This was the closest to an apology Miel would ever get. This was Ivy’s acknowledgment that she and her sisters had spent so long drawing life from the act of taking what did not belong to them.
That was the part that found its way into the whispers of this town. Those pressed roses and that lock of hair became woven into the story they told.
But there was something before that, that didn’t.
The night after the sky had taken all the stained glass, Miel asked Sam for a moon he didn’t mind never seeing again. He’d known what she meant, and gave her one so light gray it looked silver. Like the moon in those library atlases.
Miel and Aracely brought it outside, held it up, waited for the sky to take it.
Their mother would have a light to see by no matter whether the moon above them was a sickle or a bright coin. She could leave her broken heart with them. If she let it go, if she let it streak down to the earth like a fallen star, her spirit would be so light, so unweighted, she would float to places so beautiful they could not be told in stories.
The wind came, and took the moon, the air filling it like a sail. It drifted away, pale and translucent as a slice of jicama. When the trees moved, leaves covered it, and its light flickered like a star.
Miel didn’t hear her mother’s voice on the wind. Neither did Aracely. Later, Aracely said that was a good thing. She said it meant that, like all the stained glass—Aracely had seen it that night too, speckling the dark—their mother had drifted free of this world. She was untethered by gravity or worry over her children, and the water didn’t pull on her anymore.
Miel and Aracely stood with the cut grass brushing their bare feet, watching the moon until its light turned as small and faint as a firefly.
Then it was just them, on that patch of their yard, two sisters lifting their hands to the sky.
sea of nectar
For so long, talking about Samira, acknowledging her as someone who no longer lived in him, had felt dangerous as running his fingers along a sharp edge. It had been Miel eating a slick of honey off a knife. It was an heirloom blade his mother would not leave out, fearing Sam was still a child who might cut himself.
But now he was Samir, and Samira was that friend he almost thought he imagined. And she would be a little more imaginary once he and his mother finished changing his name. He wanted to neither forget she existed nor live inside her.
She was someone he could not be.
He would need to consider everything he’d ignored. How hard he had to work to keep his voice at the pitch he wanted, how it was low enough that no one in person gave him a second look but still high enough that he avoided the phone whenever he could. The way he bled, at the same time each month as Miel, when the moon was a wisp of light so thin it was almost new. How he would have to figure out if these things bothered him because he didn’t want anyone else to know about the effort it took, or simply because they were.
But for now, he knew this, that his name was Samir, and that he wanted every piece of paper declaring who he was to say it.
They could call him Moon if they wanted. They could still call him Sam. But when he said his name, he would be Samir, the sum of the blood his mother had given him and the man he was becoming. When he met a stranger and introduced himself, he would be Samir.
But he didn’t have to tell Miel what to call him. She knew. She knew him.
She was outside, waiting for him in the space between their houses. And his hand was on the knob of his bedroom door, but his fingers would not turn it.
He couldn’t settle on why they wouldn’t do it. All he had to do step into the hall, go downstairs and outside, and she’d be there. This wasn’t even the first time he was seeing her today. That afternoon he’d brought her to the Shanholts’ farm, where he was working now. He’d set a wooden-handled pollination brush against her palm, the bristles pale as wheat, and shown her the rhythm of sweeping the bristles over the anther of one pumpkin flower and then spreading the pollen onto another. He’d knelt next to her. The hem of her skirt, damp and picking up a fine coating of dust, had brushed his jeans.
Still, he could not move from this space in front of his bedroom door. Not even for the girl tracing the path of light left by his moons.
He may have known the surface of the moon, memorized the names of the lunar maria, but Miel had done more than that with him. She’d learned him, but left room for the way he was still learning himself. She knew the shape of him, every place that was shadow and every place that reflected light, without deciding he was hers to name.
His hand drew back, to his own body.
He let his hands move, not thinking enough to stop them. They stripped off his jacket, his shirt, his undershirt, his binder, until he was naked from the waist up.
Then they put all of them back on him, every piece except one.
This time, when his fingers found the doorknob, they turned it.