Sometimes it slips, down, down, down it slides, back home, into the stream. And when you cup your hands and try to scoop it back up, it's different. Always different.
It was where she laid down into at night, when she couldn't sleep in the heat of her bedroom. In instances when she could barely breathe, driplets of water entangling with her hair and blanket restraining her movement like a straitjacket. The air was strong enough to pull her back as she climbed out of bed and vanished slowly, quietly through the sliding back door into the cool darkness of crickets and yellowing grass.
She washed her hair in the river. It was not a very deep river, and the mud would replace her sweat but she didn't mind. She laughed. She stepped on the cold rocks beneath the water and tried to maintain balance. She let her nightgown become wet and splashed the yawning turtles nearby. She tickled the grass until they all laughed with her. She tasted the foxtails and the raw sweet potatoes in her mother's garden. She had conversations with the moon about Maylee, her favorite doll, about going to the beach, about the boys at school, and about her parents' divorce. The moon didn't laugh. About her brother, who was recently hauled off to jail for stealing from their neighbors. And about the first time she saw her father in a long time while at the county police station, and how the event involved him crying harder than she's ever seen a boy cry. But also about how she saw her parents hug that night and wished they would never let go.
Drowsiness would then take over, and she'd tie her hair into a knot, brushing pieces of grass off her legs. She'd make her way back to the house but only get to the porch and close her eyes in rest. In the morning, her mother would wake up and see a young girl, half covered in dried dirt, curled up on a rocking chair, the wind swaying her back and forth. And she would place a hand over the worry lines in her forehead before bringing out a blanket, not the one called a straitjacket but one like protection over the losses in their lives.
