Refuge for the Sleep Deprived
She is losing her mind.
Too much of every night is being spent closeted, now, with the loom and the cloth. The threads of warp, the bands of weft, the rhythm of shuttle and espada, the embellishments of color and abstracted shape as they come to her — have spread like kudzu, draping and covering all of her thoughts.
Cedar and blackberry. Aspen and owl. The lovers and the fishes. Red skin and silver scale. Standing tree and drifting mist. The circles of grass and sky and rainbow. Raven wing and orca breach. Lift the shed, pass the thread, beat, repeat.
Seven feet long – one foot for each soul. Circumference-of-her-waist inches wide – the anchor to haul them back.
Luna Lovegood believes ten impossible things before breakfast.
The sound of the television comes up from below. One tick louder than her dad strictly needs in order to hear. It's noise. To fill up the silence and the dark. She knows this. Sees the beer cans coming into the house. Hears the empties rattling in the trash bags he carries out to the bin.
Her mom had told her about Phil being at the hospital in Seattle.
The unsolved cases — all of them — hang from the ceiling in the hall where Charlie puts on his police chief jacket.
He doesn't talk about any of it, but she knows. She just doesn't know how to talk to him about it.
November comes in, and neither parent presses her about college, or applications. She is grateful. Doesn't want to mumble some lie about taking a gap year.
She is losing her mind.
The Cullens are dead. Nothing can bring them back.
Not even Luna Lovegood can make ash resurrect into flesh.
Some nights she dreams of the cliff and the sea. Of dark wings and old shells and cedar smoke. Of falling, or leaping, or flying, or being cast outward over the water. Anything to get her out from under the tattoo. To free herself. To find him.
But the cloth demands to be finished.
So she never goes to the sea.
In the realm of intention, between waking and sleeping, waits the vision from under the severed aspen. The burned house and the crying voice. The cloth completed. Dancing with it held aloft, spinning and swooping, catching the atoms of ash from the air. Her father's fish knife cuts the big vessels — her libation. Red spray of life over the rainbow cloth.
Either it will bring them back or it won't.
The nights stretch long, and the days stay cold.
Cedar and blackberry. Aspen and owl. The circles of grass and sky and rainbow. Lift the shed, pass the thread, beat, repeat.
While the air calls to her from the rocking chair.
She is losing her mind.
There is nothing there. There is never anything there, except the unyielding rungs of wood.
When she curls in its embrace. When the heat comes on in the radiator. It smells like scent. It smells like memory. It smells like grief.
The quilts stay where they are on her bed. She needs them there each night. To wrap herself in; as exhaustion, and burning eyes, and the chill that seeps in after a certain hour, all push her out of the closet and onto the bed, to sink into the mattress, and the grave of sleep.