pray the rosary

You pray to Santa Muerte on your thirteenth birthday, and good God (she might be the only one of those), what if it doesn’t take?

Because your house is empty in the afternoons when you return to it. It’s so full of silt-scent and rememberings that you can scarcely dust the corners. You run your hand over kitchen counter tops and catch last night’s fracas in the cracks of your fingerprints. Something evil lives here, but thirteen is too old to relegate the shadow standing in your bedroom doorway to the underground things that mean to take you away.

Your imaginable fate is worse: that they mean for you to stay here.

But staying is only the ticking of the clock. It’s arranging amber bottles on a windowsill to capture the notes that the sun plays at it progresses across the sky. It’s soccer practice and binding ankles with tape that could serve any purpose under the scrutiny of a passing observer. When you reach for an ice cream tub in the summertime and frozen peas in the winter, you can defer the winking of rosary beads to tomorrow.

So you tolerate it in every way that matters. The being and doing of things is garishly normal, and life fits around the hollow spaces in the earth you’ve carved out for yourself. Brush your teeth. Rush your homework. Get the bus to worlds with breathable air that let you swap faces for just a moment. The way forward is clearer than the sky overhead, most days, and walking to the bus feels like strolling through a far-off star field.

Until you see the dog. Not the homework-eating kind, but a white, angular dog that doesn’t fit amid the sharpened shrubberies it’s nestled between. Its fur is stark and shaggy, like a cloak drawn over its shoulders. You can picture it on a mountaintop. But not here. It’s so still that it may as well be a mountain, and it’s looking at you. You’ve never been arrested by someone’s — or something’s — line of sight before. It’s like you’re growing roots.

The world is narrowed to you and this dog for a slice of the face on your watch. If the wind still blows, you can’t hear it over the thump-thump between your ears. Had the school bus not charged down the street like the severing of a cord, you might have remained there forever. And had the school bus — the school bus. The school bus just left you for dust and you’re thirteen blocks away but you’ll never make it, which means a late slip, which means a call home when you’ve already had a talking to this week, and the dog is gone, and —

By sheer miracle, you arrive, panting, forty minutes before the bus does. The secretary asks you about the black ice. I don’t know, you say, and she doesn’t file your late slip.

Because by now, you’ve learned not to ask questions. You’re years hence and still don’t ask them when the answers all manifest in the yellowing skin beneath your cheekbone or in the rattling of windowpanes, but sixteen is too young to know much of anything. You don’t ask your mother for permission to go out, and you certainly don’t ask her boyfriend for rides. You don’t ask whose house this is, or even what’s in this drink. You don’t even want to know how many of them your designated driver’s had tonight.

You do ask where your earring is, though. You could have sworn you left the house with two in, but the weight of your spinning head is off-center. You run your finger over the bare shell of your ear and check your cup, just in case. But It doesn’t fucking matter, Crystal says as she manhandles you towards the door. I’ll get you new ones. Jesus Christ. It strikes you dumb for just a moment that you keep the company of such generous friends who remind you of angels backlit by high beams. You let Crystal finish your drink.

But it’ll take two minutes, is what you tell her. It’s the principle of the thing: of not cleaving a pair or sparing parts of yourself that others can afford more readily than you can. They’re just earrings, and yet they’re not. It shouldn’t feel so urgent. (But it does.) You wrest yourself to set your bag down on the stoop and pat down every pocket, and then retrace your steps through every room and back. You arrive to find your bag where you left it. Crystal is gone. Your ride is gone. You don’t know whose house this is, and so you walk.

It isn’t until a bus stop looms at the corner of one of many unfamiliar streets that you remember the black ice. Tonight is far chillier, or perhaps you’re misremembering, because you faintly recall word of four cars slamming end-to-end into one another like building blocks. Open roads and roads with no ends unnerve you all the same, but functional and obvious roads getting clotheslined by traffic elicit a wordless terror you think you’ve been wearing under your shirt for longer than you care to examine.

A bus arrives twenty minutes later, but it’s not until you’ve boarded and are rummaging though your purse that you find yourself thirteen cents short of the fare. Had you not been an obviously intoxicated teenager, then perhaps the driver would not be looking at you like he meant to splat you against the windshield like an omen. The drag of the wiper blades is a countdown to your doom as your numbed fingers grow frantic and you drop your purse in the frenzy. It’s eons before you scrape its guts back in and right yourself.

A crisp, clean dollar sits atop your handful of change at the driver-side window. An elderly woman has risen from her seat to place it there, and you’re just in time to catch her slide a drawstring pouch into her coat pocket. Her white hair is slicked neat and clean against her scalp, and her wrists are adorned with a bounteous collection of bangles that sing to you. She’s beautiful. She’s kindly. You don’t know how to thank her. That you’re on the verge of tears seems to be enough as she tears your ticket and hands it to you.

The ride home is sobering. You don’t think about that woman until you alight your stop and turn to glance down the bus before disembarking it, but the woman has already gotten off. The house is as abandoned as you left it, so you clamber into bed fully dressed and dry-mouthed to deal with the drywall in the morning. It’s mid-afternoon before you’re able to then deal with yourself, and in upending the contents of your purse onto your bed, your earring skittles across the duvet in a flurry of yellow petals.

Crystal never speaks to you again. But there will be other ships, and other souls to sail them.

Its captain tells revolting jokes and keeps his arm around you so tightly that you wheeze. He smiles like the waning moon in the privacy of your bedroom, yet calls you by anything but your name when you’re the fascination of his social circle. You’re used to people being like ladders by now, and twenty-two is far too old to begin a descent. So you duck your head and climb in spite of the bottles that whistle past your ears, and you hope that he might grow more creative in his choice of projectiles.

He’s better with his hands in ways that equally delight and horrify you. He handles you with all the care that one would a corpse, but sometimes in a manner that suggests he means to make you one. But when he’s a slab deep and past the threshold of cognizant speech, you can mercifully slip into the crawlspace unnoticed before his shadow looms in the doorway. You keep the company of candles and the rosary, an endless string of promises spilling out of you beyond the thirteen you know you can’t keep.

You leave Her a cigarette or two, and pray that something takes.