Read Online Grave by Joan Frances Turner - Free Book Online

shoulder to shoulder with their backs to me down in the long grass. I walked closer.
    “...like even when I’m right here, sitting and talking, I’m always somewhere else.” Amy’s voice was low, clear, carrying back to me where I stood still in the trees. “I mean, not even like I’m standing aside watching myself, even though it can feel like that, it’s more that I’m always two places at once.” Her hand snaked up, tugged at the grass stems. “And I don’t know where the other place even is.”
    “Nobody’s thinking right anymore,” Lisa said. Her consonants snapped and her vowels scratched glass even when she tried to keep it low; even Naomi sometimes winced at the sound of her voice. A strange plague-remnant. “The entire world’s just been upended, everything’s changed-everything you’ve seen—that wasn’t even a year ago, Amy. Not even one year.” Silence. “And barely weeks since...”
    “Since I killed Ms. Acosta.”
    Those words sent a hot unpleasant thrill through me, listening: not horror or agony at the confession, but a ferocious desire to stand between her and any accusers, snarl them into silence. Don’t you say a word against her, Lisa, not one word.
    “Since you killed Ms. Acosta,” Lisa repeated. Her hesitation hung in the air like rain. “Amy, when people are pushed to their absolute limits, beyond their limits, sometimes everything just—”
    “Have you ever just wanted to die?”
    The heat inside me pooled, liquefied: a sickening sensation like my insides were a wax candle, bits melting in drips and streaming away.
    “If you keep talking like that,” Lisa said, and for once the nail-pounding harshness of her words was a relief, “or thinking like it, I’m going straight to your mother and—”
    “For God’s sake,” Amy said, almost wearily scornful, “I’m not going to kill myself. I swear. On your stupid rosary beads, I swear it.” Her hands reached back, tugging at handfuls of ponytail until a slipping elastic inched back in place. “After everything that’s happened, it’d be pretty stupid to do that—there’s no point. Besides, I don’t want to be—have you ever wanted to die?”
    I waited.
    “Many times,” Lisa said. “Even if you don’t count right after Karen died—a lot of times.”
    “So before the plague, too?”
    “Before the plague, too.” Her laugh was a convulsive bark that made my whole skin prickle. “Especially before the plague.”
    A bird called from up overhead, the trees just behind me: something whose crooning chirp started out low and rose high and then swiftly muted itself again. I didn’t know what it was. Then I heard the croaky braying of a crow, a few yards away. The first bird’s voice spiraled higher and higher once more but then, before that second low note, it abruptly stopped singing. No crow sounds, either. Just silence.
    “I don’t want to die,” Amy was saying, calm and unhurried like she was working it all out for herself, out loud, for the first time. “I never wanted to die, I mean, I wasn’t afraid of dying, exactly, but I never—when I look at other people and how they live, how they’re alive, it’s like they’re doing it in a totally different way and I’m just standing there, watching them, imitating.” Her arms stretched over her head, each hand grasping the opposing elbow. “And it’s got nothing to do with the plague, or everyone dying, or what Natalie did—or even what I did. That’s the thing. Like, ever since I was born, I’ve been... traveling. Somewhere else.”
    The sadness unspooling between them both was like a thread, a spun ribbon, knotting them together in a great capacious net while the rest of us swam free outside. Except I knew the feel of that net too, the texture of that rough rope cutting into my hands; I’d almost swear I’d known it in the ghost times, the most-forgotten times, before the laboratory became my whole life. But what could I have ever said to her, my