𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐄

𝐅𝐈𝐕𝐄, 𝐈

5. | AS WE TARRY THERE, I

❝...He speaks and the sound of his voice is so sweet, the birds hush their singing...❞

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Every night Diana closed her eyes, the woman's cries rumbled through her dreams like thunder. It didn't matter how leaden with exhaustion she was when it began. Like an alarm or the persistent dance of light outside of her window, the woman would always rouse her, leaving her rooted to the bed.

Her mother told her it was what grief sounded like. The throat-scratching, teeth-clenching, hair-pulling condition of loss—and as painful as it was, it didn't always show on the surface. Sometimes, it could only be heard, and in this case, that was doubly true. Diana never saw the woman with her naked eye. She only knew of her, her position, and her disposition, and how she had become Brewster's personal boogeyman after her children were taken away long before their time.

"Diane," her mother said, "stay in bed."

Ernestine was watching her from the kitchen. She was at the small round table, candles around the circumference, a rasp to her voice, and a yellow to her eyes. The candle glow was bright enough to cast Diana's face in the reflection of the long painting in the hallway. Defined cheeks and big eyes, encased by five, chin-length pigtails, and wiry little arms folded over a black and white plaid dress. Her pajamas, she recalled, were folded neatly on her bed, fresh and untouched.

Her mother spoke to her again, but this time it was cut short by a cough, wet and feeble. She had been wrestling with tuberculosis for a long time. She could be well for years and then suddenly fall ill and be bedridden for months at a time. Witnessing her in this state, hunched, raddled, and sallow all over, had always been a thing of nightmares.

And yet, Diana did not go to her.

Only frowned, knowing there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say. She kept moving, walking toward the front door. Her mother did not stop her as she turned the knob and stepped out onto the concrete, the bottom of her brown Mary Janes suddenly sticky with spilled juice and melted hard candy.

She approached the stairwell, and, as always, counted the steps as she descended onto the ground floor. One, two, three—fourteen, fifteen—twenty-one. She landed on a stretch of pavement and followed it to a large expanse of grass.

Clouds shrouded the moon in bulky overlays of blue and gray. The mother's gaping cry traveled, moving faster than any gust of wind she had ever heard. It followed like a storm, an awful racket above her head as she wandered toward the dumping ground across the way.

The mothers of the neighborhood warned her and the other children about playing there, explaining there was no joy in getting tetanus from a rusty nail or falling on the sharp end of a shovel, but when did children ever listen? They were fickle, in love with a game or toy one moment and then disinterested the next. So had been the case for their playmate, who had grown bored playing seeker and wandered away, leaving the children behind. The children of the crying mother hadn't heeded the warning, and what they had to show for it was their graves, their homegoing on this very plot of land.

Nearly every blade of grass was covered, flattened against the dirt and grime of dilapidated couches, broken sinks, and sullied toilets. The refrigerator that took them both sat amongst a makeshift cavern of filth, a deteriorating heap of appliance scraps and other decay. It lay ahead of her like an altar. A perfectly beaten trail, unwalked and faultless, conceding to nothing. The weight of her footprints wasn't a hindrance. They faded behind her as she drew closer, and the mother's howl turned to groans, then to whimpers. Her voice was but a hollow sniffle when Diana's hand fell on the rusted handle.