I had not kissed her since that day my mother caught us, not even within the treehouse, hidden from the eyes of outsiders. There were eyes inside of me too, always watching, always condemning. She noticed it, though she didn't say anything.
"If you could be anything in the world, what would you be?" she asked me quietly. She had her hand spread out in front of her, the light passing through the cracks of her fingers and splintering across her cheeks.
"What would you see, if you looked?" I forced myself to ask her in return, avoiding my own answer. "What would you want to see?"
She did not turn towards the window, but snapped her fingers shut instead, closing her hand into a fist so that the shadow turned solid and eclipsed her face. She spoke delicately and with precision, like reciting a poem from memory.
"I would be putting flowers in your hair, and building your wings from leaves and glue."
I blinked slowly. "Is that all?"
She looked at me with a certain shade of sadness, something like resignation.
"What more can there be?"
—
It was the hottest day of the summer. Everyone was too exhausted to move, and the only sound that could be heard was the melodic thrum of the air conditioner at work. I spoke less and less to my mother those days, and I could tell that she noticed. But I couldn't help it.
She had caged me up and clipped my wings, and it would do her no good to regret now that her bird would no longer sing. I drifted through the house like a lonely wraith. I felt her eyes follow me around, like a gargoyle who seems to track your movements even as they remain inanimate.
I was listless and irritable. The heat clung onto me like a plastic film, wrapping around my arms and legs, adhering to my nose and mouth. Every breath I drew in suffocated me more. It would be torture to enter the treehouse at this temperature. In that small enclosed space, Love and I would slowly boil like frogs in a pot of hot water.
I went to my grandmother instead.
Her door was slightly ajar as it always was, and I slipped into the room quietly. When I entered she was already looking over her shoulder, twisted around from where she'd been gazing out the window.
"Junebird," she said, sounding delighted. I sat down by her feet, my fingers weaving through the spokes in the wheel of her chair.
"Grandmother," I said. "Do you ever feel trapped?"
She raised a teasing eyebrow and I bit my lip as I realized my blunder. She barely left her room these days, and was physically unable to leave her chair. I couldn't remember the last time she had left the house. Maybe it had been way back when my father was still here.
"Tell me what's troubling you," she said. I hesitated.
"I built... a box," I explained in halting phrases. "It keeps me safe, but it also traps me. I feel like a coward, constantly hiding."
How could I explain that my refuge had become a prison, and that I had chained my love to me? But her eyes were already widening, looking at me knowingly.
"I know it may be hard to believe," she began, "but your mother does not know hatred. It's not that. Her problem is that she sees the world in black and white, and when something crosses her vision that does not fall into either of those categories, she becomes confused, and stubborn."
My stomach churned. Which category did I fall into?
"So what do I do?" I whispered.
Somewhere in the house, the old generator groaned in sympathy. A loose floorboard creaked. Heat climbed up the walls, listening in.
"Do as you do," she answered simply. "Live in color, love in color, and the world will follow after. Why should you have to bleach yourself bland for them?"
Pristine white stockings. Tea without honey. Pure and bland.
A figure lurked silently in the hallway, under the impression that they were unseen and unheard. I saw the shadows of feet moving beneath the door.
Maybe all this time, it had been like this.
Maybe my mother and I had been two elusive ghosts living in the same house, haunting each other.
—
I flashed my bedroom light, once, then twice. Pause. Once, twice. Then I crept down the stairs and out the back door, across the garden and up the oak tree where I would be liberated from my cell that night.
I counted the minutes that passed by. I had not yet run out of fingers on one hand when she crawled through the window, maintaining a few seconds worth of balance before falling in head first and rolling into my lap. She straightened up quickly, her hair sticking up in all directions like she'd been electrocuted.
............
