Goldeline by Jimmy Cajoleas

Author:Jimmy Cajoleas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

I’m in a meadow. There’s a tree at the end, the same tree that Bobba’s house sits on, but there isn’t any Bobba’s house on it. In a knot in the middle of the trunk somebody wedged a book. I pull it out. It’s warm and throbbing and soft. When I open the book it makes a cry like a baby and I shut it real fast. In the limbs of the tree are about a hundred cardinals, so many I think they’re leaves at first. They chirp and flutter and all at once rise, the flock of fire flies off past the sun and I fly off too, so high the trees look tiny, the whole world the size of a gumdrop, my face pressed against the sky like it was a mirror, the cold glass on my cheek looking at my face, but it’s not my face, not quite.

It’s not me at all. It’s my momma. I’m looking at my momma.

This is a memory.

One that is too old for me to remember, a forgotten one like a scar on my head that hair grew over and covered.

It’s Momma, young and white-haired and beautiful. Momma I love you. Momma how I missed you. She smells sweet as fresh rain, like honeysuckle. It’s the smell that hurts so bad. She picks me up and spins me and it’s like I’m floating upward, like a raindrop in reverse. She kisses me and I’m so small, I’m a baby. I know this is true because it feels true, but how could I remember being so small? Her face against mine is the softest thing I ever felt.

Bobba is there too, but she’s sweeter, gentler. Her hair is real and silver and wild all over her head. She has cobbler with her but I can smell all the good in it, it wasn’t made mean and wicked like what she made me and Tommy. She hugs Momma like a sister and they are close, they laugh together.

I’m in Momma’s house, with the thatched roof and the stove and the rocks, the ones with the little birds on them, the ones Momma taught me with. The books in the corner stacked and good-smelling, I don’t know how she got them but there were always more whenever I wanted. The lantern I used to carry when I wandered the woods at night. But I was never scared, even in the dark nighttime, because of the songs Momma taught me, the nothingsong that sparkled the air when I sang it, that protected me from all the scary stuff in the dark, the horror of night like it says in the Book, the fanged things, the wolves and snakes and wicked men, my little light out in the black woods. I would wander and sing and pretend I was a star that fell out of its tree and toppled to earth but didn’t burn out, just got small and brave and became a girl who glowed at night.

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