Dear Adelaide,

23

A cool heat rushed into my face. It was so that I could hardly feel the temperature on my skin.

The hand was delicate, fragile, with mud trapped up beneath its fingernails. It looked as if it had clawed its way to the surface, and there were hollowed lines in the mud around it, lines from desperate fingers.

My heart beat in my ears and tapped violently behind my eyes. The hand was cold, yet it looked as if it hadn't been long since life left it. The clouds moved and the ground beside me washed itself in a pale bleached light. The hand looked as if it had been reaching up for something. Now, it was reaching for me. I took it in my own, traced it in the spot of moonlight.

I knew this hand, the paleness of the skin, the graceful curve of the fingers. The spot of blood where one of the nails had broken away by wooden splinters...splinters from the floorboards of her room.

For a moment, I stopped breathing.

And then my own hands were in the dirt. And they were moving without me.

They threw away chunks of mud, handfuls of mud, tossed it aside, digging, digging, trying to beat the race of my heart in my chest. I was clawing mountains of mud away, burying myself, in search for the rest of her. For any small part of her. Perhaps for a hand that was connected to a muted heart. And for the memory of it beating...As I dug through that mud, I prepared myself for finding her hair, her face, the silence in her chest.

But when I brushed away that last speck of dirt, when I tossed aside that final clod of mud, when I found her, I hadn't prepared myself for the way her hair would look. No longer blonde, but matted in deep black mud, splayed out against the earth. I hadn't prepared myself for the state of her face. It laid still, cool, lips turned indigo and her blue eyes sealed shut with muck. You'd have never known there was ever color beneath those lids. You'd have never known there were ever eyes beneath those lids. It was becoming hard to imagine closed eyes ever open again. It was hard to imagine she had ever been human at all. Now she was silent, a relic, as if she were, herself, a fossil.

But Jane wasn't a fossil.

Jane was dead.

And my lips were moving, my words hardly reaching the air. "No, no, no. no, no, no...no-" I'd brought my fingers to her still cheeks, with all the color washed out of them, and touched the grayed skin of her arms. I tried smudging the mud from her body, but it only spread it across her skin.

Jane was dead. This Jane. My Jane. Jane, if that was ever her name. Jane.

My sister.

"No...." I brought a shaking hand up to my mouth and it was warmed by the steady flow of tears. My chest heaved and I broke a plastered piece of hair away from her face. Her mouth was filled with mud, as if it had opened in one final attempt to breathe. Only to find herself too deep in the ground for air. "Jane...I'm so sorry." What was her name? Her real name? Amy? Amy? Amy who'd been hopeful for a new house and a new town. Amy, who I'd never know. Amy, who'd never know she had a sister.

I sat in dazed stillness beside her, my knees making holes in the dirt. Was it only a few days since I last saw her? A week?

Who was she reaching for before her body stopped?

Dear Adelaide,

                    Can you hear a scream when it's buried in the ground?

I sat back on my heels, and I cried.

I clawed the earth beside me.