulders, clinging on tightly as we prepared to jump. My sister had just taken her first plunge, after being urged on by a gang of youngsters. As her head emerged from the surface and she ran her hands through her hair, I saw her brilliant white teeth sparkle for what felt like the first time in years. From that point onward, as our reality back home was taken over by this new oasis of genuine people and carefree joy, there would rarely be a moment when my sister did not have a wide, uncontrollable smile on her face.
I am back on the roof with my sister. I want to hold the reins of time and give the command to decelerate. It seems impossible to imagine tomorrow – the day I will voluntarily turn my back on this place. Tonight was the last grain of sand before my hand was once again empty.
“This sucks,” my sister says.
“I know,” I sigh. “I know it does.”
“I think I blinked and a month went by.”
“Yeah. And then another.”
“And now it’s over,” she says, a hint of anger in her sweet voice. What was she angry at? Our parents? New York? The world for still turning when we wished it would stand still? I guess I was angry, too, though. At everything. At the situation; the mere unavoidable reality that tomorrow would come and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
“I can’t believe it.”
She takes a while before speaking again. Her eyes are wide. I can almost hear her thinking, as if her mind is so focused on one single thing that the thoughts have manifested themselves before her, echoing through the night air. “But,” she says slowly. “I guess… you just have to keep living.”
“Hm?” I say, even though I understand completely.
“You know what I mean.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
In a way, I just want to hear her say it herself. “I don’t know. I’m just out of it, I guess.”
“Oh,” she says. “You thinking about Jasmine?”
A firework pops inside my head. “Oh my god!” I say, sitting up and thrusting a hand in my pocket. I pull out the crumbled piece of paper. Meet me at the lake at ten, it says. “What time is it?” I ask, standing up now.
“I don’t know, a little after ten maybe? What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m supposed to meet Jasmine tonight.”
“What time?”
“Now, I guess!”
“Well then go! This might be your last chance!”
“I know I know, okay, I’m going.” I reach down and kiss my sister on the forehead. “You’ll be alright?”
“I’ll be fine, just go!”
“Okay. Okay, I’m going.”
I lower myself down off the roof and stumble when I hit the ground. I take off towards the lake, leaving a trail of rising dirt clouds behind me.
My heart pounds with the thought that I’ve missed her; that she got tired of waiting and now this is how we will leave things when I go away. I have tried not to think about it up until now – even though some days it was all that occupied my mind – but there’s no way I would be able to fix this before tomorrow, and all kinds of terrible thoughts are instantly unchained and set loose to wrack my brain of all sanity.
“Hey,” I hear a small voice whisper. I turn around and see her sitting against a tree by the water.
I run over, kneel down and kiss her, opening my eyes to see that hers are closed. I move back and brush the hair out of her face. She stares at me with childlike embarrassment and averts her eyes. With the moonlight skimming the surface of the lake and the wall of gnarled tree trunks outlining its perimeter brought into focus by its ghostly glow, I feel encompassed by a surrealism rarely present even in my dreams.
I press my hand against her cheek and turn her face to mine. A knot forms in my stomach as she gazes up at me, both of us mesmerized by the existence of the other. This dream is a nightmare; one that dangles something incomparably magical right before you and then snatches it away in a moment. I know that when I open my eyes in the morning it will all be gone.
“Hey,” I say. We beam silently at each other, withholding so many impatient words wanting to break free from our lips, afraid to ruin it; afraid to end the moment we know will end soon anyway. Just a few more seconds. Just until we can find the button to set it all on repeat.
“My brothers are going to miss you,” she says.
“I’ll miss them too.”
“They want you to come live with us,” she laughs. “They say so every day.”
“Wouldn’t that be a mad house,” I joke. “You and I cause enough trouble alone.”
“They love trouble.”
“Trouble loves them. It’s a perfect match.”
She giggles. She looks off towards the lake and crinkles her nose. “You ever wish you could relive a moment? As many times as you want? Like, just have it in a little glass jar on your nightstand, and open it up every night before you go to bed.”
“I would put this whole summer on my nightstand if I could.”
She says nothing and I can tell she is trying to hold back tears. I can see the moonlight reflected in tiny, crescent pools forming beneath her eyes.
I run my hand through her hair and she smiles weakly.
“But, I guess,” I say, with obvious difficulty. “That’s what makes those moments special; that you can’t keep them.”
