Free Bloodroot by Amy Greene Page A

you do that?”
    “You know that stump behind the house where Granny scatters seed? They come in droves this time of year, all different kinds of birds. I’ve been sitting there every day with my hand out. They’re used to me now.”
    “Reckon they think you’re part of the stump?”
    “I am,” she said.
    She lowered herself off the rock and into the branch, her dress darkening and spreading in the water. She lay back on the rocks with light shifting on her face, fingers of creek water closing across her middle.
    “Can I tell you something?” She closed her eyes and propped up on her elbows. The water trickled over her thighs and played with her dress tail. I couldn’t stop looking at her pale body, stretched out long and hard in the creek branch.
    “Yeah.”
    “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy.”
    “I won’t.”
    “I thought… it was like …that chickadee was my mother.”
    Myra had never mentioned her dead mama to me before. “Like reincarnation?” I asked. “Better not let the church folks hear you talking that way.”
    Myra smiled. “Not exactly.”
    “Like a ghost or something?”
    “More like a spirit. Like she’s still here.”
    “The Bible says there’s two places people go when they die.”
    I looked at her stomach, the black dress gathering in neat wrinkles where her navel was hidden. I imagined a dark slit filling with water.
    “I wonder about her. You know she moved off to town with my father when she was seventeen. I can’t figure out how she could leave this place. She must not have been like me.”
    I lowered myself into the water beside Myra. The cold took my breath. “Does it make you sad?”
    “Hmm?”
    “That she wasn’t like you?”
    “I don’t know.” Myra sounded sleepy, drunk on the feel of the creek lapping at her fingers, running like a cool scarf over her elbow bends, gliding under her heels and between her toes, and all the smells of blossoms and muck and mottled toadstools risen like yeast in the shade. Looking at her, a feeling came over me that she might do the same thing her mama had done. I wouldn’t have believed that Myra could leave the mountain, but I hadn’t seen until then how she longed for her mama and wanted to know about her.
    “You’ll go, too,” I said, leaning over her.
    Myra took in a deep breath, black hair coiling out in all directions, a nest of water snakes. “Never,” she exhaled, and I felt the cool rush of her breath on my face. I put my hand on her wet stomach and it tightened under the slippery fabric of her dress, but she didn’t open her eyes. I leaned in and pressed my mouth, ever concealing the broken tooth, against hers. But I’m no fool. It was Bloodroot Mountain she tasted when I kissed her lips. I might as well not even have been there. I knew it then and I know it now. I never tried to kiss her again, but I’m glad I took my chance when I saw it.
    Myra drove Mark out of his head, the same as she did me. He tried to kiss her a million times when we were teenagers. She always laughed and wriggled away as if he was playing with her, but I knew it was for real. I saw how his smile dissolved and his eyes flamed up. In high school when we went to the movies he would try to touch her in the dark, his hand sliding onto her ribs and moving up toward her breast. She would bend back his fingers until he cried out and the people behind us fussed at him to be quiet. He’d try to pretend that he wasn’t mad, walking through the lighted lobby to the parking lot where Daddy’s old truck was waiting for us, but I knew what his anger looked like.
    Mark hated me when he discovered how Myra sought me out. He caught us one day coming back from a walk. He was home early from a fishing trip because nothing was biting. He watched us as he took his pole and tackle out of the truck bed to put in the smokehouse. Myra waved but he didn’t raise his hand in return. I walked her down to the road and when I came back he was sitting on the