Page 63 of A Grave Not Made For Mourning
The bookcase blurs as I lay my eyes on it. There are no titles on the spines, not in my mind, just dark colors splotching together.
“Don’t try to tell me what she would say,”I sigh, staring at the blob of books.“Just be the boy.”
I turn back, and Ma is gone. Only the boy sits before me now.
I miss her instantly. I didn’t think I would—I thought I’d understand it’s only an illusion. But suddenly my mind is screaming:come back.
“I’m sorry, my love,”the boy says.“I thought it’d be helpful.”
“To speak as the woman I killed?”
The boy flinches, his features squishing in anguish, as if I’ve said something far worse than the truth.
“You did not kill her, Little Thorn.”His voice is soft—much too soft for the lament written on his lips.
“You’re the only person in this house that believes that.”I turn away, just to turn right back.“If you know what Ma would say so well, riddle me this: whether accidental or not, if my actions led to a death, does that make me the one who killed them?”
The boy opens his mouth, but he does not speak.
“Did I kill her?”I repeat.
“It’s more complicated than that—”
“What would a philosopher say?”I ask.“What wouldMasay?”
When he doesn’t answer, when he doesn’t tell me,“No, you did not kill her,”I open my eyes, escaping my mind. Tears flow from me in the real world.
My head crashes against the desk—the desk that still reeks of her, the room that clings to the echo of her presence—and I break. Each tear slices through me like it’s ripping me in half, each tear like my mother’s blood, coating my cheeks, filling my mouth with salty sin. I cry until my throat is raw, until my chest feels like it’s caving in. I cry until I can’t breathe, until my ribs bruise under the weight of it.
Guilt or grief, I can’t decide.
Either way, it’s agonizing.
Chapter 14
Anything but What
I’ve Become
A
fter an eternity, the tears subside, as if I’ve cried myself dry. If I were a world, my inhabitants would die of thirst. I’m dying, my head limp against the wooden desk.
I only twitch when the boy’s voice curls through my mind like smoke.
“I cannot answer the question for you. It would be too easily dismissed. You must find the answer yourself.Thatis what a philosopher would say.”
With my head now facing the window, I don’t move for hours. I watch as the sun sets, as the sky turns from bright blue to navy to black.
I watch as the stars come out from hiding, twinkling in the dark. For just a second, I see Ma, shining on me in this darkness. I think of all the stories, all the people who were laid to rest in the sky. All the constellations, all their gory stories and heartbreaks, and I think of her. She showed me all of them.
She must have known, in some way, that her death would follow the pattern of those stories: gory, egregious, gut-wrenching. But she went on anyway. She found the strength for it all.
I only wish for half of it, only a piece of her—but I will never get that if I give up now, when I’m so close to her.
My hands press firmly into the wooden desk as I force myself to rise. It feels like stepping back from the brink, like I am rising from death. It would be so easy to sit here and wither. But I don’t.
I rise.
