EARTHLIGHTS (4th place winner in the 2019 NOVUS ANNOS SHORT STORY CONTEST)

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 “Why can’t you two stop being criminals?” Midge sighed, scratched at a mosquito bite, and then patted Buck’s and Big Dog’s heads. They wagged their tails and smiled their doggy smiles over the evidence of their latest theft: a chunk of pottery, a bit of bone, and teeth. Human teeth.

They did it all the time, digging up and dragging home souvenirs from the Indian burial mounds along the Little-Big Econ River.

There was no real way to make them stop. Buck and Big Dog were just dogs, after all. They didn’t understand that when you dug up a grave it was like peeking through a neighbor’s bedroom window and seeing your best friend’s mom in a towel. Some stuff was supposed to stay all covered up. Midge always felt bad when the dogs brought home other people’s teeth and bones.

The only thing she could think to do about it was to take the bits of bone back to the river. She never could find the exact right spot where the dogs had dug up their treasures, but she tried hard to make a good job of it anyway and hoped the owners of the teeth didn’t mind too much that she reburied them in whatever burial mound she could find. She always said a few words, making sure it was something respectful and poetry pretty.

“You bad dogs come with me, and we’ll go for a walk to the river to do the right thing. Again.” Buck and Big Dog wagged their tails harder. They plopped their butts in the sand to wait for her.

The bones would go back to the river, but the pottery Midge kept. She always put the shards of clay in a pile in her sock drawer. Bones and teeth were one thing, but bits of busted up old dishes felt a lot less serious. Whenever she added another hunk of clay to the collection, she had to admire the crosshatch marks stamped on the side.

Someone, some long-dead somebody, had managed to take ordinary old mud and smash and bend and dry it into a bowl or a cup. Not only had they turned mud into something good, they had taken the time to try to make mud beautiful. Midge loved that about that long-dead somebody.

At the Little-Big Econ River, the dogs watched while she reburied their latest stolen treasure. After that, Midge wandered the river’s edge. The dogs sniffed and ran.

She enjoyed the way the river got lazy and low in the dry season. It seemed to be saying the ocean could wait.

Low water left the banks raw—carved and crumbling mud. Tree roots reached out for the water with tangled fingers. Midge climbed over exposed roots and navigated the deadfalls that piled up where the river turned in on itself. She kicked through sugar sand heaped up in snow-white dunes along the bank. Buck and Big Dog poked their noses into animal dens and gator holes.

The rustles and skittering hidden under the folds of heavy green drapery sounded like the magical chanting of some tiny, invisible world.

There was magic in this jungle, everyone knew it: globes of light that floated out of the steam and mist. Some called them spook lights. Others called them ghost lights, or said the lights were balls of lightning trapped in the muck. The science guys at the university called the lights swamp gas. Even that idea seemed touched with a kind of magic.

And everyone knew that the biggest magic hung around the Snow Hill Road River Bridge, where the river widened, deepened, and swelled. When they reached the bridge, Midge thought someone had left a pile of blankets in one of the rectangle boxes under the bridge. Nosy and whiny, Big Dog climbed up. He started sniffing the blankets.

“Come on down here you big, dumb dog. There’s nothing up there for you.” Midge climbed the incline under the bridge to grab Big Dog’s collar. He growled and worried at the edge of the blankets, pulling them free as she dragged him away.

That’s when the old woman sat straight up like a wasp warning off an intruder. Bam.

She was a gray-haired tumbleweed of a woman tucked up under the bridge, dressed in a red bathrobe with a rabbit’s foot hanging from the zipper pull. Midge could hardly breathe.

“Don’t tense yourself up, little girl. I can barely bite, now can I?” the old woman said, and then smiled a broken-toothed smile that might have been frightening but wasn’t.

Big Dog dropped the blanket and retreated to find Buck, and Midge was alone with the old woman.

The old woman’s eyes were the color of the river, the dark brown of tannic acid and the curve of dark mud. Midge saw the earth.

