Three
At sunrise Luna’s under the willow tree, digging a grave with just her hands. Her look is sour, more than when the barn collapsed. She’s upset-er than after her favorite chicken got foxed. She’s upset because I’m upset.
I kneel beside her, earth digs into my bare legs like frozen peas. My arms are heaped with wildflowers. I have enough to cover the entire grave. I could fill it till it boils over. I could make it look as if it were never dug at all.
“Ready.” Luna says.
I set Lucky evenly in the grave bed. Kiss his face, once. Twice for good measure. His fur is still warm. Warmth like Luna’s heating pad, which she uses to sooth unruly blood that won’t stay inside her body.
“He was a good rabbit.” Luna begins her eulogy. The flower crown I wove silently between my fingers clings to her hair. She wears a black hot-topic T and shorts. Her lips are tight with sorrow.
Behind us, the meadow repeats black-eyed susans like a curse. Luna calls those “wannabe sunflowers.” Then, if you catch her on a good day– today is not a good day –she tells the story about how Susan hurt her eye; she wouldn’t stop staring at Sunflower, wishing she was as perfect as her, so Sunflower’s boyfriend socked her in the face.
Luna buries Lucky quickly. One hand throws the dirt, the other dabs at my oversized, pear shaped tears. I miss him. I sign, when all is finished, and Luna soothes me from across a facetime call, safely tucked away in the house opposite mine. Wedged between us is the meadow.
“I know, Hazel.” She tells me, her camera flipping upwards to show the boy band posters that armor her ceiling. “I’ll do the dishes and earn enough allowance to buy you a new rabbit, ok?”
Two
I lay my head in Luna’s lap and she lays across the clover. My mouth and nose are full of garden mint set wild. Grass color streaks my skin. The creek water’s made my clothes stone heavy.
I turn to Luna, my face suddenly sharp with worry. What do you think happens when we die? I sign, my hands fumble with an unfamiliar shape. My head won’t stop thinking about Lucky.
“Well… I’m like Thumbelina.” Luna explains, ripping up clumps of grass. “I was born from a barley’s flower. When I die I will return to one.”
I consider this carefully. What will I return too?
“I think you will return to the sea.” She says after a while. “In a past life you were a siren, that’s why you can’t speak. You used up all your voice singing.” My Mom calls it voluntary mutism. I like this explanation better. I didn’t volunteer after all, not like how my Father volunteered to file the divorce papers, or Luna volunteered for the school play, but skipped every rehearsal to be with me.
And lucky? Where did he go? I ask, but don’t really wanna hear her say it. I read a Goosebumps about the undead and have been playing that idea through my head for hours. Zombie Lucky clawing his way through roots and soil, his half decayed fur under heavy moonlight, mouth brought to water at the thought of brains.
One moment before I kiss her, we sit under the tree-of-heaven and watch it sponge up lantern flies.
“Do you know the story about Romulus and Remus?” Luna asks. “I learned about it in class.”
I shake my head. “Well it’s about these boys who are raised by wolf parents. Sometimes I think I’m a wolf being raised by human parents.” She shreds a dandelion as she talks.
Why? You don’t look like a wolf.
“I know. But, well, my Mum and Dad are always wishing I’m more like them. But I’m not. There’s gotta be a reason why I’m not.”
My Mom wishes I used my voice. When I’m alone, I say things to myself, lots of things. My voice is a possession I can’t share. Luna never pressures me too. That is one thing I like about her. Her eyes are my favorite color. That’s another thing. I think about these things a lot. I think about Luna the way my school friends do about boys.
“We are like the lantern flies, y’know.” Luna whispers through the gap in her teeth, her voice heady and low. “We don’t belong. Invasives. Aliens. Girls like us don’t play in meadows, we conquer them.”
She presses her chin to my shoulder. The lantern flies sail above us, their gray elytras parted, red wings beating. I lean close. The fragrance of facemasks and pink drinks sits on her skin like a balm, our houses are a meadow apart, nothing divides us but air.
After
“You won’t be seeing her again!” Says a Mom who’s forgotten how wild I’ve become. Who thinks about Father and how he brought me to a shooting range once, and the season where I insisted on wearing snapbacks. She is remembering when I told her my favorite color was blue and not the time it was pink, red, mulberry, lavender, gold. She thinks my girlhood can be pried off in strips. She doesn’t realize it’s still whole. Me.
She sends me to my room so I dream about grass so sweet I can really smell it and warm rabbits and lantern flies that eat ambrosia. I dream about Luna. Her in the creek, her in the flowers, her stood over the dark, dark dirt.
At sunrise I sneak out, to stand in the open belly of a collapsed barn, up to my skirt in the weeds. A bad influence, a troubled girl. That’s what Mom calls her. Not her name(s). I yell them, all of them, till my breath putters out. “…Barely Girl. Lantern Girl. Grave Digger Girl. Meadow Girl. Wolf Girl!”