“They’re over so fast,” she says, turning to me, a silver pearl sliding down her cheek.
“Yeah,” I say, feeling my throat tighten. “They are.”
She stutters with the beginning of another thought and then falls into me. I press her against my chest and hold her as tightly as I dare. I see a tear of my own darken a small spot on her dress as it sneaks past me and gives in to gravity’s unrelenting tug.
For a second I consider the possibility of actually living here. I think of it as if it was already a reality, not minding the complications of money and my parents and my sister. I couldn’t leave my sister alone in the city anyway. That was the one speck of solace I could pick out from this looming tragedy – that we had each other to lean on. I was always close with my sister, and even though, after her accident, I had felt like I was talking to a fragile porcelain doll with its paint still drying, I knew that things would get back to normal eventually. I could talk to her about anything; ask her anything without fear of cracking her or smearing her paint or making her shatter.
Something she said begins to reverberate inside my head. You just have to keep living. An ironic statement, given the source. But it’s true. And as much as we want to deny it, as much as our lives feel torn to shreds, turned upside down and shaken until all the pieces fall out of place, the world will continue spinning, waiting for us to realize it and decide to hop back on board.
I let go of Jasmine and hold her at arm’s length, once again silent and staring, both of us now with gleaming streaks running down our faces.
“I guess you just have to keep living,” I say. My sister’s words taste funny.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I mean that everything is gonna keep moving whether you’re there or not. I mean that…”
Wait. What did she mean?
I replay my sister’s words, this time coming from her mouth, exactly as she said them.
You just have to keep living. You just have to keep living. You.
Was that how she said it? Did she say “you” like that? It couldn’t be.
“You mean that… what?” Jasmine says.
And then it’s obvious. She wasn’t talking in a generalization. She was talking to me. I have to keep living. Me.
“I have to go,” I say, standing up suddenly, rigid and frightened. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t stay long enough to hear her response; her concerned shouts melt into the moonlit moor as everything around me stretches into hazy blurs balancing on the edge of my periphery. The ground beneath my feet can’t pass fast enough.
I hit the dirt road running as hard as I can, my body struggling to keep up with my mind which has already made it back to the house. It betrays me and conjures horrid images and spreads them as a collage throughout my pounding head. The stars watching me vibrate in my vision with each heavy footfall and I hear the crunch of dirt and dust increase tempo as I push my body harder than ever before.
I have never been religious, but something makes me look up at the sky and offer a silent prayer. In this moment of absolute desperation my mind grapples for some security; some nameless, invisible promise from a benevolent entity it could clutch onto until the nightmare falls through. I try to feel it beating. I try to feel its silent promise to me.
And then I come to the innocent, clueless white wood of the front porch. I take the steps three at a time, bounding up and crashing through the door – a hurricane that shakes the shutters and startles my grandparents in the next room. The blood swirls in my head and constricts my vision and throbs violently in my ears, drowning out their angry reprimands as I grab the handrail and fling myself up the stairs.
Time slows as I reach for her door knob; it crawls on like a wounded soldier inching his way back into a bunker as shells cut past his cheeks and all sound smears into a collective ringing.
I feel the cool brass. The knob turns beneath my sweating palm and I swing the door open.
Tumbling clumps of dirt hit the black oak with sporadic impacts. The big lady’s veil sticks to her tear-filled face as she wails from the middle of the crowd, just behind Howard who weeps silently, his bright blue eyes surrounded by red, puffy wrinkles. Berry stands next to me, his hand on my shoulder. Jasmine is on my other side, my hand grasped tightly in both of hers. My grandparents are across from us, grandpa doing the shoveling, grandma hanging her head. My father puts an uncertain arm around my mother as her body quakes subtly beneath her black dress.
It is morning time. The colors of the Texas countryside are pale pastel sketches that have yet to come into focus. Time waits for the sun to finish stretching before it once again resumes its constant ticking.
But it will resume. I know that. I can almost feel the omnipresent rotation of the earth. It follows me wherever I go; there is no running from it – no escaping it. It will turn underneath my feet whether I want it to or not, whether I feel like it should or not. Sometimes its unwavering consistency still surprises me, though. We may think the world turns at different paces for all of us; we may even think we can feel it slowing down or speeding up or even coming to a sudden, abrupt halt. But regardless of our perception, it keeps turning all the same. And yet, the day my sister died, I was shocked when the world didn’t even flinch.