“Have you come for the stories?”

It was the best question anyone had ever asked Midge. There was a secret delight in even being asked such a question. Usually, grownups talked around Midge and never to her. Too small, too quiet, too ordinary looking, Midge understood that she was never going to be one of those most- likely-to sorts, the kind of kid that adults favored and petted and fussed over.

“Do you have stories to tell?”

“I have to tell stories. It’s the way of things when you spend your days under bridges for a living,” the woman said, smiling her worn-out smile. The woman’s grin made Midge think of stitches on the skin of a dried-out apple. It wasn’t beautiful, but it wasn’t scary either. There was nothing of harm in the woman’s face or in the promise of storytelling.

“I love to hear stories, anytime.”

“Yes, I can tell you would, and I love those slices of meat with the red bits made of pimento and green olives. I’ll take that in payment, so you won’t feel that you’re stealing from me, and I won’t feel robbed.”

“I’m not sure what kind of food that . . . Miss . . . what should I call you?”

“We’ll come to that, but we’ll leave some mysteries for later.”

***

And that’s how it happened, that Midge went home and asked her mother for pimento loaf so that she could hear stories strung out like the yarn in a loom.

She’d wait for her mother to run errands and leave Buck and Big Dog at home, so she didn’t have to keep a look out for dogs that liked to steal people’s teeth. It might hurt the feelings of an old woman with not many teeth of her own, and Midge didn’t want that.

Midge visited the woman on Wednesdays. She heard stories about conquistadors and Indian princesses, tales of pirates and secret treasure, stories about clouds made of mosquitoes—so many mosquitoes that they swarmed into the noses of cattle, suffocating them—and stories of the river, always the river.

The Snow Hill Road River Bridge crossed the Little-Big Econ at the place in the river where an island once sat. It had been an island made of graves, a Timacaun burial mound. When the bridge builders came, they knocked down the island of bones, letting all the molars and elbows inside tumble away from the Little-Big Econ all the way to the St. Johns. The bridge crossed the river. The river crossed the dead. And the old woman kept her stories tight underneath as the cattle trucks and SUVs rumbled over the concrete and steel above her head, making the cement vibrate and hum, shaking the spiders in their webs.

Then came a Wednesday when the old woman told Midge no stories.

“Help me, child. Help me,” the woman said, bending over her cement rectangle under the bridge.

Midge stood at the edge of the water, looking up at the old woman who searched through her blankets as she tossed tuna cans and worn-out pillows over her shoulder. It was a waterfall of trash coming down the incline, all those cans that rolled down to land at Midge’s feet.

“Hurry up now and help. Those science boys from that university will be coming to find out about lightning balls made of swamp gas, now that the mists have come back. All the science in the world and not a drop of dreams to swallow.”

Midge crab-scrambled up to the old woman’s nest. When she stood up, Midge could touch the underside of the road without stooping, and so could the woman. They were the same size.

Emptying the stone box, the woman snorted, “Those university boys think to figure out why the ghost lights live here. They won’t.” She pulled the last blanket free.

The stone box was full of a dozen mason jars.

“Were you sleeping on those? Wasn’t that hard for you to do?”

“Plenty of blankets. That’s the key. Remember, plenty of blankets.” She lifted a jar out and shoved it at Midge. The glass was dulled by dust and grime.

“Drink!” she commanded. “Start drinking, girl,” she said.

“What? Why? I don’t want to drink anything inside that jar. It’s so dirty.”

The old woman turned to Midge, searching for something in her face. Then she laughed. Taking the jar out of Midge’s hand, she grabbed the edge of the red bathrobe and scrubbed at the surface of the glass. Like a window in the grime, the clear spot glowed.

She handed the jar back to Midge. Inside was a swirly light, bouncing around the jar like a ball. Glitter, like flecks of Pixie dust, winked at her. It was beautiful and cheerful in a frantic kind of way.

“Don’t open it until you’re ready to drink, or the light will get away, child.”

“What is it?”

