Free All Stories Are Love Stories by Elizabeth Percer Page B

together? At Dale’s funeral, of course, ten months ago. If that could be thought of as togetherness. It was really only an emergency, with Javi showing up to make sure Vashti’s dams didn’t dissolve entirely. Then she was gone, whisked away again by the siren calls of professionalism and a compulsive need to earn and achieve that began long before she’d seen the inside of a courtroom. Vashti traced it back to the maelstrom that followed their mother’s death, when their father’s intensely silent grief inspired his eldest daughter to try desperately to take her mother’s place in the store—running the register, answering the phone, dealing with adults burdened with half her maturity and ten times her arrogance—so professionalism becameboth her armor and her crutch, a way to leap around the world and keep her carefully protected heart from prolonged exposure to any one place or person.
    â€œHere,” a ten-year-old Javi whispered into her sister’s ear, “try this.” She held out a pail filled, to Vashti’s aching delight, with crumbled earth. Like a bear cub, Vashti cupped her hand and reached in, shoveling the welcome filler into her mouth. Only Javi could be trusted with Vashti’s compulsion to fill her mouth with dirt, joined as they were in the mystifying, terrifying aftermath of life after their mother’s death. They were both doing whatever they could to keep from caving to the pressure of crushing grief, whether that meant Javi’s staying awake late into the night with her back against the wall and her sister’s head on her lap to avoid the despair of further nightmares, or Vashti’s eating dirt. That was, until Javi changed the rules of the game.
    Javi smiled over the bucket between them, her eyes winking down and her mouth lifting up. A smile as wonderful and frightening as the man in the moon’s.
    â€œYou’ve got to eat something, Vishy,” she explained.
    But Vashti just held the strange taste in her mouth, shaking her head, stuck between the desire to swallow the sweet, spicy impostor or spit it out.
    Her sister sank down and put both her hands on Vashti’s knees, looking up into her face. Their mother had been dead for weeks, and they’d been trying to walk around and eat and live with the gravitational pressure of grief pinning their hearts to their chests. Her death had warped everything, even the naturalorder that had been their daily lives. They went to bed on time, but Javi woke in the night if she slept at all, speaking through the tongues of her dreams. They sat before the best meals their father could prepare, but Vashti barely ate, then crept outside afterward and filled her mouth with soil from the garden.
    Javi licked her thumb and wiped a smudge off Vashti’s face as their mother used to do, breaking both their hearts all over again, though they were growing used to the constant cleaving and opening of their hearts breaking multiple times a day now, the muscles developing the seeds of defense that would later grow into Javi’s inability to love anything but her work and Vashti’s inability to stop loving the boy who would sew her heart back together. “It’s just chocolate,” she said. “You can at least eat chocolate, can’t you?” She reached one of her own fingers into the bucket as if showing her the food was not poison by trying it herself, willing to do that for her sister.
    Vashti watched her eat. And as she did, the chocolate made its way down her throat and into her belly, triggering a surge of primal, burning hunger. Vashti filled her palms greedily, the burst of silky, chalky sweetness ricocheting through her mouth, spurting out again with her tears. It was, she was surprised to find, so good. So, so good. Vashti rested her head against her sister’s and cried, tears mixed with chocolate choking her until Javi had to pound her on the back and their