1.

She was dead before I met her so I’m not sure how much of our meeting I should believe. I was at the deli counter at Kroger when she found me, far away at the crossroads of Main and Court streets in Luray, Virginia, at what used to be the second stoplight in town. She introduced herself as Rosebud (which should have been my first clue), and she winked as she said, but you can call me Rosie, and I knew right then and there that I’d believe anything she had to say.

We talked for a minute about the stoplight and how they’d probably have to take it down. It’s causing too many wrecks, she offered, and I responded with, Yes, for a lazy little town in the mountains, people sure do like to drive fast. After throwing me a smirk, she said I only said that because it sounded like the grownup thing to say, and she was right. I often found myself saying those sorts of things. She never said so, but I could see she understood—how being from a small town could make you feel inadequate. How using big words helped to make up for it. Like the Ferris wheel that came into town every year for the Page County Agricultural and Industrial Fair. I used to think if I got stuck at the top, where you could see the mountain crest, then maybe I’d have a chance of getting out of the valley. But as soon as I mentioned the fair, she wanted to know if I ate the cotton candy and what color it was. She had dreamed of having a candied apple.

Besides the candy though, she thought fairs were sad and full of sad people, like yard sales, and wanted to know if I had ever been to one. I told her about the one I went to on Moyer Avenue, and she seemed very interested in the small details. Why I would buy a stuffed animal that belonged to somebody else. Why the dog had blue fur. Why it cost a nickel and not a dime. How I steered my bike with it sitting on the handlebars. For every answer, she had two more questions so we carried on like that for some time. Besides, the light never changed colors anyway, so we just stood waiting, and I loved hearing her voice, my southern accent echoing in hers.

She didn’t understand how complicated everything was, how people can’t let go, how very complicated everything was. She had already begun to wither, so I didn’t tell her about the yard sale my parents had the year they lost our house. How I came home from college to find my memories spread out on the lawn for our neighbors to look at, criticize, and comment on. The plastic, polka dotted mugs my mom used for hot cocoa, they were on the front table, tagged for a quarter. And I overheard a lady saying she had that exact same set. I guess they were common, but I was hoping for just one person to say how truly extraordinary they were, how this family must have drunk a thousand stories in those mugs, how no one would ever know the small hands that gripped those mugs. But no one said any of that. They just said they were rather common (one in four women have them) and, at the end of the day, they still sat waiting on the front table, tagged for a quarter.

She started skipping toward Bo’s Belly Barn and shouted, Dare you to skip after me, and I had to look over my shoulder before I even considered. Another grownup impulse. I was asking her, who skips anymore, when I realized I was in the impossible predicament—disappoint her or embarrass myself and though I chose the latter, I couldn’t help but to release a giggle as I began. Winded shortly after, I yelled to her saying when did skipping become so difficult? She said nothing. She was too far-gone already.

I gave up on skipping and noticed that the worn-out sights of my hometown no longer seemed familiar. The common blemish of chipped paint snuck out from the once proud facades of the Main Street buildings—the H & H Five and Ten Store, once swelling with Sunday shoppers now sat as an empty tomb of what used to be.

Rosie was lost in the glare of the asphalt, and I started running, trying to yell out her name, but there was only silence.

2.

She was mostly dead, she said, when I confronted her, but not all the way dead so that’s why it didn’t count. She stuck out her tongue and laughed and thought herself quite clever for having said it. I laughed despite myself, even though I knew she was ridiculous. Too perfect, it would seem—soft curls whipping the ends of her ponytails, pink bows frayed from a day of play, tan cords bruised with the dust of a playground, a whisper of a waist, pale cheeks punctuated by two gray eyes that at once captivated and revealed too little of anything.

She snorted when she saw my butt jiggle from skipping and said it was the funniest thing she had ever seen. She wanted to know if she’d have a big butt too someday and if so would it jiggle. And if it did could we make up songs about it. She made me laugh, too, like a child, and I loved saying her name over and over Rosebud, Rosebud. Rosie.

