Crossed

CHAPTER 44 CASSIA

I am the first to wake. A beam of sunlight shines through the door of the cave and I glance over at the others in surprise, wondering how they haven’t yet noticed the bright light and the absence of rain.

Looking at Ky and Eli and Hunter, I think of how many invisible injuries are possible. Ones scored on your heart, your brain, your bones. How do we all stand? I wonder. What is it that keeps us moving?

When I step out of the cave, the sky blinds me. I put my hand up the way Ky does to block the sun, and when I bring my hand back down, I think for a moment that I’ve left a thumbprint, a mark of wavy dark lines blotting the sky. Then the print moves and turns, and I see that it is not the whorls of my fingers but the whirls of a flock of birds, tiny, moving high in the distance. And I laugh at myself for thinking I could touch the sky.

When I turn back to wake the others I draw in my breath.

While we slept, he painted. With swift, light strokes; paint-dripped haste.

He covered the back of the cave with rivers of stars. He made the world rocks and trees and hills. He painted a stream, too, one dead and alive with footprints along its bank, and a grave marked with a stone fish whose scales cannot turn back the light.

At the center he painted his parents.

Painting in the dark, he couldn’t see. The scenes blend and bleed into one another. Sometimes the colors are strange. A green sky, blue stones. And me, standing there in a dress.

He painted it red.