GRACE AND GRAVITY

by Carol Mitchell

She walks this road every Sunday, a mile-long, tree-lined stretch that stands between her point of origin and her destination—her grandmother’s house, carrying a package that is almost weightless; unworthy of her sacrifice. 

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This Sunday she’s late. 

Lena and her mother had faced off in the kitchen, her mother plump in her dark-blue tailored Sunday dress; Lena in her favorite shorts, black denim barely covering the cheeks of her butt. Her mother’s hand outstretched with a package of healing herbs, dried and wrapped in stiff wax paper; Lena’s arms folded across her chest. There was nothing different there. Every Sunday, the same package, the same posture, the same expressions, the same words: all stiff and unyielding; bombarding Lena in endless crashes, wave after wave. 

“Go straight to your grandmother’s house before it get dark,”—her mother. 

“Stop wasting time on the beach with those no-good friends of yours,”—her mother. 

“Don’t come crying to me when your belly start to swell,”—her mother. 

“Don’t! You must… Stop! Come! Go!”—her mother, her mother, her mother. 

Lena? Silent.

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She left her mother, bikini concealed under her T-shirt, sweatshirt tied around her hips. On her way down their shrub-lined driveway, Lena spotted a caterpillar: bright green, yellow, and black gorging itself on the last leaf of her mother’s beloved oleander plants. Would her mother want her to kill the caterpillar or save it? The rest of the leaves had already been devoured, and all that were left behind were naked stalks punctuated with delicate white flowers. Lena chose inaction. The plant would have to save itself. 

Lena greeted the two friends waiting at the end of the driveway and together, they made their way to the beach. The group grew as they walked the paved sidewalks of their neighborhood, calling out to their friends who exited their houses, hurrying down carefully maintained walkways and onto the street. When Sheldon, Lena’s boyfriend, emerged from his home, he beelined to her side and slipped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close, as effortlessly as if he had shrugged on a near-empty backpack. His fingers reached past her clavicle and brushed her T-shirt at a spot just above where her breasts began to swell. She wanted to sink into the intimacy of his embrace but her mother’s admonitions nagged at her, making it impossible for her to match his steps. Her body felt stiff and ungainly against his. She stopped, pretending to adjust her shoelaces, extricating herself from his hold.

It’s your time to decide what to do. 

This voice was new, kind of. Lena had first heard it three years ago, around the time she first bled and “became a woman”—her mother’s words—and over time it had grown more assertive in its suggestions that she defy her mother in terms of her dress, her habits, and her adherence to her mother’s wishes. She wondered whose voice it was. It came from within her, yet it did not feel a part of her, like an older friend who knew all of her secrets but had not shared any of their own.

That afternoon, the voice pushed back against Lena’s mother’s litany, challenging her mother’s voice in her head phrase for phrase as if they were in hand-to-hand combat; articulating Lena’s desire for more autonomy over her growing self in ways that Lena was not free to express out loud.

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Lena dallied on the beach with Sheldon and her other friends, talking, laughing, then falling into silence as they sat, their bare legs extended like beached driftwood on the edge of the shore, watching the sun descend towards the horizon. A wave moseyed to the shore and Lena dug her toes into the sand the water had moistened and made malleable beneath her toes. She knew she should leave, that the dark would present challenges on the journey to her grandmother’s house, challenges she should avoid. Instead, she rested her head against Sheldon’s shoulder, and once lifted her face towards his and offered her lips for a single sweet kiss. 

She wanted more, longed for more, but her mother’s face, always the celibating force, appeared in her mind, reminding her of her duty. She rose, leaving her friends coupled around a bonfire on the sand, where they would share confidences late into the night. She hoped that Sheldon would say: “It’s dark. I’ll come with you, protect you.” Perhaps she could have asked, but even before Lena pulled her shorts over her swimsuit and donned her sweatshirt, another girl shifted into the wet W Lena’s buttocks had left on the sand. She did not look back to see if Sheldon leaned towards this girl, if he whispered into her ear. Her leaving had created a gap in their constellations; their paths would forever diverge from hers. 

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And so, she walks. 

The lights and sounds of the city have disappeared as if they’ve been sucked into the dark forest that separates the towns where her mother and her grandmother live; like a black hole, it’s a space in which nothing or anything can occur. 

Lena is halfway through this void, a point marked by the cavernous trunk and long gnarly limbs of a silk cotton tree. The limbs appear leafless, and Lena wonders if its leaves have also been devoured by caterpillars. She once read an article that popped up on her phone about how tomato plant leaves poison the caterpillars that feed on them, driving them to eat each other. She pictures the caterpillar she saw in her mother’s garden, its numerous tiny red legs, grasping the oleander’s leaves, and she is struck by the fact that the poison in those leaves makes caterpillars bitter so predators keep away while the poison in the tomato plants’ leaves destroys them. Compliance or self-defense? Passivity or action? Which would she choose? She longs to discuss these questions with someone, but no one she knows is interested in these ideas.

The mist that accompanied her at the start of her walk no longer cools her legs and she senses it has joined the shadows dancing in the crevices of the silk cotton tree trunk. Her mother has warned her of these shadows: jumbies that move in tandem with the sounds of the night, swirling, swarming, leaping, drawing energy from the tree like offspring, suckling on its sap until they are grown enough to do its bidding. Such spirits, her mother has said, are tethered to the tree for life, and if one escapes, another must join. Lena feels the power of the tree, power to create or destroy, yet she does not believe. 

