Chapter 3
~Bella~
I woke to sunshine and silence—tangled in my nightdress and crumpled in the grass. My fingers were pincushioned with splinters from being ripped off the fence by the wind. My hair was as chaotic as those clouds had been last night, full of static and frantic energy. My bones hurt. My head was in a fog. My mouth was dry and sticky, and my heart ached something fierce.
I blinked to clear the haze.
The house was still standing, looming over me, casting a big black shadow across the grass. The two unblinking windows upstairs were still intact. The porch sagged a little on one end, but it was still attached. Some shingles had been blown loose, but the roof was still on. The screen door was hanging lopsided, but it hadn't been torn completely off.
That spot on the carpet was probably still there too.
Dammit.
Sparrow had told me a legend about a woman who could cleave the storms: a cyclone person, a whirlwind. The thunderbird, with her knife plunged into the dirt to carve the storms in two. Split the clouds, cracked the wind, shielded her home and her people from destruction. Somehow, I felt like her knife.
Piercing the dirt, cleaving the storm.
Preserving that godawful house.
I sighed in defeat. Somehow, the hope that everything would get blown away, including myself, made the reality of the same old situation feel a thousand times worse. I flopped back down into the grass, pushing my face away from the sunshine into the clover and purslane and alfalfa. It smelled twice as strong as usual, rubbed raw all night long by a windy, rough-edged lover, then left to bake in the sunshine afterglow of the next morning. Unbearably green and fresh and alive. I dug my fingers into my eyes, trying my best not to wail like that abandoned wind-baby.
I came nose to nose with something wet.
Something small and shivering and breathing.
Big brown eyes. Long dark lashes. Giant velvet ears. A constellation of white speckles littered down its back. A long, delicate face and a wet nose, black as coal, sniffing me inquisitively. It was huddled up against me in the grass, gangly legs tucked beneath itself, its chin on my shoulder. We lay there blinking at each other, me and that little fawn, for a long, long time.
"Hi," I mouthed, no sound, moving slowly to touch a single finger to its ear. The sunshine filtering through the skin illuminated a web of veins, flimsy and fragile, but the fawn didn't flinch. It leaned in toward me to set that wet nose back against my neck, soft fur and baby breath brushing my skin. I slipped my entire arm around it. Hugged it to my belly and felt its heartbeat skitter against my own. A million beats per second, both of us. The fawn cuddled closer, digging sharp hooves into the soft black dirt as I wondered where its mother was.
I knew for certain she wasn't coming back for it.
I talked to the fawn for what felt like hours, feeding it flowers and soft tufts of grass as I dumped all of my loneliness and solitude and overworked anxiety into the still morning air around us. I made long looping chains of clover and phlox as I told it about the house, the mid-century foundation poured by my great-grandfather, and the garden planted by my mother. The mother everyone said I took after. I gave the fawn a headdress of salt cedar and sweetbrier roses as I told it about her, the woman who went from majestic falcon to broken bird in one fell swoop of a gun barrel. I tucked bluebells into my hair as I told it about all the talking that happened in town, the whispers around corners and the mutterings behind my back: the "there goes Bella Swan with her heavy baggage" gossip that followed me wherever I went. I never went anywhere at all anymore. I crushed lemon balm between my fingers as I told it about the doll in the last room at the end of the hallway upstairs. Cried when I told it about that spot on the carpet, the one I wished would just swallow me whole already.
I told it that, sometimes, I had dreams about wandering into the prairie at night and letting it eat me alive.
Those sirens had been a lie. The newscasters had been full of shit. This was no tornado. I'd made it up or wished for it or fantasized about it so hard that it very nearly happened. But it didn't. The prairie was just as calm and peaceful as it had ever been before. The sun was shining in that way it always did after a storm, quietly deceiving. The sky around it was big and empty as though nothing had happened last night, tranquil and nonchalant, crisscrossed with the faint trails of airplanes, not a single cloud in sight to mar the great big brush of blue. The prairie was nothing but birdsong and too much sunshine. There were a few trees lying haphazardly, and the fields were flattened, yes, but there wasn't a trench of turmoil suddenly ripped through ground. There were no far-off sirens echoing from town or helicopters dropping aid and supplies like the last time a tornado ripped through here.
Jack and Millie's, the house across the way, the nearest sign of humanity even though it had been empty for years, was still standing.
This was no tornado. Tornados were sly and swift and impossible to sneak out from underneath. They trailed up behind a wall of wind and clouds, dropping their death fingers to the earth with surprising stealth. They didn't hit you until it was too late. They took everything and tossed it skyward and left just as quickly as they came.
I wanted a tornado, but I only got a storm. I wanted the house flattened and my feet picked up off the ground, my body flung somewhere far, far away. Wanted the remains of my disastrous life to be sucked up into the sky and spit out in a mile-wide trail of wreckage, littered across four states in unsuspecting backyards. What I got was a trick tornado. A fabricated hoax. A mad dash of hope followed by a crushing reality.
The sweet taste of salvation marred by the bitter sting of an almost-cyclone.
I stayed sprawled there all day in the grass, pondering my utterly fucked situation. Nothing had ever been normal, but whatever routine I'd established had been knocked off the edge of a very flat earth. It wasn't much, but I had found ways to survive: losing myself in picture books pilfered from Sparrow. Wishing for black mountains, for white beaches, for green jungles.
Anything, anywhere, but this goddamned brown prairie.
I'd never get far enough, no matter how fast I ran.
Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.
Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!
HB&PB