as she walks from her grave

I could not articulate the thing before me. If you sliced open a passionfruit and pitted its seeds, maybe then I could liken it to my best friend’s own ripe fruit. A thing was inflamed, so I avoided it with concern.

Here, girlie. Let me show you how.
Sex is a carnage.

Turned sixteen.

Junior year.
AP American Lit.
First, I was the ghost, the ravenous daughter. Then, I became the mother herself.
I once was ghost and then I became woman.

We lived in a fortress of stone on an isthmus that snaked between the Atlantic and a vast wetlands area called the Rodarth Marsh, named for a bird expert, or something. The inside of the snake of land protects a pool of water that powerful sea gulls sail over, scanning for dying fish and runaway crabs. The long-legged white herons that post along our base’s shores had better luck with their meals. As soon as they snag a fish, they swallowed it in whole chunks.

In order to enter our fortress, you had to pass through a gated area where two soldiers stood with rifles twenty-four-seven. So much armory and all to conceal an enemy within.

Enemy/familiar forces might have killed me, if I hadn’t of ran as I did. Become Sethe and slip through the forest on a starless night as I did. But rather than North, I ran into the South for my freedom. Down the Rib to Carolina.

Escape seemed as simple as stealing away in the dark with a car filled with some college boys bound for St. Augustine’s College.

I’d waited with a duffle bag outside a convenience store on Roanoke Road, two miles away from the base, and then they pulled up beside me. My best friend’s expecting me in Raleigh, I told them and stared them down until one of them cracked open a car door. They looked centuries younger than I felt. Into the car and down the Rib went I with a can of iced tea clasped between my knees.

The Rib was Highway 12, North Carolina’s road that skirted its beaches for mile after mile. I would have gotten farther inland after the Rib fed into 64, but the boys put my variables together. The Army-issued bag and the proximity to one of the country’s largest bases had the driver a little uneasy. Shit, shit, shit, the college guy who was driving said. Get her out of the car now. The ones in the back seat were stoned in some way or other, but they tried to dissuade the captain of the vessel from kicking me out in the middle of nowhere. Eventually, he stopped the car on a bridge over the Alligator River and pulled me out himself. Go west, girlie; don’t stay here over night, the stoned men sang out while driving away. Black bears’ll get ya. I waited until they’d gotten out of sight to pull out their whiskey I’d pocketed into my duffle bag. It was for her, but a nip wouldn’t hurt.

That was, in fact, the last, first nip I’d ever take.

A pressure was building up on the palm of the wildlife refuge. The wind began pulling my hair back and tearing up my shirt. What did I care for wind? I would soar to Raleigh if need be.

Let hurricanes split my breast.
Feverdrench me, North Carolina, for I am free.

I walked on the highway as the darkness fell. The single nip of whiskey had delighted my senses too thoroughly. Why had milk been forced on me for 16 years when this nectar existed? I grew too drunk to walk any longer and I simply stepped into the forest and walked until I found a live oak with mosses hanging long enough to conceal myself under. I didn’t mind the shadows, but I flickered a flashlight first and scanned the ground for biting things.

The forest night was a cacophony of wolves, locusts, owls, and frogs.

Tomorrow I would walk to the nearest town. Hi there, may I bother you for some food? I would ask the townspeople. I would tell them that my name was Sethe, no, Sara, and that I had been living with my family out in Waves, but a tax collector had taken our house. Now it was up to I, the oldest, carrying the child of the villainous tax collector, to journey to Raleigh for work that would support my family and the life of my unborn child.

I gave up on the story and threw the bottle away. So much for bringing a gift. The bottle landed in some water with a plop that made me jump. Had I awakened the alligator queen? I listened for heavy claws stirring up the mud and waited for her jaws to reach for me, but nothing came excepting the bullfrog’s song.

I once was ghost and I was also a woman.

But the ghost stayed home.

The only time I had ever seen my best friend was when I first met her. That was a year ago, again in the humid weight of August, but this time on the Tennessee side of the Smokies. Our families had rented cabins in one of the towns at the base of the park. Swimming pools and warm rocks to nap on like lizards, campfires at night, reading on a porch with a bag of candy passed between my little sister and I. Would have been the best goddamn week of my life, whether or not I’d met Eleanor.

I’d been walking through the hills around sunset and then stopped for a while to listen to bullfrogs at the creek running through the campground. Their voices were so loud, the trees and rocks and dirt seemed to vibrate. I heard a giggle and I looked up and there she was. She opened her mouth to say something and a bullfrog interrupted. She threw back her head and laughed and then she leapt towards across the creek. I’m watching for bears. Want to join? She asked me.