The woman paused, smacked her wrinkled lips, and then sighed. “I forget that not everyone knows what I know because I’m old.” She took the mason jar back and shook it like a snow globe. The ball of glitter went to pieces, filling the entire jar and then re-formed to become a bouncing ball again.

“It’s the stuff that the stories come from. And if the science boys find it, they’ll try to measure it, and weigh it, and make a chart out of it. Stupid waste of perfectly good dazzlement and fizzle.”

A truck rattled over their heads and the bridge echoed with hums. She held the jar up in front of Midge.  

“Drink it up, girl. But do it right or the light will get away like I said, and then we’ll be bothered with sightings and reports and folks seeing will o’ the wisps all over this river. Drink it up now.”

“But you do it. Why can’t you do it?”

“Too old. The story glitter will leak out of my worry lines and then where will we be? Telling you the stories was the last of me being their keeper.” She shoved the jar at Midge, insistent. Midge hesitated to take it.

“But how do you know the scientists are coming?”

“Child, just because I can’t bite when I chew doesn’t mean I can’t hear what’s in the wind.” The woman’s voice turned sugar soft. “You brought me the meat with green and red in it. You brought me what I asked for, and I knew that you would be the one I could count on. No one sees old women under bridges. No one. And less than no one brings pimento loaf when asked.” She smiled her warm, hollow smile, and rubbed her nose on her sleeve. “Were the stories good? Were they not full of what you wanted?”

Midge had to admit that she would have brought more than lunchmeat to hear the stories. She nodded and reached for the glass jar.

“Unscrew the lid, shake the light, and swallow it down fast . . .”

A dump truck banged past and the bridge vibrated with the weight of dirt roaring by. The mason jar slipped out of the woman’s knobby fingers and dropped between them. The jar broke open like a bag of marbles at their feet, scattering. The ball of bouncing light seemed stunned by its sudden freedom. It hovered—almost uncertain.

The old woman’s hands flew to her mouth, pressing against the emptiness. She moaned. Then the light darted up, hit the underside of the bridge, and shot straight down into the river. The spark of moving light torpedoed beneath the surface, headed up river just below the top of the water, and then it was out of the water and gone, into the slick, wet jungle.

“Oh no! And now they’ll come and bother me.” It was more a sob than actual words.

“I’m sorry. I should have grabbed it. I didn’t have it in my hand. It fell. It just fell.” Glass still tinkled against the cement as it settled and shifted.

The woman reached for another jar, handed it to Midge and said, “Drink!”

Using two hands, Midge unscrewed the metal ring, held the canning lid with her thumb, shook the glass, and then drank the glittering swirl straight down. She couldn’t help thinking that it tasted yellow and orange and like the underside of sunlight, except on the edges where it tasted like green scales and violet eyes.

“It’s so good,” she said, surprised. “I can taste the way the world sounds.”

Laughing now, the woman handed Midge the next jar and the next until they were all empty and Midge’s head was full of everything that stories might be made of and then some.

“And your name, I know it now.” It felt like tumbled moss in her head. “I should have guessed.”

With a finger that felt like a rabbit’s ear, the old woman tipped Midge’s head back and looked into her face.

“Don’t let the science boys tell you how the world should be or that earthlights are nothing but the swamp farting gas, because now you know.”

Together they rebuilt the woman’s nest of empty jars and musty blankets.

“Should I bring more pimento loaf when I come next time?” Midge asked. The woman patted Midge on the head, looked sad, and turned away.

***

The next Wednesday, professors from the University of Central Florida showed up to study the phenomenon of swamp gas.

Then the local news channel got the idea to do a human-interest story for Halloween about ghost lights and the scientists who try to study such things. The news trucks showed up with cables, strobes, and curious reporters looking for a story, any story.

They made no mention of a homeless woman living under the Snow Hill Road River Bridge, or of Buck and Big Dog who liked to dig up the long dead, or of a local girl who had the glitter of sounds and the color of stories tucked inside her head and thrumming through her bones.