Pomegranate

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.CLICK HERE TO SIGN UPAlready a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. For Jordan For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.FROM “POMEGRANATE” BY D. H. LAWRENCE Mama was gone and not gone.She had disappeared into the hospital while Ranita was at school, getting tamed and stuffed with facts and equations, and there she lay, immobilized by tubes and wires. Ranita had stood beside her hospital bed, watching the blue ventilator bag fill and empty, trying to understand how Geneva Atwater had been felled by something as tiny as a blood clot.She had seen her dying.And after the mourners filed past Ranita at the wake, grateful for the phrase that helped them navigate the sudden woe, sorry, so sorry, so sorry for your loss, she had stood beside the coffin and stared at her mother, lying in its white satin folds like a parody of a fancy gift box display. The shiny wig Daddy knew she would have wanted, low on her forehead like a helmet. Skin waxy and mouth pressed shut. Eyes closed to her, for good now.She had seen her dead.But she heard her mother’s voice in the back door alcove, at the table, in the basement. And now she would never please her. Never tell her what she was keeping inside. Never love her more than she feared her.A month after the funeral, she sat across from Auntie Jessie, picking at one of the casseroles the church ladies kept bringing. She’d brought a book to the table, which had never been allowed, but there were fewer shalts and shalt nots, now that Jessie had joined Daddy at the house until things eased up. He stretched out work as long as possible and escaped to go fishing on the weekends, and both he and Jessie tried to stave off the bloated gloom with food, encyclopedia facts, artificial cheer. Neither one talked about Geneva. Neither one asked Ranita about her sadness. That was the family way, ONEFebruary 2019I live my life forward and backward.Seems like my body remembers what I can’t afford to forget.I’ll be carrying on, trying to choose right, and then the past comes for me, rumbling from my chest into my shoulders, pushing through my neck and up into my head. I try and answer its call, own where all I’ve been.Remember, even when forgetting feels like the only mercy.Four years of captivity, and here I sit on this hard plastic chair, surrounded by cinder block, about to leave Oak Hills. Waiting to be thrown back to the world. And I cannot get still. My knees jackhammer; my feet tap. They’ve got wills of their own. My interlocking fingers steeple and flatten and steeple.I try and empty my mind, but my Oak Hills life thunders to the surface and flashes before me, like those shifting pieces of colored glass in the tin kaleidoscope I had when I was six. Damn, really? On my out day, which is stressful enough. I choose a pomegranate and try to see myself holding it, broken open, in my hands. Leathery skin. Pointy stalk. Jeweled seeds.And I can just about feel the shape and weight of it again when I hear the shout, “Did I say you’re free to go?” and I’m surprised to find myself standing up. I look the overseer in the eye… why give him a name when all I am is inmate?… and rein in my anger as I sit my ass back down.It’s true what they say about time slowing down the shorter you get. These last few days have inched by, me hoping and praying I’ve got it in me to keep doing right. I wait to get back the belongings I came in with, wondering what my stuff will look like