We found out each other’s ages and hometowns and family statistics soon enough. No bears came, but a moon rose. The soft hairs on her skin tickled my arm and made me shiver. A lover’s hand clasped mine.

Shivering, so silly, in the heat of summer.

At sunrise in the land of alligators, I crept from under the tree I’d sleep beside with an aching bladder. Too many hours immobilized by this booze. Since I was a little girl, I had never been able to hold the pee in for very long, for whatever reason, and got up every few hours to use the bathroom. The piss just burned its way out of me. I was constantly scalded down there, it would seem.

Not a minute after I had trotted from the woods and back onto the narrow highway was I picked up by a large woman in a King County truck.

She rolled down the window and stared at me.

I opened my mouth to speak and emptied out a caramel-colored liquid with such a wrench from my gut that tears came from my eyes.

I’m sorry, I said in rapid-fire once I could stand up again. I was out walking last night and got to feeling so poorly I had to sleep under the trees. I would be so grateful if you would give me a ride to the gas station in Plymouth so I can call my family.

She watched me and laughed long and hard.

Little lady, she told me. That’s a sweet speech, but a lying one, nonetheless. But I’ll give you a ride and some breakfast, too.
           

The woman told me her name was Carol and that she lived in a trailer at the campgrounds in Alligator River. She was to be the campground hostess for the summer months. I just broke up with my husband, she told me. Some time to be in peace is what I needed.

Some people seek out the solitude and some people seek out some company, Carol explained. I’ve done the latter and here is where it landed me: Miles from a town, no cable TV, no Internet. No man, that’s for sure. You like your eggs scrambled?

I shook my head. No, thank you. Do you have a—

Carol continued: When I was with my husband, I was compensating, I guess you could say, for wanting something else. Drinking. That’s what my problem was. Always has been. And it was fine until it wasn’t. You know? She laughed and threw the egg shells in a container by the sink.

But, like most things, that did not last. So now I’m out here in the wilds.

I’ll just run and wash my hands, I said. I stood up and headed towards her a tiny bathroom.

It don’t take a number two! Carol told me as I closed the door.
           

Carol gave me a ride to the Plymouth gas station as she had promised. She handed me a folded piece of paper as I was climbing out of her truck. Fifty dollars.

Just in case you don’t find your friend. That’ll get you back to Virginia.

That’s not where I’m from, I said too fast, too defensively.

Once she was out of sight, I folded the cash around a second piece of paper in my pocket: Eleanor’s phone number.

I bummed a ride from Plymouth all the way to the orderly university that was a few blocks from the address Eleanor gave me when I called from the gas station phone. Boys and girls just a year or two older than I were walking in groups, holding books, and carrying backpacks, just as the college brochures depicted them. They were free too.

My heart beat faster.

Eleanor came to the door with a chunk of bread in her hand. Some jam was smeared on her lips. Liza?

Liz, I corrected.

She nodded. Her wide brown eyes suggested a generosity I remembered, though in my fantasies, she had always smiled at me; now she was too grave. I assume you’ll need a place to stay? she asked me.

My face burned. I’d been so focused on getting out of the fortress, it had not occurred to me that my savior might be imagined.

She walked with me to a coffee shop on the edge of the campus. She seemed to know everyone in the shop. In fact, the society of the entire cafe seemed to pick itself up and spin around her. Strange to see her in the world of her neighborhood coffee shop after knowing her, alone, with the moonlight and pine trees.

Ellie, how you doing?

Not too bad, girl. Picking up the pieces, you know.

We sat in overstuffed armchairs at the back of the shop and sipped black coffee with cinnamon sticks popped in it. I had never tried coffee before and I immediately hated it. My mouth was suffused with bitterness that made my saliva work to overcome.

I worked here a while, so that’s how I know so many people here, Ellie said.

Totally.

You got a boyfriend? She laughed as she asked, as if the question was already answered.
            No one like that, I told her.
           

On the floor by her bed that night, I dreamed that I was watching a woman in what I imagined a bar would resemble. I was dreaming, and then I was deep in her, but in this dream, I had no language for what that thing was. A bubble, a blister, a hard stone? The woman pulled back and I woke up with my privates throbbing, my thigh muscles to teeth clenched. I opened my eyes and saw Eleanor’s shape above me.


In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and there was Eleanor in the slip she’d slept in and a long sweater worn over it. I looked down at my jean skirt and flowered tank top. She was pouring hot water into a French press.

Sleep good?

She reached for a glass container filled with cinnamon sticks, picked out two, and tossed them into two different mugs.

A bit. I really appreciate you sharing your room with me. I don’t mind sleeping out in the living room.

Stop that. We don’t even have a couch anymore since that bitch took off with it. You want a doughnut?