I confronted her up at the gravel pit—the old rock quarry down in Ida, past my granddaddy’s house in Stony Man. Rosie asked why it was called Stony Man, so I pointed up at the skyline so she could see that big sleeping man resting atop the Blue Ridge. Her eyes swelled and a wow escaped her lips when she finally made sense of it. My daddy and I used to shoot his rifles at the gravel pit after he’d have too much to drink. He’d say, “Drive me up to the pit,” and I’d take on his old Jeep like a wild horse, past the row of used Fords full of young lovers, to the range where you could shoot empty beer bottles tossed down to the bottom. Apparently, I was a good shot for a kid, and I wanted to show Rosie. I wanted to drive her into every hollow, to share my life with her, so that I could say this is where I bruised my left shoulder, where I went after prom with Smokey, where I cried for what was lost. This is where I was little. But I’m not little; I’m dead, she said, well, mostly dead so it doesn’t count. And I would come to find later that she was right. It didn’t count.

3.

She drank soda from the can with such swagger that even the sales clerk mistook it for flirting. Her hair was longer now. A little less cutesy, but still pretty despite her neglect. I took her to Imagination Station, a wooden playground, hiding on the outskirts of town behind the old elementary school. We weren’t there long before she screamed out in pain. After having a look, I diagnosed her with having a splinter. She wanted to know how something so small, so invisible, could hurt so much. I told her we needed to get it out, but she refused and ran away. She didn’t understand how the tissue would become infected. She just kept running, and she threatened never to return. So then I cried, too.

4.

I thought she drove her Mustang too fast, but she reminded me that it didn’t matter, you know with being dead and all. She had a point, so we went cruising past the speed limit to the top of Old Rag. We hiked a short space, and I fanned out the quilt Nanny made me for my fourteenth birthday. I remember hating it, the tiny flowers pinned down on the purple matting served as proof that no one saw me growing up. Rosebud, of course loved it. (She was back to being Rosebud. Rosie’s a child’s name, she said with real conviction.) She didn’t see the irony. She thought they were tiny roses, but I’m sure they weren’t real flowers at all. They were those silly little yellow flowers that everyone draws. Fake flowers. Not rosebuds at all.

She had bored of I Spy, and I wanted desperately to make her happy, to show her something worthwhile. I left her there, just for a moment, just long enough to stumble upon a nest of robin’s eggs. They were beautiful. Tiny and perfect, alluring in their delicate way. I gathered them carefully to show Rosebud, folding each one into my blouse. I showed them to her while her eyes filled with tears. What’s wrong? I asked, and she explained that because I had touched the eggs, the mother robin would most likely abandon them. That’s right. My touch had tainted them. How had I forgotten that? I could see how badly I had hurt her. We both had tears in our eyes, and I looked at her and said, I’m sorry, and she said that sometimes saying sorry just wasn’t enough.

5.

Someone said they saw me talking to myself at Kroger. But I wasn’t talking at all. I was singing a song Rosebud taught me. By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. She had stolen the words from Shakespeare’s Rosalind, who also said ’tis such fools as you that makes the world full of ill-favored children. I’m not sure why some things stick and others don’t. It doesn’t make sense to me. I told that to Rosebud once, and she said I was singing the song of the undead. She said that the song was full of unsaid words for all of them who were undead.

She said it made people too sad which is why no one said them, even though that’s all they really wanted to hear. Things like it’s not fair. That it shouldn’t have happened. That you’ll never recover. That time doesn’t heal this wound. That each year you mourn birthdays that never come. Words that never come. That there’s no excuse or time or place for grief because you can’t grieve the undead. You can’t grieve a life unlived, even though you had it all planned out, even though you had lived it a million times over in your dreams. Even though it was hope itself.

6.

It took six weeks to miscarry Rosebud. She had me skipping down Main Street, and then – like that – she disappeared. I was heating spinach in the microwave when I saw her skating on a small patch of ice. She was going round and round with the steam from the spinach and once it cooled she dissolved all together. And then we were at Kroger, at the deli counter ordering turkey and cheese when I said goodbye and she winked and whistled a tune I couldn’t really hear because the woman behind the counter was waving her gloved hand, saying, “Ma’am. Ma’am? Are you okay, Ma’am?”

-Amy Azano

Dr. Amy Azano is an Associate Professor of Adolescent Literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech.