smile failed to soften the ice crystallizing around Moira’s heart.
“‘Fraid you’re gonna have to figure out how to catch them fair and square,” Moira said. “My crawdad whispering days are over.”
“Aww come on, Moira Jo! Ain’t no one can talk them out of the water like you can. My business will go belly up quicker than a whore in the bog if you take off.”
Moira dropped her well-seasoned cast iron skillet into the suitcase and wheeled on her uncle. “It’s Moira Joule goddammit, and don’t you Moira Jo me! I’m about damn tired of you feeding me bullshit so I can keep you flush in booze and chew. I want to know what I am, and I want to know now.”
“What do you mean what you are? You’re my niece.”
As ever, Uncle Sal was as slippery as a corn snake when it came to any discussions of her past. Moira herself tended to crash through the underbrush like a wild hog, her arrival announced through commotion, her legacy—the destruction left in her wake.
“You know any other nieces that can talk fish onto a line, or crawdads into a net?” she asked.
Sal regarded the unfinished wood floor of the small bedroom where Moira had grown up the only student of his unconventional tutelage. “Not directly.”
“Not at all. You know more than you’re telling me. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know there’ll be answers when I get there.”
“What makes you so sure?”
The answer to this came easily, but not in a form Sal would understand.
Words on the wind.
Moira had awoken in the sweaty depths of the night to see the Spanish moss outside the window reaching for her like witches’ hair. Branches spread their fingers in slow motion. The world reorganized its spin around her—a new axis. Moonlight thickened the air to pale silk that slid across her skin, and her every movement unfolded through space as dense as seawater.
And then, she’d heard it.
Syllables spoken not to her ears, but to her soul.
“Return to me what has been forsaken,
By earth, air, fire, and sea…”
The ground had been warm as she padded out of their small, tin-roofed fishing shack and walked to the bayou’s edge. Mud anointed her feet like a poultice, sending a tingling through her ankles and up her legs, clear to the space around her heart. Strange that such a sensation should be borne of earth and water alone.
Animal voices added a haunting refrain to the incantation. The darkness alive with collective hums, chirps, and croaks of a thousand creatures, calling to her.
Calling her home.
Morning had found her naked as a jaybird beneath the cypress trees, feet on the bank and half-covered in moss. She’d pulled her negligee back over her head and walked into the house, knowing only that she needed to pack.
Well, shower, eat some cold fried chicken, and then pack.
A girl had to have priorities.
“Well?” Uncle Sal’s expectant question reeled her back into the present.
“You wouldn’t understand.” Moira leaned across the scarred leather suitcase so she could zip it closed.
A foreign expression clouded the weathered brown skin of Sal’s face.
Hurt.
He sank down on the edge of her bed. Moira looked at the denim quilt dipping beneath him, already missing the weight of all those faded scraps cocooning her in at night. No way to pack it. Just another thing she’d have to leave behind.
Moira sat next to him, their combined weight causing her mattress to groan in protest. Good thing she never brought her work home.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Sal. I just…” Moira consulted the backs of her hands for an answer she knew wouldn’t come. “I just can’t be here anymore.”
Uncle Sal shifted, his weight pulling her off kilter just enough so she had to lean the opposite direction to keep from sinking toward him. He had ceased to be a bigger object in her universe in any capacity save size. Was this realization a burden to her? Or a comfort? On this day, she couldn’t yet say.
The little pig pushed his way out of the wallow he’d constructed in her pillow to scoot into her now available lap. His hooves pressed indentations into the length of her tanned thighs as he turned his habitual two-and-one-quarter circles before settling himself in the trough where her legs met. His warm belly against her skin brought a small measure of comfort.
“If I told you where you come from, would you stay?” Sal ventured a sideways glance at her from beneath his dark brows.