Sure!

You need some meat on your bones.

Ha, yeah, that’s what my sister says to me. She pinches at me and says, Just eat a burger, Liz. But she weighs, like, under a hundred.

How old is she? Eleanor handed me a teacup with black coffee in it and the reddish stick swirling in the middle.

I swallowed a gulp of the ghastly stuff. Thirteen.

You left her alone to fend for herself, huh?

What? 

Eleanor looked long and hard at me. Finally, a smile broke over her face. But, I forgot that you’re a little Army brat. No one’s gonna fuck with an officer’s kid, huh?

We walked for probably an hour north through the red-brick university, its fields, and up Brooks Avenue. Before we left, Eleanor dug around in her jewelry box for some kinds of pills. Who knows if they’re still good, but it should be fun.

What do they do.

Takes the edge off. And from the looks of it, you’ve got more than a few edges.

We came up on the green of a golf course and a white-pillared mansion that guarded it. Was this the Old South, I wondered. How glaring and white and glittering the place was. We walked around to the back of the white mansion and looked upon a spacious porch with sparkling dishes upon small tables. Lavender bouquets and their shadows towered on every table. Men older than my father, all with even paler skin than his, were reading newspapers and drinking dirty blood from tumblers.

Heat of the day. Rivulets running underneath my clothes. I wasn’t smelling too pretty right now and a shut-off country club was the last place I wanted to be.

Follow me, Eleanor whispered. She took my hand and pulled me right onto the golf course.

Is it OK for us to— 

Even a hundred feet from the mansion clubhouse, I felt their eyes; their lips poised above their blood-filled crystals and their biceps flexed mid-swing while we walked, our fingers entwined, onto the green.

I whispered: I don’t think they even like us to be wearing these shoes on the green.

Eleanor faced me and took both my hands in hers. She pressed closer to me.

I was somersaulting in figure-eights around us and then back in front of only her.

I looked back to her lightly freckled face and round, blue eyes. So simple, an inclination of my lips to hers.

Ellie told me she and Jess had done it all the time.

We go in and wander around the Big Joe’s superstore and hide out in the sporting goods section, or wherever really. Everyone there is super dumb. They won’t notice.

Like in that movie?

Huh?

That was one thing I had noticed about Eleanor. She had seen, like, five movies in her lifetime that she could reference. I had all but given up on explaining my references to her; girl had never seen Star Wars, for fuck’s sake.

Anyway, me and Jess came back with nearly two hundred bucks worth of clothes and shoes and we just sold that shit online for market value.

Market value?

It’s like the standard price for goods. Don’t want to undervalue the worth of it, you know. And we’re incurring a risk by going into the store like that, not to mention.

Stealing.

Re-appropriating.           

We spent the next day at the coffee shop, her eating the food they were about to throw out at the end of the day, me looking the other way, before we headed over to Big Joe’s on the south side of Raleigh. We each took an earbud and split a can of Coke on the walk there. We walked like school girls, or sisters, her arm draped around my shoulders, my arms around her waist. At sunset, we arrived at the superstore; it was a space craft in the middle of a field of concrete. High-suspension trucks and beater cars were parked there with a mean regard for parking-space lines. Large women in ill-fitting jean shorts and tank tops and flip-flops hurried in and out of the store, their chins pointed slightly to the ground as if weighed down by our gaze.

Ellie led me through the rows of makeups and lotions. She dabbed my lips with a color like smashed plums and spread a crushed cherry over her own mouth. You’re so pretty, you don’t need any makeup, I told her, though I was really thinking that about my own face. I looked over her shoulder in the mirror that Eleanor leaned into, frowning, and dabbing off excess lipstick; for the first time, I noticed how our bodies clashed. My face is thin, long and my cheekbones were high, my eyebrows thick, my mouth full compared to Ellie’s thin lips and broad cheeks and eyes as round as the rest of her.

A low-hanging part of myself cringed to think of introducing this new friend to my people back home.

I’ll kill this bastard, Ellie told me. I’ll slit his throat.

Her threat was too familiar, I touched my own throat with my dusty fingertips. The display camping tent we had crawled into had not been cleaned in a long while, if ever.

How can you kill someone you don’t even know? I finally said.

How could your people stand for this? What kind of a father--?

Ellie’s breath caught. I touched her cheek and felt the wetness. Tears she was crying for me.

We were silent for a moment.

Girl, is your sister OK?

I think so.

Girlie, you got to be sure of that.

Stop it.

Shh-shh-shhh.

I knew how to clamp down, so I did.

Look at me, Ellie said. Liz, you look at me.

I croaked as quietly as possible: What?

You got to keep looking at me.
           

