Beetle Girl, Again

    At the lesser window, she props her chin against the sill. The old wood is prickly against her skin, and she fears splinters. She can feel the phantom shatters of cedar under her jaw. But a bend creeps up her chapped, changed lips anyway.
   The lilies are waking up, surprisingly hearty and waxy flowers, even as the rosy daisies falter and the Queen Anne’s Lace is robbed of its posture. She will press the petals soon and keep them forever. She will keep them in the cardboard, so that the beetles cannot eat them. They would devour them if they knew they existed. They would not rest, as they do now, in the closet.
    She almost thinks they have been drugged. They sleep that deep, unnatural sleep of coma patients and very, very old women. Their bodies move imperceptibly, but every once in a while, one stirs in its slumber and the girl sighs in a combination of relief and anger. They are alive, but far away from her.
     In the field outside, it is raining. The sun does not cast its maddening shadows, and does not spin the silhouettes. But she is in a state of accidental ignorance, and didn’t even notice, even as a figure moves through the skunk cabbage and sinks into the wet of the field. She does not notice as it approaches the house. She is at the lesser window, with her chin propped up against the sill.
      Earlier she sat, with her knees draw up to her sickly happy sternum, and traced the new footprints, which the beetles haven’t found yet, with her index and middle fingers. She sought them out in the planks of wood painted sage, and found them easily enough.
      The lights stray onto the porch now and the key turns in the ignition and the vehicle makes a high keening sound. The girl fights against her reflection in the glass, trying to see out, trying to make out details in the dark and the rain. But all she can see is the lights, and the light of a better day.