Prosis

“When we were seventeen—the night of the summer festival—you remember how we snuck into the old mill?”

Celeste would come again. They would sit at the pine table. They would not speak of the mill, or the fire, or the lantern. They would speak of the rain, the river, the deer in the circling forest. prosis

Then she set it down and walked back inside. “When we were seventeen—the night of the summer

“I pushed a lantern off the hook. Not at you. Just to break something. But the hay caught. The whole mill went up. And you—you almost died. The smoke. They said it was a miracle you woke up.” They would speak of the rain, the river,

Celeste wept. Not the tidy weeping of confession, but the ugly, body-shaking sobs of a person finally setting down a stone they had carried so long it had grown roots into their spine.

“I need to speak,” Celeste said. “Not write. Speak.”