Night Wherever We Go

by Tracey Rose Peyton

Texas weather was an animal all its own, and we had yet to figure out what gods it answered to.

But to us, they were just the Lucys, sometimes Miss or Mrs., Mister or Master, but typically just Lucy, spawn of Lucifer, kin of the devil in the most wretched place most of us have ever known.

We slipped deeper into the grove of dead trees, the large oaks and elms skinned of their bark, in various stages of atrophy. This was believed to make clearing the land easier, but it seemed to us wholly unnatural, another sign that the land of the dead maybe didn’t reside under the sea as we previously thought, but was somewhere nearby, in some neighboring county in Texas.

We were bound together by what tends to bind women like us together. Often, that doesn’t make folks kin. Makes them trapped. And that can make them hateful toward one another, unless it’s redirected and harnessed toward something else altogether.

It was your business whose help you sought—whether it be Jesus or the moon or your dead.

It had to be something wrong about her or in her that kept them from coming, that left her in this strange place with little to no aid in this world.

What did it mean to be saved or spared or favored if only to be thrown out again later? It seemed hard not to be undone by such thirst, how often the spirits needed to be fed, praised, or worshipped. And how at times like these, all that effort felt fruitless.

Her body became a map of all the places he had touched, and what lingered afterward in the soft soreness of her muscles seemed to her like a delicious telepathy between them in the silence that followed.

Facts weren’t friends. They could be fickle as paint. Hard to come by and easily changed.