Shift
Before a crawdad can grow, it must shed the hard shell of its body.
First, a new skin forms beneath the shell. This skin is soft, but grows stronger.
It is a process of separation, of letting go of the old shape.
A slow goodbye to the body that existed before.
One
Everything that Misty needed was behind her bedroom door, but she couldn’t open it. She planted her toes into the carpet and leaned her full weight against the wood, twisting the knob back and forth. For a moment, the door slipped open, revealing a sliver of darkness about an inch wide. Somewhere inside that darkness was her bed piled high with pillows, her favorite T-shirt, and her box of treasures. Misty stretched her fingers, hoping to slide them through to grab the door, but it slammed shut before she could.
“Penny, let me in,” Misty said.
A muffled “no” came from the other side.
Misty tried again, but her sister was too strong, no doubt digging her heels into the same carpet, her sister two years older and three inches taller, her sister a weight Misty could not move. It would be so much easier if Misty could talk to Penny the way she talked to everything else, so much better without words.
“You can’t keep me out of my own room,” Misty said.
She pushed again, and again the door jerked forward an inch, a space just big enough for Penny’s voice to slip through: “Then go tell Mom on me.”
Misty let go of the door and it slammed back into place. “I can’t.”
On the other side of the trailer, her parents’ voices rose and fell in argument. Misty could only make out every tenth word from behind their closed bedroom door, and those words didn’t make sense alone—won’t, should, really, right, leave. They needed everything in the middle to be complete, all the parts that Misty was missing. Her mother’s voice stood out the most, a sharp spike against the dull rumble of her father’s voice, and together they made a slow, slack creature whose fists pounded against the trailer as it dragged itself closer and closer to Misty.
She slid to the floor and pressed her knees to her chest. Muffled sounds came from behind her, too—Penny crying alone in their room. It would normally hurt Misty to know that her sister was sad, but it only made her angry this time. She pounded her fist against the door, trying to jar Penny’s head. Trying to punish her for shutting Misty out.
But Penny just balled her fist together and punched back, and the wood reverberated between them, their spines pressed to the same spot on the door, and together they made their own strange creature with its own strange heart pounding and pounding.
Misty didn’t stop punching until her father walked out of the bedroom with one hand held in the air and the other empty by his side.
“I’m done talking about this,” he yelled.
Misty’s mother followed him. Her ponytail slumped against her shoulders, little baby hairs catching the light around her face, making her glow. “You don’t get to decide everything on your own, you know that? You’re married. You’re a father.”
“I don’t need you telling me who I am.”
“Apparently you do. You sure seem to have forgot awful quick.”
He snatched his keys from the coffee table and turned toward the door. “Like you’d ever let me forget a damn thing.”
Panic rose in Misty’s chest at the sight of her father leaving. She looked for something to distract her parents with. She’d done it before, stepping between them when they started to argue, holding up her art project or reciting the Bible verses she’d memorized from Sunday school, and the sight of her was often enough to startle them out of their fight. Misty became a blush rising to her mother’s cheek, the spasm of her father’s hand clenching tight and then releasing—a freckled truce with her father’s wide nose and her mother’s brown eyes.
But then her father opened the front door and light flooded the room so quickly that Misty and her mother winced against it. Misty’s father turned to say something else until he spotted Misty sitting on the floor at the end of the narrow hallway. He stopped.
Her parents stared at her and Misty stared back at them.
This was usually the part where they would stop fighting. Her mother’s voice would lift to a false high, her father hugging Misty even though he rarely showed affection. Even their attempts at happiness felt wrong.
But this time Misty’s father looked away from her without smiling. He looked at her mother and said, “This is what you wanted, Beth. You’re the one who has to tell them,” then slammed the door hard enough to rattle the glass in the windows.
Misty’s mother stood with her arms crossed over her chest. She stared not at Misty but through her to some far and foggy place that Misty had never seen. She went there often enough that Misty knew how to handle it, how to be patient, to wait for her mother to come back to herself. Back to Misty. But this time, her mother touched her fingers to her mouth, walked back across the trailer, and disappeared into her bedroom.
The trailer was quiet without her parents’ noise. There were so many small and empty spaces in need of filling.
Misty dug her heels into the carpet one last time. She pressed her full weight against her bedroom door so fast that her sister didn’t have time to prepare. Something thudded behind her and the door jerked back a few inches, the dark space of their room yawning by Misty’s side until her sister growled and pushed back even harder. Misty’s feet burned as she lurched across the carpet, and she fell to the floor on the outside of everything she wanted.
Two
After Misty cried and the tears dried on her cheeks and left her skin feeling tacky and brittle, after it was obvious that neither her mother nor her sister were coming to check on her, Misty walked through the same door where her father had left. Her body carried her to the creek by muscle memory, back to the place she always went when she was sad or lonely.
She climbed down the steep embankment before the creek using a chain that was sunk into the ground with concrete. The chain was old and thick and rusted. Her mother told her it had been part of a swinging bridge once that spanned the width of the creek and connected this ground to the road above. It used to be the only way to get to their holler until the new bridge had been built. Earl had the swinging bridge torn down when he bought the land and cleared the trees to make room for his trailers. It always made Misty sad to see the chain all by itself, torn away from what it used to be.
She stood with her toes on the edge of the place where the sand gave way to the water. The sun was warm on her shoulders, but she didn’t feel warmed by it. She rolled the hem of her shorts up until the denim cut into her thighs and walked barefoot into the water, careful for broken glass that sometimes shifted loose from the sand and craved something soft to tear into.