Waiting for Sunday

chapter 2 - beyond what we can hold

Seventeen steps from her bedroom to the mouth of the kitchen. Lillie counts them, starting from one, as she does each morning—an exercise to keep open the eyes she's just opened, to boot up her brain like you would an old computer. When she gets there she wavers in the middle of the tiles, swaying slightly like a reed, until she convinces herself to move again. Plants need to be watered. Coffee needs to be made. There is a day out there waiting for her to step into it.

For another twenty days, maybe, it's still summer, and the city around her holds onto it like a last love. There is no hint of the dreariness from the night before; the sunlight flowing in through the blinds on the patio door is full and lush, the color of honey. She hears someone start up their car. In the further distance, a train blows its horn, long and emphatic. Cicadas hum, a constant harmony.

Lillie's just set the moka pot on the stove when she hears the strike of her bedroom door against the wall, the door stop twanging. She looks up to where Moses lounges on his air mattress just beyond it, his hand still stretched up towards the doorknob. "Are you making coffee?"

Lillie very loudly rolls the espresso bag closed again. "Yes, Moses."

"Do you have toast?"

"Yes, Moses."

He rolls over onto his stomach, looking at her through the gap between the door and the jamb. Somehow his T-shirt has come halfway off over the course of the night, bunched up around his shoulders like a shawl. His close-cut curls are fuzzy, dark eyes shiny and a bit mindless, like a bird's. "Can I eat the toast?"

"What do you think? I'll let you stay here for the weekend but I won't feed you?" Lillie says. She turns, grabbing the bread box and pushing it across the island. "You're getting up and slicing your own bread, though."

Moses mutters something under his breath that sounds like a long and dramatic hidoi. Japanese is their grandmother's tongue, and once, it was theirs, too. Lillie's mother, half Japanese and half African American, had lost much of her Japanese speaking ability by the time she gave birth to Lillie; and Lillie's father, fully African American born and raised in Louisiana, could never speak it at all. Even so, Lillie spent so much time with her maternal grandmother in the early days of her existence that she was once fluent—something Lillie can't even imagine now. She and Moses, too, have lost most of it besides a few words and phrases, the same sort and caliber you'd find in a bargain travel guide.

All Lillie has left of her grandmother now is her name, Izumi, simultaneously a gift and a weight Lillie worries she will never be strong enough to carry. She hears it at graduation processions, or when her mother is angry with her—Delilah Izumi Glass. Like a bright evening gown in a shop window, she thinks it's beautiful. Just maybe not on her.

"It's hardly cruel," Lillie scoffs as her brother slumps through the door, blanket tossed around his shoulders.

"Is too. Am I not a guest?"

"Don't be stupid."

He flicks her in the head. "By the way. When did you start collecting rocks?"

The question comes entirely out of left field. Granted, this is not a rare thing when it comes to Moses, but she's not quite awake enough at the moment to be prepared for it. "Rocks? I don't collect rocks."

A gentle clack as Moses sets something down against the granite. "I found this on your nightstand."

If it is a rock, it's like none Lillie has ever seen before, long and flat like a shard of glass, in the shape of an uneven triangle. Frowning, Lillie picks it up, holding it up to the sun.

Her breath hitches. She hears it first: the faint patter of rain against the glass. The inside of the rock is streaked with water, rain falling within in miniature sheets. A storm, crystallized.