She does not believe, even as a figure separates itself from the tree, and limb by limb, shifts into an anthropoid shape. It leans against the tree, one leg planted on the ground, the other bent—lodged against the trunk. 

Lena crosses her arms, forming an X across her chest. Sweat trickles between her breasts, rehydrating residual crystals of sea salt on her skin. The scent rises to her nostrils and sinks into her mouth, where it tastes as if she has bitten her tongue and released drops of blood. She smells him too—the man-shadow—a musk mingled into the stink of the silk cotton tree flowers. 

She pulls the hood of her sweatshirt tight around her face.

His head is low, his chin close to his chest. As she walks past him, clinging to the farthest side of the road, he jerks his head up as if sniffing the air, turns in her direction, and whistles, his catcall casting two notes—me ti—long and low, into the night.

The notes slip from his lips and skim the air on their way towards her. They enter her ears and stimulate her eardrums until not only her ossicles, but every bone in her body vibrates and all of her nerve endings tremble, distributing electric impulses throughout her body. 

The night creatures fall silent. 

The audacity of this catcall first immobilizes then energizes her as angry thoughts fill her mind. Anger at the man intruding on her thoughts with his callous call; anger at her mother for this weekly errand; anger at her friends for moving forward in their lives without her; anger at her grandmother for needing more than a granddaughter should have to give.

Anger at herself for not pushing back against them all as she should… As she will.

Her body moves to the pulse of the whistle and through it, learns his essence. The anger brewing inside her evolves from thought to substance and ferments into a poison constituted just for him and without antidote. The blood pumping in her veins is venomous now. 

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Every one of her senses is wildly awake, feral. Power surges in her blood, pushes against the insides of her body, but she does not know how to release it. She searches her mind, wading through the words her mother has said to her over the fifteen years they have been together. Surely there is something, some drop of wisdom that will guide her through this encounter, but all she senses is admonishment: she broke the rules and brought this on herself. 

The voice that has lived in her head for the last three years speaks up. 

Everything you need is already within you.

She grips her grandmother’s package tightly; this errand that has endangered her might be her salvation. She forces her fingers against the edge of the wax paper until it slices the skin of her thumb. Blood wells up, pushing through the thumb tip and spreading red against the white wrapping. 

She hears a sharp intake of breath. He has smelt her blood. She senses his heartbeat quicken—thump, thump, thump—matching hers. 

She panics. Her steps accelerate, each one light on the ground before the next lands. 

His steps pad softly between her footfalls, tracing her path.

The chorus of crickets and frogs travels with them, now a syncopated beat, matching the building tempo of her steps. 

The blood bubbles up through her broken skin. Just like water trapped underground will find or make a fissure, her blood will not be contained. 

His breath sounds little more than an arm’s length behind her. Running is futile. She must act.

She flicks her wrist violently, one, two, three times. Drops of her blood land on his cheek. 

The shrieks of the frogs and crickets crescendo into chaotic discord as she closes her eyes and imagines her blood mingled with his, its poison traveling up and through his body, overpowering his organs, stunting his every defense. 

On the ground ahead of her, she watches his shadow twist and writhe, elongate and contract. Long limbs stretch, rise, and fall, reaching towards her as if she is a lifeline instead of his grim reaper. He flails and fails: shrinking, devolving until there is nothing left and the night subsides into sated silence.

She remains motionless but her heart still pounds loud and fast. She feels powerful; not only undefeated but undefeatable. She reaches inside her mind for the voice which has guided her to this point. She wants to share with it that she has become more: large, powerful, grown. But she hears nothing. 

Is this what freedom sounds like? she thinks.

She tests this idea, tries to conjure her mother’s warnings about who she should and should not be. Her mother would not approve of the power that bubbles inside her, and perhaps this is why, again, she is met with silence. 

A twinge of something like loneliness threatens to rise up in her heart, but she squashes it and instead welcomes the spread of the venom, even though it squeezes against her lungs then her heart, forming something dark inside her. She knows she can stop it… should stop it? She listens again for the inner voices, considers reverting to the young woman she was at the start of her walk. Can she be that girl on the beach again? That girl reached outwards for her strength, tugging at Sheldon, her friends, her mother for justification of her place on earth; following the path of piety that her mother has laid out for her; hoping for Sheldon to want her and her alone. But whatever she garnered from them dribbled from her grasp as if she tried to carry the ocean in her hands; it was never enough. 

She can return to her old life with this gift, this understanding of who she is and what she needs, but when she thinks beyond the “before,” all she can feel is the depth of fear she felt while waiting helplessly for the creature’s attack; as if she were alone on a raft that had drifted too far from shore and was surrounded by sharks. She will not be that girl again.

Everything you need is already within you, she thinks, but it is her own thought this time.

She walks, and the lights of her grandmother’s house appear ahead, first faint, wavering in the dark, then steadying into a beacon. She looks back. The silk cotton tree stands strong, its branches curling in the dark. The mist returns, whipping between her legs, rising in front of her, then drifting west in the direction of the tree. She crouches and follows.

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Carol Mitchell is the author of the novel What Start Bad a Mornin’ and of nineteen books for children, three published by HarperCollins UK. She holds an MFA from George Mason University where she is a Cheuse Center fellow and a member of their advisory board. She is a fellow (and on the fellows’ council) of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and a fellow of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She also hosts and produces the Moonshine Murmurs podcast by Stillhouse Press. Her book reviews and short stories have appeared in several journals. She is an assistant professor at George Mason University in Virginia and is working on a novel.