After the cavity of Big Joe was silent as a mortuary, we unzipped the sleeping bag and stepped out. Wait a minute for your eyes, Eleanor told me. To adjust.

Ellie whispered instructions for me in the jewelry section—Bracelets, girlie, and lots of earrings, that stuff that we can load into our pockets real easy—but in the Women’s section, I had freedom to choose. I tiptoed across the aisle to Lingerie.

Get over here. Ellie’s words came too quick, too harsh. We don’t need none of that.

It’s for you.

She sighed and pushed her curls back off her forehead. Her eyes were wild in the ascending high of our theft.

Dumbass, if your brain worked half as well as your—

An alarm sounded and cut off her words.

Terror started in the north; its sound rocked me. We hid in the center of two different garment racks, as I had done with my little sister when we were bored and wanted to give our parents a scare. My body was too unruly, unspooling now from underneath the dress shirts and slacks—an elbow here, a ponytail there. The policemen’s footsteps seemed magnetically pulled to me. I started to retch.

The lid was removed.

Dad had been listening to talk radio on the three-hour drive from the base, but he turned it down to a nearly inaudible volume just in case I said something. The sound of our tires slapping against the road was so much louder than those other voices. The roughness of our northbound car on Interstate 87 rocked me into a trance, but not into sleep. I could not sleep; the way it all went down flashed in my mind over and over.

Ellie, outraged at being caught had shifted her focus to our apprehenders and managed to convince the Raleigh Police Department to first call up social services. She’s dying, she’d screamed. You going to let that happen too?

Dying?

I had already died, been buried, and walked from my grave.

I had told the officers and my Dad, I want to be helpful, but I don’t remember. What or where. I just know that it did. Happen.

When did she last eat? They asked Ellie.

Two days ago? Ellie answered with an honest scrunching up of her nose. I tried, but the girl won’t eat.

When and what and where—and did any of this even happen?

I was raised inside a fortress of stone, the oldest military base in the United States. Armed legions, so many beloved men, had been taught the civility of war on these grounds. Values that had been lost elsewhere were meant to be secure inside Rodarth Marsh.

I do remember some things about my youth. I remember everything about my sister, who was still a girl and who still needed me. I think I remember the two of us skipping down the street to get candy and the afternoon sun was bright and waves crashed against our sea walls just a few blocks away. We held each other’s hands as our bodies lifted themselves up, across space, and back down again.

You’re back. Lizard Face.

You’re OK? Amy-girl? You’re OK?

I’m fine. What did you think would happen?

I just worried about you.

God, seriously? You were worried about me?

Amy.

You know what, fuck you, my sister said and she started crying.

I won’t do it again.

Run away as much as you like. I don’t care. You’re dead to me.

That’s fair.

Sorry.

Well.

I’m just really tired, she said, already apologetic. I’ve slept, like, two hours this past week.

It’s all over now, Ame. We’re going to sleep like bears tonight.

But I had one more thing to do before I could sleep.

From my upstairs bedroom, I used my binoculars to watch the sirens scream down the street to the house with cherry trees. A man dragged out. A dog barking hysterically at his master’s apprehension. The door left yawning and open and inside a clear glass pitcher filled with thick juice. Ice cubes melting in anticipation of the fruit’s blood. 

Ellie had told me to watch the whole thing go down, but the ghost was shaking itself from my woman skin. I set the binoculars back down again.

Where are you going? my parents asked me on my way out the door. You couldn’t blame them for being vigilant.

Just to the water’s edge, I called back. You can watch me from the front porch.

Their mouths twisted, but my Dad nodded. He murmured something to my Mom and she grabbed a sweater for the cool breeze.

With my Mom watching me from our house, as if I was a child no longer trusted to cross the street by herself, I crept out to the beach and carefully picked my way along the rocks that lay at a slant along the beach.

My stomach turned and some stuff came up. Finally, I rose up and walked again to the sandy part of the beach. I turned and looked back. She was there, waving to me.

Let me sing a song of peace.

For the trees—alligator green—and for North Carolina’s bone, and for the Rib that took me there and brought me home again. For pink nights and for this new kind of freedom.

I prayed that my women might grant me salvation.

I picked up a palmful of white sand and watched my fingers clarify themselves when the sand slipped away. These Virginian beaches had forgotten more than I would ever know. Above, seagulls squawked like children too old to cry anymore.

Feverdrench me, Virginia.

Surely, I am free.

Mary Breaden recently moved home to Oregon, after spending five years working in New York City. Mary’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Joyland, the Fanzine, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Persistent Visions, and The Mondegreen. She was selected as an Emerging Writer in the Lamprophonic Reading Series and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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