Free Frail by Joan Frances Turner

supposed to know at least something about, but you don’t?”
    “Like Shakespeare.” I felt my pockets again. Cell phone, ID cards. Good. “My favorite I wrote was about Callisto.”
    Lisa shook her head. Nobody ever knew that one, or they confused her with Calypso. “Callisto was a beautiful nymph,” I explained, “a follower of Artemis. One day, Zeus saw her wandering over the mountaintops. He raped her. Once he was done with her Artemis banished her, as punishment for no longer being a virgin.” That part confused me no end, the first time I read it; I thought Artemis was meant to be a lesbian, you’d think she’d understand. “Then, because she just wasn’t punished enough, Zeus’s wife, Hera, turned her into a bear—but the worst part was she still had her old mind, trapped in a bear’s body. She tried to beg the other gods for help, tell her family what Zeus had done to her, but she’d been robbed of speech forever. And she didn’t know her own strength. I mean, she literally didn’t know her own strength, in her head she was still a young girl. She fled over the mountaintops because she was terrified of the other animals, she couldn’t see herself for what she was. She hid in a cave, away from everyone, crying for everything she’d lost, but all that came out was the sound of an animal that’d crawled away to die.”
    My mom cried when I played it for her, that song. I hoped it wasn’t just because I got nervous and fucked up all the chord progressions. I stared up at the slope of the sky, the little pizza slice of the quarter moon.
    “So what happened to her in your song?” Lisa asked.
    “She got captured by a circus. She became a dancing bear. Then one day, right in the middle of her act, she suddenly understood that she had teeth. And claws. And enough strength to decapitate an animal trainer, with one swipe of her paw.”
    Something too high-pitched to be an owl called out a few times from the birch trees, lapsed back into silence. There was a faint rustling sound in the trees, the grasses, some small furry thing scuttling toward its hole. Nothing had changed, for them. Nothing at all.
    “Would you mind if I closed my eyes for a while?” Lisa asked. “Just a few minutes. It’s been a hell of a day.”
    “You’re the one who kept saying you didn’t need it. Not me.” I clutched my backpack tighter. “Good night.”
    “I’m just taking a nap. Get some rest. Good night.”
    She stretched out on her side and in seconds was sleeping like an animal sleeps, flinching limbs and piteous snoring cries giving way to deep sighing breaths and a sort of graceful weightiness; her whole body sank straight into the blanket with the heaviness of fatigue. I’d never slept that soundly, my mother once told me, even as a toddler. It’d be her thirty-ninth birthday, in two and a half months.
    What would I be doing, in two and a half months? In Elbertsville? Weeding a vegetable garden. It was too early to grow anything now, weird hot weather or not, the last frosts didn’t end until after Memorial Day. Mending clothing pulled off dead people, after slapping it clean on a rock. Laying snares for rabbits. If this arm didn’t get me first. If Lisa were wrong about the rabies, it’d definitely have happened by then.
    I fell asleep dreaming I snared a little skeleton wearing a zipped-up parka and tiny red boots and a soft rabbit-fur hat, the rabbit ears still attached and flopping over smelling of death. Promise me you’ll take care of it, Kristin begged me of the skeleton, pleading low and soft and desperate like she had last winter, I know what I’m putting on your back but please promise , and I did, because I had no choice, because otherwise the circus bears would break loose and kill us all. But the thing is, their cage doors were all open already, someone unlatched them while we weren’t looking. I tried to tell Kristin that, in the dream, but she just wouldn’t listen.
    I told Ms. Acosta too.