Ayanna stepped through the door, and there was a moment when her heart felt so light, and she laughed with relief in the middle of a suburban street. Someone was grilling and blasting out soul music, and every smell felt so loud and overwhelming after elsewhere. Her phone was buzzing, text after text. And there was the twinkly sound of an ice-cream truck, calling everyone toward Bomb Pops and homemade vanillas. Ayanna turned, did a full circle, looked up into the air, looked toward the houses, and didn’t notice the car coming toward her until the person started honking and rolled down their window and yelled, “Get out of the road, dumbass.”

On the sidewalk were a long scrap of a light blue-and-white striped dress, a ragged cut from a skirt, and some long blue grass.

Part Two

Interstitial

Once, the spirit sang that love was two intersecting paths. In a small ranch house, a mother converted her grief into red wine. She spoke to herself, to the wind, to God. Each utterance, a different attempt at penitence. If you apologize enough, if you make yourself small before glory, the universe will open its arms to you.

Sometimes, late at night, sometimes after enough prayer, the mother heard her lost daughter’s voice, like music drifting in a window from very far away.

When you are lucky enough to have the dead speak to you, listen.

When you are lucky enough to be given a miracle, you must see it.

When you are lucky enough to be loved, you must treat it like a seed. You nourish it in yourself, yes, but you are meant to instill it back into the world. To not do this is a sin.

10

Ayanna felt like the first year of college was a complete blur. Most of it was because of grief—she had never felt so fucking alone in her entire life, and it was better, she knew, to let everyone think she was just a typical sad girl crying over some dumb boy than to try to talk about missing Olivia. In some ways it was better to be depressed because it helped her ignore the voices that tried to chat with her, the flickering shapes she could now see among people at the grocery store, or lingering in the city’s complex alley system, and her longing to go back home, to wonder when the door would return to the soybean fields. Her parents did not visit her at college, but her grandmother came multiple times, despite the cost, to remind her she could not let sadness eat her whole.