Page 72 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

Mourning is a difficult thing.

It’s a stain that never goes away. The sting of loss fades, but you’re still left with this laceration that doesn’t scar. It just continues to weep, and you accept that.

There comes a time when you’ve lost so many people that all you are now is one massive wound. All you can do is bleed for the ones you’ve lost and hope you don’t die of blood loss.

May Pierson deserved a better life than she had.

She deserved a better son, a better grandson. She was far too lovely of a woman to go through her life with such little affection. May deserved a family who hugged, laughed, and spent evenings with her in the garden.

I was warmer to her than I’d been to anyone else, and yet our relationship was still cold.

When I woke up this morning, Lyra was draped across my chest, her body attached to mine like a spider monkey, hips straddling mine and legs tucked at my sides.

We must’ve fallen asleep in the living room after she demanded to work on her project now that she had the spiders to fill it. The couch was ridiculously uncomfortable, but when my eyes had adjusted to the morning light, I withstood the pain for a few moments. A few prolonged instances where I admired her while she slept.

Lyra is not a sweet sleeper. She does not look angelic or peaceful. Instead, she looks more like a wild animal.

Bushels of hair sweeping in every direction, so fluffy and curled that it’s almost hard to see her face. She sleeps with her mouth open, and there isn’t an alarm clock in the world loud enough to wake her.

But she’d been beautiful.

In a chaotic, feral way.

That same unfamiliar ache ricocheted in my chest, which had been more than enough to get me moving. It made me panic.

I’d carefully detached her from my body, tucking a pillow beneath her head and a blanket over her legs before disappearing from the cabin.

My plan was to go for a run through the woods around Lyra’s home, but I’d just kept running until I found myself here, at the gates of my family cemetery, out of breath and covered in an obscene amount of sweat.

I’m not sure why I’m here or what possessed me to run this far in the early morning hours, but if I had to guess?

Maybe because I knew the only person who could explain what was happening to me would be May. I might’ve been able to tell her about this sudden onset of what feels like the worst case of heartburn I’ve ever experienced, and she’d have an answer for how to treat it.

The wet ground makes a horrible squelching sound as I walk through the graves of my ancestors. Everyone with the Pierson last name, dating back to the man who’d founded this town, was buried here.

I weave through until I find the newest tombstone. A tall angel statue sits atop the grave’s base, and I can’t help but smirk thinking about how much she would’ve hated this gaudy thing.

When I was fourteen, my ninth grade English teacher publicly ridiculed Silas in front of an entire class of students. He’d gone over the misconceptions in his paper out loud and essentially told him it did not matter how much money his father had, it would not change the fact he had schizophrenia and would never amount to anything because of it.

I left a dead deer on her front porch, guts strewn across the entry steps and a simple painted message in the animal’s blood on the door.

You’re next.

I’d been more than delighted when she put in her resignation the very next morning.

That idea, or at least the seed of the idea, had come from May.

Now, she didn’t specifically tell me to leave a cut-up animal on the lady’s doorstep, but she had identified what was wrong with me the moment I came home from school that day.

My friend had been wrong, and it was okay for me to be angry, she’d said.

It was the first time anyone had recognized an emotion in me and let me know it was okay to feel it.

Squatting down, I run my hand across the tombstone. A rose lies perfectly still on the grave marker. The grass beneath my feet is finally growing. The earth takes no time for remembrance; it simply continues as if our grief does not exist.

I don’t believe in speaking out loud to those that have passed. Wherever they go, I don’t think they can hear us, and if they can, what good would my words do?

However, just this once.

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