Two Wings to Fly Away by Penny Mickelbury

Author:Penny Mickelbury [Mickelbury, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612941509
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 2019-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

How long is all night? Not long enough . . . or too long? For Genie and Abby, it was both for a while. Now, as the cold dawn sought to penetrate the darkness, it was the latter. Genie opened her eyes to find the deep blue ones, inches from her own, gazing at her. Again. At least now she could see them. During the night she could only feel them. That’s when the night had felt endless, when they lay close together, breathing deeply, not touching, not talking because they didn’t have words for their feelings, yet not sleeping because—because they couldn’t. Finally, Genie had thought of something to say.

“I haven’t slept in a bed with anyone since I was a little girl and my little brothers and sisters and I all slept together.”

“How old were you?” Abby asked.

Genie thought; it was so long ago and a memory so deeply buried. “I was perhaps seven or eight.”

“And your brothers and sisters?”

“Younger than me,” Genie said, regretting that she had spoken of it.

“I have never slept in a bed with anyone at all,” Abby said, remembering what Maggie once told her: Jack said slaves did not speak of the past with each other, to say nothing of with strangers. Jack had revealed bits of his past only after several years of marriage, then only reluctantly. “I have no siblings so I can’t imagine how sleeping with them would feel but I know that sleeping in the same bed with you is . . . something I want to do often.”

“Yes,” Genie said, and took Abby’s hand and held it tightly.

They awoke to the sound of wind rattling the windowpanes. It was now very cold in the room, the fire in the grate now little more than barely glowing embers. They wrapped their arms around each other, initially for warmth but ultimately for the deep, though so far unexplored, comfort it brought. “Where are they now?” Abby asked.

“Who?” a drowsy Genie asked.

“Your brothers and sisters.” The pause was so long Abby thought she’d drifted off to sleep.

“I don’t know,” Genie finally replied. “They were sold off with my mother.”

Abby cried out as if wounded. Then she began to weep. Genie held her even more tightly, grateful that someone could cry for her long-lost family because she no longer could. “Oh God Genie! How do you bear the pain?”

Again, Genie didn’t reply for a long while and Abby waited, but it was she who finally dozed. Had she remained awake she would have known that Genie never replied because that was a question she could not answer. How did she bear the pain? She didn’t; she buried it, so deep that it no longer could be touched. She barely remembered it and had never spoken of it. Why now, and why to this woman? Perhaps because she was able to shed the tears that Genie herself no longer could. And now those deep blue eyes were looking into her own dark brown ones.

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