A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,11

it pounds and pounds and pounds into your headboard and then your desk and then the wall.

Nothing is safe. I look over your room, filled with drawings, trinkets, family photos, and I want to save them all. You have snow globes from all over the world and I lunge to cover them, but I am just air and the guitar smashes into them. Your face, it isn’t yours. It is someone else’s. Someone who is hard and cruel, broken and merciless and …

Did I ruin you? The thought slams into me.

“August!” I yell your name, aching and desperate for you to stop. But you don’t hear me. Of course you don’t.

You let go of the guitar. Your mom is calling your name and you run to lock the door. You nearly trip over the fallen objects. Switching the lock on, you rest your head on the door and your palm splays beside it. You are shaking. Gritting your teeth, tears find their way out of your scrunched-up eyes. You are turning red and I am afraid you will explode.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” You are crying and shaking and I want to take the hurt away.

You pound the wall with your fist. Turning around, your back is up against the door.

Your mom is pounding on it from the other side, yelling your name.

You don’t respond. Your apologies turn into questions. “Why?” You say it over and over again, as if in prayer, as if there is someone who could tell you.

Whywhywhywhy. The question reverberates down to my bones like an accusation. I should know. I want to cup your cheeks and tell you the truth. The truth I don’t know, but wish I could remember.

Still, I know in my hollow bones it was never your fault. My August boy of sunshine, lightning bugs, and birthdays.

You finally stop speaking and shuffle onto your knees and crawl to the spot where the crumbled photograph lies on the ground.

You pick it up and fervently uncrumple it and nestle it in your cut, bloody hands.

“Why?” you ask again. “Why?” Your fingers are featherlight again, stroking my cheek as if you could push the wisps of my hair behind my ear. As if I am there.

You finally whisper my name and it is the saddest word in the world.

9

Momma,

I stay with August until he falls asleep amid his wreckage, until his momma finally pries open his bedroom door. Her eyes are red and she sharply inhales when she sees her son asleep among shards of glass. She doesn’t wake him. Her heels crunch over the brokenness and she slides down the wall beside him in her knee-length pencil skirt. I don’t know if the glass cuts her, because the tears are streaming down her face even before she hits the ground. August doesn’t wake. Grief seems like a heavy and exhausting burden to bear. Mrs. Matthews just holds August close and then closer, as if she is afraid that if she lets him go, he would disappear.

That’s when I leave.

Tears in the wake behind me.

I don’t run home. I walk. I am in no rush. I thought I was lonely when I was alive, but being dead is pretty damn lonely.

I look at my bare feet. I miss my inked-up Converse shoes. They had quotes from my favorite authors Sharpied all over them. I remember finding them in a thrift store bin when I was twelve. They were too big for me at the time, but I already knew I wanted to be a writer. So anytime I read a line that took my breath away or stumbled on a quote that made me believe in big and wonderful things, I would write them on my shoes. These shoes will carry me through this ugly world, I had thought. And when I was fifteen and the shoes were still a bit too big but fit well enough, I started to wear them every day.

I am back in my room. I wish I could sleep, tuck the questions away, but time feels disjointed and too long. The moon is ripe and full in the sky. There is so much missing in my mind. So much that I feel is swimming just under the surface.

I don’t look at the chair or metal bowl of ash in the corner. Looking haunts me. I stare out the window trying to remember. Father is snoring in the next room. I toss the memories that came to me back and