Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

by Ashley Winstead

This is Southern Baptist country, and people are prone to unease, apocalyptic and overly associative, seeing holy warnings in the smallest of things, like the pattern sugar makes when spilled across a counter.

All this beauty stirs the soul, making one feel the pinprick presence of another order: God, perhaps, but maybe also something darker, secret beings with lives that unfold in the slivers between trees, whose slitted eyes blink open at night in the depths of the swamp, yellow and ancient as alligators’.

“A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.”

“Are you going to grow up a good girl, Miss Ruth, or are you going to be a threat to your daddy?” His smile grew so wide I could see the dark crescents where his gums were pulling back from his teeth. “He gonna need to cage you?”

“Better move fast past them men, little bird. Whatever you do, you must never let them catch you.”

“There are some things that just have to be done, even if they’re evil.”

Love isn’t salvation; it’s a curse. Feeling so much, wanting so much, not being in control of yourself.

Since the day I found you in the swamp, I’ve been trying to answer that question. I thought once that you might be the answer to the only prayer I ever made. Or my conscience—my heart, beating outside my body. Sometimes…” He swallows. “I think you’re a fistful of sand, and the tighter I clutch, the faster you spill. I don’t know, Ruth. You’re something I’ve never had a name for.”

we loved like this, with an all-consuming passion, because our hearts had awakened to the truth of what we wanted for ourselves. The awakening itself was a miracle for those of us who had no map for love, who’d never once felt an emotion directed at ourselves as strong as the ones we gave to others. How do you draw a map of a place you’ve never been?

sometimes a person was bigger than that. Sometimes they were your freedom. The whole woods, the channel through which you first fell in love with the earth, felt at home in it. Sometimes a person was your home, the love you learned to grow for yourself, stored in another’s body. Sometimes they were the way your body first learned what it wanted. Sometimes they were an awakening.

I think of the poor frightened child I’d been in church, searching for love and acceptance, doing my best to repeat You will be saved. You must be good. Be good and be spared the lake of fire. How deep the wound must’ve been for me to carry it for so long.

the way he spit out teenage girl like it’s the most pathetic thing a person could be.

What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin? We’re reviled and desired in equal measure; cringed at, laughed at, then lunged at. The sheer effort people like my father and my teachers have spent trying to control us. So many dress codes and rigid rules and unspoken ones we have taken on the mantel of policing ourselves, looking in the mirror and wincing at our reflections, drawing our own blood first, before others can.

“I was a young woman once. I know what it’s like to be torn in different directions. To try to understand what you think is right and wrong, what you care about, who you are, when everyone’s trying to sell you their version. It’s a rite of passage as old as time. The only way through it is to trust yourself, okay? Choose your own path.”

sometimes a person is more than a person. Sometimes they’re a lifeline. Your ticket out, not just of a house or a town but an invisible prison whose bars are in your mind. Sometimes they’re a key in the exact shape of the lock that cages you.