Hey, June by Cree Nomad

Author:Cree Nomad [Nomad, Cree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9781738315314
Amazon: 1738315304
Goodreads: 209190100
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2024-02-19T22:00:00+00:00

I’ve walked the border of my existence countless times, reaching each end and then starting again. After a while I station myself back on the bench—the only other constant.

My dad has long since left, and I don’t think he’ll be back for a very long time. I don’t want to be here if he returns. I don’t know if anyone else will come to sit with me on the bench on my hill.

I hope they never come back. I’m too tired now. I can’t listen to anymore, you hear me?

I don’t know who I’m talking to, I just hope that they listen.

I look up to the night sky, dimpled by the sparkling light of the stars. The Milky Way stretches over my head, purple and subsuming.

Thirteen. Thirteen moons in one year.

Thirteen.

It wasn’t a secret trap door I could disappear into: it was a clock. Counting down until… what, exactly, I don’t know. It’s been—I quickly count off in my head, using my dad’s words as a guide—seven moons already. Six left. Will I be wiped entirely from existence? Can I even fight this any longer?

I begin sobbing, my head heavy as it falls to my chest, my heart heavier still as I slump against the bench. I would fall to the ground if not for the soft planks of wood and twisted metal holding me up. This damned thing seems to be all that’s keeping me anchored to Earth.

I thought I had a choice. A chance, maybe, to reverse all of this. If I listened and learned a lesson, then I would be deposited back into my warm bed, back in June. But I have learned a lesson. A thousand of them. And I’m still here on this hill. Maybe, I finally let myself wonder, the answer isn’t in what was before. My dad is usually right when it comes to things like this.

I do have a choice, I think. A small part of me has known it all along, but I ignored it with everything else that hurt. I could stay here, fight to accomplish some arbitrary task I’m not even sure exists by the thirteenth moon in order to go back to the land of the living or—

Let go.

Do I even want to leave? I can’t stop thinking about what would happen if I went back. How impossible it seems now to return. I’d wake up, relieved to be breathing again, yet knowing what I know now might lead me to an early grave still. Sometimes knowing is the heaviest burden there is. I wouldn’t be able to unhear the things I’ve heard about myself. I wouldn’t be able to unknow how precisely the people around me break.

What if I went forward then? Reunited with my mother on the other side of that veil. We come from the stars, so I imagine it’d be beautiful, like the pictures in astronomy books. The ones that left me breathless, in an awe tinged with unfathomable sadness, the same as when looking at photos of my mother.

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