Ruth

You saved me; that’s how it ends.

Ruth opened her eyes in the silence and dark. Her head sat in the dirt, the pain barreling through her legs like a hurricane. She could only shake. Her ribs stabbed inside, making her groan noiselessly. She clutched a broken bottle in the dust. The wailing was gone. She coughed into the darkness, then gazed up at the pale beam of light shining high above her, the space in the foundation of the house where she had fallen and lay unconscious. She stared at the tunnel of moonlight above her head. Her hands glided along the bottom of the pit, feeling the covers of old books and bottles. Panels, glass, and bones picked clean garnished the cavity. Horseshoe layers of rust and stone, grazed by centuries, rested in the sun-dried clay. She found a beer bottle, the base intact, with the head missing. The last transitory drops were brown and yellow. Ruth held the bottle to her mouth, gazed away, and set it back down. Slow, shallow gasps for air sounded off in the darkness. She sat herself up, then blinked at the figure sitting beside her. It was her mother.

She looked different now, maybe a little bit younger. Her hair was brighter in the darkness, and her mismatched eyes seemed almost the same color. She looked a foot taller, with her open mouth showing her yellow and brown teeth. She was looking at Ruth, her head pointed down, but her eyes looking up. There was a long bruise on her forehead, and she opened her mouth to talk. Her voice was hoarse, and she failed to whisper. Skin pale and bloated, her evenly matched eyes shone dimly over the broken bottles. Her hands trembled, and she lifted her body in the dirt and sat down on them, shaking in the dark. If she could have spoken to her, she would have. She looked at her mother until she couldn’t anymore.

Ruth rose from the bottom of the pit. The pain shot through her body like a lightning bolt, her broken ribs howling and settling into a cold, dry gnawing. The blood trickled down her legs like dots of frozen rowanberries. She stepped around her mother’s unmoving legs and glimpsed at the moonlight. She raised her arms in the air and grabbed onto two flimsy roots in the soil. Ruth lifted herself from the pit. Her feet rested on two narrow rims of the wall. She felt her feet settle in place, shifting against the rocky edge. Then Ruth reached up and grabbed two pipes sticking out from the concrete and pulled her agonizing ribs further toward the light. She grasped her hands firmly around the tapered curves of the pipe, then bounced up, resting her feet at the rocky edge. Her hands gripped the pipe as she missed the edge of the tunnel. Falling back to the bottom, she lay there in semi-consciousness.

She opened her eyes as the darkness clouded and wisps of moonlight paled into the black, swarthy night. Ruth gripped the root, then pulled herself towards the two pipes, cutting her hands over the tapered curves. Her whole body sang with aching, but she kept breathing. She looked up and could see the edge of the stairs, the place on the earth where she disappeared into darkness. Ruth felt her foot slip, her grip loosen on the pipe as it cut through her hand. She reached for something to hold on to, and then, in the inky blackness, with the last wisps of the night behind her, a hand came down from above, and she looked up into a warm and smiling face. Ruth looked into her mother’s eyes as the hand lifted her through the pit and into the rising. The capillaries broke up in her pupils, the light withdrawing. She watched her image degrade in her mother’s wasted life. Then her breathing stopped. She was dead. She was dead, and that was It.

Mama, she thought. Those eyes are bright. That could have been my brightness. It could’ve been my miracle. They could have made me bright, Mama; my first word was “Mama.” It was my last word. My last word was “Mama.”