Mercury by Amy Jo Burns

Author:Amy Jo Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celadon Books

* * *

Marley used her key to the salon’s back door and crept inside. The black palm trees on the wall looked like witches’ fingers in the dark. She flicked the light in the storage closet. The door hit a broom; it fell to the floor with a clatter. Marley held her breath and turned off the light. Waited. When she bent to take a pack of sponges and a jug of generic-brand ammonia, she felt something sharp in her back.

“Stay where you are,” Jade said, turning on the light.

When she saw Marley, she dropped her kitchen knife. Dressed in plaid pajama pants and an Exposé T-shirt, her hair in a side pony, Jade leaned against the wall and rubbed her eyes to survey the contents of what Marley was stealing.

“Shit, Mar. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were burying a body.”

When Marley just held her gaze, speechless, Jade said, “Oh, shit,” and grabbed her coat.

For the next two and a half hours, the three of them scrubbed Elise’s presence from that hidden upper room. A mighty act, three women cleaning. Erasing skin and flesh and blood, as if they knew inherently what it took to make something un-exist outside the walls of memory. These women knew how to give life, how to sustain it, and how to starve it, too.

When they finished, Elise used a gloved hand to shield the preacher’s body with a choir robe.

“I don’t want to speak of this again,” she said, her eyes darting back and forth between Jade and Marley. “We’re leaving it in this attic. Believe me—silence, more than anything else, is what it takes to be a Joseph.”

Marley could think of no response. She was exhausted, and dirty, and frightened. She’d never been closer to Elise, and she’d never felt so far away from herself. Elise took her maroon heels, and the three left the way they’d come: with the attic hatch left open and the light on. They went home just before the rain and did not fall asleep.

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