Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

For though I’m small, I know many things, And my body is an endless eye Through which, unfortunately, I see everything. —GLORIA FUERTES, “NOW”

We on our backs staring at the stars above, Talking about what we going to be when we grow up, I said what you wanna be? She said, “Alive.” —OUTKAST, “DA ART OF STORYTELLIN’ (PART I),” AQUEMINI

Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.

The only thing that’s ever been easy for me to do, like swimming through water, was sex when I started having it. I was twelve.

And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, Why not? It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.

I thought that one day we would have sex, but he never came for me that way; since the boys always came for me, I never tried to have sex with him.

I put my hands in my pockets, and the pregnancy test I ripped out of the box and tucked into the waistband of my shorts when I wandered away from Skeetah on a trip to the bathroom scratches my side.

I know something’s wrong; for weeks I’ve been throwing up every other day, always walking around feeling like someone’s massaging my stomach, trying to push the food up and out of me. Some months when I eat a little less because I’m tired of ramen or potatoes, I’m irregular. But the sickness and the vomiting make me think I should get a test, that and me being two months irregular, and the way I wake up every morning with my abdomen feeling full, fleshy and achy and wet, like the blood’s going to come running down any minute—only it doesn’t.

all the times I’ve had sex, and it seems like every memory has gold and silver condom wrappers, like chocolates covered in golden foil to look like coins, that the boys leave behind once they get up, once we pull apart. This is what I’m thinking...

Two lines means that you are pregnant. You are pregnant. I am pregnant. I sit up and curl over my knees, rub my eyes against my kneecaps. The terrible truth of what I am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles. There is something there.

I have dreamed about kissing him. Around three years ago, I saw him having sex with a girl. He and Randall had talked her into coming back to the Pit with them when Daddy was out, and I heard them all laughing when they passed underneath the window. I followed them into the woods. When they got

The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years.

Because everyone else was crying, I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then

Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.

I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.

There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding.

This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.

“To give life”—Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue—“is to know

what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.

I want him to grip my hand like he grips the dark beams over his head, to walk with me out of the shed and away from the Pit. To help me bear the sun. To hold me once he learns my secret. To be different.

The girls say that if you’re pregnant and you take a month’s worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage.

If I took care of it, he would never know, I think, never know, and then maybe it would give him time. Time to what? I push. Be different. Love me.

She is calm and self-possessed as a housecat; it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree’s roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don’t uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.

“The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.” “There’s another storm?” Randall asks.

“Katrina has made landfall in Florida … miles from Miami.” It is the local news.

I know that wink, that grin. He smiled like that when he was done when we had sex for the last time about a year ago, when he was wiping himself, turned away from me; he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder. I grip the seam where the windshield joins the hood, and I pull myself away from him so that we are no longer touching. I do not like his smile.

And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying

again for what I have been, for what I am, and for what I will be, again.

suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.

the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great

and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.