everything
that
stopped.
And then
Cali set down her crayon. There was no more space. She couldn’t even read the last three words she’d written. She needed a new piece of paper. She slid her drawer open and shuffled through the contents with her free hand, still holding the phone with the other. She couldn’t find the rest of the paper. She went back to her letter, tried again.
“Okay. I really have to go,” Theresa said. “The social worker keeps looking at me.”
I stopped,
too. And
now
“I hope you find her,” Cali said. She wanted to add something else about the girl’s mother, but there was a murmur and muffled sounds and then the line cut out, and the phone blinked off. Cali set it on the desk. It was warm from her ear, moist from all those words and her skin and her breath. The battery icon blinked.
LOW LOW LOW.
Cali shoved the Midnight Blue crayon back into the cardboard sleeve, right between Razzle Dazzle Rose and Tickle Me Pink, and folded the yellow-and-green hood over the box.
She flicked her phone into a backspin, watched it twirl over her letter. Beneath the blur of metal and graphite, colors scrawled across the paper, trees and clouds, stars, spiderwebs. Her words had been totally enveloped. The original orangey-pink Mango Tango letters were nearly lost, peeking out now in thin fingers behind the sky, like the sky outside her window. The sun would be up soon, on the drawing and on the outside. The darkness was slipping through her fingers.
Cali slid the window sash up, then the screen. The breeze tickled her cheeks, her eyes. She shivered. The orb weaver approached the edge cautiously and tested the surface, untrusting.
Cali could close the screen. Hard. End the creature’s uncertainty, the aching and pointless need to survive. She curled her fingers over the edge, tips turning white as she held on and considered it. The spider stopped, perched on the ledge. It seemed to Cali that the creature was weighing her options. Stay, go. Hello, good-bye.
Suddenly, without warning or lead-in, pain flooded Cali’s heart. It ripped through her flesh as though she’d pressed the blade to her chest instead of her wrist, as though this bright new hurt would be the death of her now, rather than the pills rattling in the cup in the desk drawer. Her lungs filled with warm liquid, a searing, sticky feeling she didn’t recognize. Her insides burned, throat tightened. Her heart thudded and blood whooshed through veins, blue and taut beneath the scar on her wrist. Her ears rang and the room spun and she looked again at the spider, then her drawing, searching for a focal point. She found the only remaining clear words on the page and stared until they, too, swirled before her eyes, as unrecognizable in their simplicity as a foreign language.
matters
now
Cali’s cheeks were wet but the dizziness finally passed. She relaxed her fingers, slid them off the lip of the window screen, the spider still in limbo on the ledge. She’d read somewhere that nature didn’t like interruptions. Interference. But she raised the screen higher and blew a gentle breeze across the spider’s tiger belly, anyway. The sun was rising now, its bright orange fingers reaching across the sky. Cali closed her eyes and let them warm her tear-streaked face and the orb weaver scampered out over the ledge, out into the unknown.
Cali opened her eyes. The spider was gone, the remnants of her web drifting lazily and unfinished in the window.
Cali’s phone blinked off, finally spent. She’d have to get the charger from her mother later. Cali slipped it into her desk drawer on top of the magazine and pushed the drawer closed. She left the window open, though; closed her eyes again and inhaled the dawn breeze.
She hoped the spider would be okay.
Jackson Pearce
Where the Light Is
Underground, it is cold.
The deeper you go, the colder it gets. In elementary school, I learned that if you go far enough, there’s a layer of magma underneath the dirt, and beneath that the earth’s core. It’s hot—billions upon billions of degrees—and solid. Most people think it’s made of iron. My teacher said some people think it’s made of gold.
When I told my father that, he said it wasn’t true—that it’s the core of the miners that’s gold. That they are brothers underground, protecting one another, using drills and shovels like wands and athames to uncover power for the world. A league of magicians working in the depths, in the secret places of the world where no one else has ever been.
I am in the league, but I am not like the other miners, who slap each other on the back and tell dirty jokes gleefully. When we go into the mine, all I can think is this—billions of degrees at the earth’s core, yet it’s cold. I think it’s a sign, like the way people get a chill when they go into a haunted house. The earth is telling us we’re not welcome.
But underground is where the money is, in the fat seams of coal, tall as me and ten times more valuable. We rumble into the mine on the cart, Roth’s salt-and-pepper hair whipping back as he presses harder on the accelerator—he knows the track well enough to speed along with total confidence through the labyrinth. The headlights beam through the coal dust like we’re driving through black snow; we turn our helmet lamps on as the sun vanishes behind us. I’m afraid of the dark in the mines. Afraid to be so, so far away from the world above.
I nod to a group of miners as we pass—most of them went to Middleview High with me. Just four months ago, we sat at graduation together. As the principal talked about bright futures, I entertained the idea that I would go on to something else—anything else. It was a silly fantasy, of course. The only Middleview boys who escape a life in the mines are the Runners, who slink away to colleges or the army, never to be seen till they return for their parents’ funerals. The town doesn’t welcome them back. They’re deserters, traitors.
My father was a foreman, last out in an accident fifteen years ago. The Middleview Mine Catastrophe, the monument calls it. Four died; Dad kept a group of seven others alive, including Roth. My father gave them his lunch. He went hungry as three, four, five days passed until rescuers reached them. He is a local hero; he was a great miner. If I were a Runner, it would destroy my mother. It would destroy my father’s memory.
I could never come back.
Roth drops me off, pats me on the shoulder as I walk away from the cart. Because I’m new, I get the boring jobs; because I don’t talk, I get the solitary ones. Just like yesterday, I’m plastering an airflow wall, scooping white goo out of a bucket with my hand and rubbing it into the cracks of cinder blocks.
I pretend I’m a painter, drawing stick figures in the plaster. I pretend I’m a doctor and getting the plaster into all the cracks saves someone’s life. I pretend that I’ll keep my promise to myself this time around, that once this mine is dead, I’ll consider leaving this town even if it means never returning. I’ll escape, I’ll be free, I’ll be happy. I don’t know how much time passes—it’s hard to tell without the sun. If I check my watch I obsess over each second, so I just try not to look. I’m halfway into pretending I’m an archaeologist, making casts of something ancient, when I hear a sound.
A single knock.
No, not a single—there’s another. And another. Knocks with just enough pattern to be intentional, louder than the grind of machines farther down the path. I lift my head, wipe my forearm across my mouth. Knock, knock, knock; before I know it I’m walking toward the noise. I pass a group of miners who look up at me, eyes of all ages lined with coal that’s thick like a girl’s eyeliner. Don’t they hear it? We stare awkwardly at one another for a moment; I think of saying something—