A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,52

to lock him out when he did, but instead he slammed the door shut and dragged me by my hair along with you. We were scared, but emboldened by each other, we both struck out trying to scratch and claw at him. But he just threw us to the ground and then started kicking. We clung tight to each other, both of us wrapping our arms around the other’s head to shield the blows.

I could feel the magic that lived in the night only hours before crack and break to pieces along with bones.

I don’t remember passing out, but before I did, I thought about the bruises under your makeup. I thought about our house that kept so many secrets. I thought about how you once tried to run away and he found you. I thought about how I’d never be able to leave. I thought about how nowhere would want me anyway. I thought about the dreams I had and they all slipped from my grasp as I faced the reality:

I would never get away.

Neither would you.

52

Depression,

Momma and I clung tight to each other that night and when I woke up, we were both bloody and on the floor, tangled up in our pain and secrets.

And you returned, fierce and incessant, and I had nothing left to fight back.

You won.

the last day

53

Life,

It was a Monday. I was supposed to meet August at school. I was supposed to talk to Ms. Hooper about my final creative piece.

But I didn’t do any of that. Instead I waited until Momma and Father left for work.

I had already decided my fate, and unlike all of the times before, the thought was a solid thing that wouldn’t shove off my chest. It clouded every inch of my mind and I felt like I was a robot moving through a script that was coded in me. I saw myself go through the motions, saw each step as it played out in my head, and it all made me feel this wave of relief.

I knew what I would do. I’d thought about it all weekend. I’d prepared. I’d slept in my shoes because I knew I would miss them and I knew I couldn’t take them with me. My shoes were years of Sharpied hopes that now felt like lies.

Sunday night, I fell asleep staring at the ceiling beam in my room. Other thoughts fought their way in—thoughts of flour fights, and kisses near electric candles, and hope taped to the inside of a locker, but there was none of that left. There was just me and the thought of my impending escape.

Father never found his lighter in the backyard, but I did.

* * *

On Monday, the sky was blue and the sun was glaring. I waited till I heard the roar of the Cadillac drive away. I went to my closet and pulled out the papers on Columbia and the story I’d read for August.

I wrote stories so that I could live in them. But they weren’t magic after all.

I took the battery out of the fire alarm. I put all the papers in a metal bowl that Momma had picked up from an old antique shop years ago. Back when we still could laugh loudly in our kitchen and make messes, back when we had no Cadillac in our driveway.

I took everything that meant anything and put it in the metal bowl. I lit it on fire with Father’s lighter. He was always destined to burn our lives to the ground anyway.

I watched as the papers crinkled into ash, blackening at the edges. I swallowed hard, smelling it as it burned. I watched till every page turned to dust.

Death would be my escape. Maybe it would be kind. I was waiting for the peace. The quiet. The relief.

None of it ever came.

I thought that if I remembered the night when the world was bright and new and cloaked in candlelight and unbroken things, that it would be enough to say goodbye.

It wasn’t.

now

54

August,

The torrent of memories fades away.

You slept in our candlelit grove. You shook from tears and tossed and turned and roared and cried some more. You are awake now, tossing and turning, with your arms wrapped around your middle. The tears you cry now, I will never forget. I sit next to you and pretend that I can feel your shoulder underneath my head.

We stay like that until dawn. Your fits of tears coming and going, but my name is a mantra that