Waiting for Sunday

chapter 20 - a prayer and a hypothesis

It's too cold to be outside; the autumn temperatures have been diving steeply for the past two weeks, and this afternoon they've at last scraped the bottom of the barrel. The air is thin and snippy, every shadow edged with frost.

Lillie finds herself on the back porch of the family lake house anyway, her body buried in layers of alternating fabrics—turtleneck undershirt, wooly sweater, parka, throw blanket. The scene before her is too picturesque, the pale sun an egg yolk sitting atop the lake's shivering surface. It begs to be seen with the naked eye, not dulled behind the glass of a window.

When she left her family last, Moses was missing and her parents were trying to bake a cake, which is to say her father was struggling with all the inscrutable buttons on the souped-up stand mixer while her mother relaxed on a barstool and openly judged him. Tara Glass's favorite thing to do is judge people, and she's also quite good at it, especially if you ask her husband Zeke.

Now, a flicker of movement at the base of the tree line below catches Lillie's eye, and she tracks it until it steps into the blazing saffron sunset and becomes her younger brother.

"Mo?" Lillie straightens up as Moses comes jogging up the porch steps, the tight curls at his hairline frizzy and his forehead sheened in sweat. There is a stupidly happy smile on his face for some reason. "Why did you just materialize out of the woods like a cryptid?"

"I do that all the time. Don't you?" Moses says. He drums his hands along the wooden railing. "I went for a jog. It was very peaceful."

"I have no idea how that's peaceful. What if you got attacked by a bear or something?"

"Then I would hope I taste good," Moses says, leaning against the railing now, hands loosely interlaced and dangling over its edge. "It would suck to go out that way just for the bear to say you tasted like shit afterwards."

"You're ridiculous."

Moses grins. He rolls onto his side then, facing Lillie. "And you're sulking."

She was hoping it wasn't that obvious, but then again, it's not like she was trying very hard not to be. Lillie glances at her brother's smiling face, and when it proves just as bright as the dying sun ahead of them she drops her gaze instead. "I have this feeling," Lillie starts, before she's figured out quite what to say, so she has to pause and sift through to find all the right words. "Like I'm getting myself into something I can't get out of. Maybe that's a good thing, or maybe it's bad, but it's the fact I can't figure out which that scares me. Do you know what I mean?"

Moses's dark eyes regard her with what she thinks is a blank look of confusion at first. His eyelashes are long and naturally curled and have been a begrudging object of Lillie's envy ever since he was born. "How's your writing going lately?"

It's so out of bounds of anything Lillie was expecting him to say that she has to backtrack, to reassemble the thread of her thoughts. Pulling her blanket closer around her shoulders she answers, "To tell you the truth, it's awful, Moses. I haven't been able to write at all. When I try, my fingers cramp up and my mind goes blank and I just—I can't."

Lillie knows fear, the same amount anyone else knows it, she supposes—an old acquaintance she forgets about but can slip back into easy conversation with the moment they reappear. This is different. This is a fear that clings, that suffocates, that parasitizes. She can't distinguish it from the sound of her own pulse.

"You go away when you're not writing, Lillie," Moses says. "It doesn't make sense to me either, but it's true. I don't want you to go away; I don't want to miss you."

Lillie crumbles, dropping her head into her hands. "I know, Moses, but I—"

"You write beautifully. I'm sure you can make beautiful things, too," Moses tells her. "Have you tried?"