Excerpt from This Box of Masks and Scars:

Prologue: The Weaving

Jenny listens to the explosion of thunder and counts her heartbeats until lightning illuminates the valley again. From the screened-in porch she watches the storm roll in as pregnant raindrops begin to die on the tin-roof, their suicides the percussion to the electricty humming in the torn sky. As the music builds and lighting crescendos, Jenny realises for the first time that the phrase ‘roll in’ is literal, the storm’s weighty clouds creeping towards her like a lazy tide, grey, vast.

As the thunder booms again, Raine, Jenny’s mother, slides open the screen door separating the porch from the dusty dining room. “Jenny-Mae?” she asks, her head scouting through the opening.

“Over here,” Jenny calls from a chaise in the dark. The tip of the joint she smokes glows, a thin halo of light not visible behind the high-backed furniture.

“Your grandmas want to have words with you.” Raine, her hair an unusual tangled bun, turns and leaves the door open. Her slippers shuffle through the hardwood house.

Jenny watches one more lightshow change the landscape, rising with the soundwave. Her instinct here is fear, a crash-like echo of thunder’s boom in her pulse, thinking she knows the events that will unfold.

Mothballs and bacon grease whisper through the air inside, neither pungent, but both leaving an unpleasant tang on the palate. Jenny follows her mother down the hall and into her great-grandmother’s room where the chemical bite of sterility overpowers the rest of the old farmhouse, the whitewashed scent of a makeshift hospital.

At seeing her great-grandmother, Paisley, grown so old and weak, Jenny’s pulse shudders as in response to the thunder, a visceral knowing of life’s workings. Great-Gram has always been a small woman, but she’s become child-sized, an elderly woman in miniature as one by one her wee organs turned to mush.

Missy, Jenny’s grandmother, perches near Paisley’s waist on the far side of the electric bed, worry--etched decades prior between her brows--hanging from her countenance. Raine sits at the foot, biting the insides of her cheeks and drumming her knuckles against her thigh. 

Jenny nestles herself onto Paisley’s left, hip butting the pillow, and takes her cold hand, running her thumb over the ridges of wrinkles. Missy reaches across and takes Jenny’s free hand. She is touching both her grandmothers. Raine takes Missy’s and Paisley’s free hands. They weave themselves together, a first and a last.

Jenny looks to Paisley, her feathery white hair, knowing she’ll be dead soon. They all know. It’s why they are here, letting Paisley die at home. They are prepared that the slow expiring could take weeks, but the change in Paisley’s breathing forces all to believe it will be tonight. The twins are on their way, so all Paisley’s daughters will be with her. 

Paisley is lucid, a rarity. “My girls,” she hums. “My girls.”

“We’re here, Mama,” Missy says, giving her hand a beat of pressure.

“I am not proud of everything I’ve done in my life.” Paisley coughs. The exertion of talking tests her frail lungs, little more than pulpy tissue. The women wait for her fit to finish. 

The rain drums the roof. The hoots of owls in the starry sky and restless bats in the attic play backup as Paisley breathes, slow and shaky. Her voice rattles from her chest. “You have no idea how your experiences prepare you until you look back, see the big picture.” Clockwise, yellowed eyes welling, she looks to her girls, all grey-eyed, familiar in their similarity, snapshots of her life. “Tell her everything,” Paisley sighs.