This chapter hit the cutting floor during the editing of the new novel, (Cold Grace, out from Honno, February 2025). I didn't want to lose it, but on the other hand losing it there does mean I can share with you here as a sneak preview. I know we'll be talking about this character's voice. This is/was the only place in the novel where it was heard, and that matters.
Still
Maman laughs like a flock of birds and then she laughs like glass. She calls me chère coeur and opens up the space between her arms and her knees. I walk into it, put my head on her shoulder and my nose under the hair at the back of her neck. She smells like johnny cake. She smells like rosemary and she closes her arms all around me.
Jeanne Delaney climbs up onto the other chair and jumps, trying to reach the roof beam.
Maman says, ‘Get down and come inside this hug while it’s going.’
Jeanne jumps one, two, twenty times. I look up and her hands go into the dark below the timbers, but her face looks like she’s just about to touch the sky. Then she lands bad and knocks Maman’s sewing box off the table. I put my head back into the dark behind Maman’s neck and hear it all hit the boards. Clatter scissors, roll thread, whispering tinkle pins. Maman’s arms tighten up and then fall away. She puffs air past the top of my head.
We pick up all the pins and drop them into the tin.
‘The sounds are little, for mice ears.’ I think it out loud and Maman laughs like the water in the spring house.
‘Come on into the yard, angel girls. It’s time to choose.’
There’s dark all over the sky and in between the trees. Dark with things in it. She knows I don’t like it, so she brings the lantern. She only closes it when it’s time to pick our stars.
We lie down in the thyme, faces up to the night, and she tells a long story. Maman is on one side and Jeanne on the other, trying to be the walls of me. I’m not listening because of the animals and the wind in the trees. If all you can do is hear things, you have to pay extra attention. The dark makes me breathe faster and have to pee. It makes things standing over me, inside my head.
Then, ‘Look!’ Maman says, and puts her arm across me. That makes me feel like I won’t fly away, even if I picture myself flying. I like that. But it’s the other arm she wants us to look at, the one with the finger up in the sky.
‘If you could fly up there and land,’ she says, ‘it would all be made of fire and light. You could live up there in your angel world with nothing but light to eat and breathe and bathe in. Night-time isn’t dark, Etta Grace. They only put the light far enough away so it won’t dazzle you and burn the little creatures.’
‘That one’s for me,’ Jeanne says. She points up over the creek and the beeches at the brightest thing in the sky.
‘Well, ’course it is,’ Maman shoves Jeanne Delaney, then kisses her hair. ‘You’d swallow the whole world and choke yourself if we weren’t here to stop you.’
I’m waiting for the moon. It looks good when the light around it goes yellow and soft. Like I’m hiding underneath the other Jeanne Delaney’s dress, the mother who’s dead. Like I’m in the very first picture in my head, before T-Jeanne, before snow, even. Gauze-yellow light and warm voices.
‘Moon for me,’ I say, and she tells me not to forget. We’ll come back out for my moon tomorrow night. Remember.
I do. I remember this one thing, after everything else flies away from me.
I remember I can bathe in the fire and not get burned. I remember her warm, heavy arms. I remember their voices.
