Midnight in Newbury
Midnight in Newbury is wet pavement and hungry coyotes and tired oak trees. It’s black houses with tucked-in children, waxed SUVs parked in driveways, persnickety landscapes of rose bushes and palm trees and fleshy succulents. There’s one main street that runs straight through, a spine of asphalt that leads to the beach or inland to the mountains, a stretch of road as quiet as the milky way at midnight.
To the right is the hospital your big sister stayed in for two months, her body straddling two kingdoms, eyes closed like a dreaming newborn, face swollen like a pugilist. At the stoplight on the way to her, your brother met your eyes, the same shade as yours, as hers, heartache and grief flooding the car. You both already knew how bad it was, the police saying she wasn’t going to make it, the doctors cataloging her swelling brain and snapped jaw and mosaic tongue; the witness who saw her body launch into the sky, her beautiful face with the perfect brows, a shooting star on the asphalt. The hospital looms on the side of the road and you feel dejected. It’s where your big sister got her broken jaw and inhaled teeth and shredded skin reconstructed, where she learned to walk again, to bite into a crisp apple, to hold her own head up.
To the left is the mall. It looks strange at midnight. This is where she once told you to go pick out anything you wanted, where she talked her way out of getting arrested while you waited in the hallway, where you got your first ear piercing. The mall held your youth, your chats about crushes and grades and accessories, its smells of Hot Dog on a Stick and Yankee Candles, rust-colored carpets with trails of chewed gum, teens aimlessly orbiting with their beepers and belly rings.
When you drive down there now, at midnight, you turn up the volume, roll down the windows, and starburst on the road.
About the Author
Christina Berke is a Chilean-American writer and educator. She's been supported by Hedgebrook (where she was the inaugural Carol Shields Prize Foundation Residency Fellow), Tin House, VONA, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Juniper, Storyknife, Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale. Her work is in The Sun, Khora, Teen Vogue, Edible, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. She is working on Well, Body, an excerpt of which was Longlisted with Disquiet Literary International and the Miami Emerging Writers Contest, and shortlisted with Fractured Lit.
Illustration by Jane Demarest.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
