The Revivalists by Christopher M. Hood

Author:Christopher M. Hood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

I spent that whole long night awake, staring at the lions as they ate and listening to them when it was too dark to see. The wind whistled across the empty endless fields, and even with my sleeping bag pulled over me, I couldn’t get warm. My hand cramped from holding the door closed, until I pulled a shirt from the back and used the sleeve to tie the handle to the steering wheel. My eyes hurt, as though they’d been scoured clean with pumice stone, clean enough that I could see the world as it really was, bloody and raw and pitiless. I could see how we’d been fooling ourselves. A road trip. As though we were picking Hannah up at school, maybe getting ice cream after.

The stars disappeared as the sky became overcast, and I never saw the lions pad off into the darkness. When the moon finally shoved the clouds aside, they were gone, having eaten their fill. Birds had replaced them—hunch-shouldered, wide-winged buzzards and hopping, glint-eyed crows. Was Penelope watching them too? I didn’t know what she was looking at, whether she was looking at anything at all. The silence in the car wasn’t a pause between words, it was the same well she’d fallen into during the winter.

I couldn’t turn off my brain. Ancient scenes kept tormenting me: A Tribe Called Quest popping from the speaker in the kitchen as onions caramelized in the pan and I turned the pork chops. Hannah’s bare feet on top of Penelope’s as they danced. Later, we would play Uno in front of the fire, openhanded, our cards laid out on the carpet for all to see. Hannah played a wild card, and her face came alive as she started thinking about what color to choose. She was about to start kindergarten, a big girl going to real school, and when Penelope and I dropped her off in the morning, we knew that we should appreciate these moments, that she was growing up, this little girl who already seemed to know what she wanted, who unbuckled her own car seat and ran out to meet the friends who were still clinging to their parents’ hands.

If I could have shared this with Penelope, it would have been better. I could have said, I just remembered playing cards with Hannah by the fire, but now I was remembering how the tenderest moment could sour, how I wanted to remind Hannah to say Uno when she was down to one, but instead Penelope made her draw all four penalty cards because that was the only way she’d learn. Why did everything have to be a lesson? Why couldn’t we enjoy an evening together? My brain was broken, all rutted and calloused, and it got stuck on the wrong things, couldn’t let go.

Penelope was burrowed into her sleeping bag only two feet away from me, but it could have been miles of prairie. I wanted all of this to be a dream

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