The Elementals by Saundra Mitchell

“With the bugs, it was nothing. A blink. The birds, a moment, and that was awful enough. Then I found you dead in the yard, guarded by a dog we’d buried that morning.”
    Outwardly, Zora was steady. She was always steady: broken bones and accidents in the field, a fire in the feed house, the creek flooding the back forty—steady. Whatever the disaster, she stared at it, decided how to conquer it, and briskly went about the business of doing so.
    She told this particular story the same way. It was over and done with now. At the time, she’d clutched Julian to her chest and, with bared teeth, dared anyone to take his body from her. The half-moon bruises she’d left on his arms took weeks to fade.
    “You woke up when the funeral director knocked on the door. And after that, we kept you very close. Kept the yard clean as we could, and yes, we hoped you’d forget entirely.”
    Julian cranked again when Zora nudged him. “I didn’t.”
    “We still had to try to protect you from yourself.”
    There was a darkness to his quiet, something beyond contemplation. His shoulders hardened. Still, he kept his voice low, as if he were ashamed to talk back to her. “You’re only afraid because you don’t understand.”
    “Oh, do you think?”
    Stubborn, Julian muttered, “I know.”
    Picking up a measured cup of water, Zora said, “Look at me.” When he did, Zora threw the water into the air.
    Before Julian could dodge, the water exploded into thousands of individual beads. They swirled around him, crystalline and catching the light from outside. Hands folded, Zora admired the rainbows that flickered across Julian’s dumbstruck face.
    Water came so much more easily these days. Sometimes at night, she dreamt of slipping into it. She liked it when Emerson sat by the aluminum tub, because every so often, she thought if she were left alone in the water, she might melt into it. Disappear into it.
    Only once, last winter, she admitted that. And in reply, Emerson said, “There’s times when I think the earth wants me back.” Zora remembered it as clearly as she did Julian’s half-moon bruises, as clearly as the silver streams running beneath the prairies.
    Silent, she turned her head ever so slightly, and the water exploded again. Beads became mist, a swirl of fog that hung improbably over the table.
    Meeting her son’s eyes, Zora raised her brows and watched him. The fog swirled. Like a raincloud, it grew denser. Then, abruptly, it spun, a hurricane summoned, a delicate typhoon.
    Glittering flecks of water clung to their hair like a liquid veil. The kitchen cooled; it tasted clean, like an afternoon after rain. Zora again raised the measuring cup, and the storm drained into it.
    “I understand so much more than you can imagine, Julian Thomas.”
    Wonderstruck, Julian stared at the measure as his mother put it on the table. It was half-full now, the rest of its contents still misting his skin, his hair. Unsteady in spite of his crutches, he found it took more than a moment to compose his thoughts.
    “I got it from you? Why didn’t you tell me?” Scrubbing his face dry with his sleeve, he bobbled. “What else are you keeping from me?”
    Weary, Zora brushed him aside to work the grinder herself. She still tasted the water in the air; it called from the pump and the spring and the stream. It called from everywhere, whispering sweetly, trying to entrance. Focusing on the work in front of her, Zora fed the grinder with one hand and cranked with the other.
    “Nature demands a balance. It won’t let you disturb the proper course of the world.”
    Now frustrated, Julian asked, “What does that mean?”
    “You don’t create life, duck.” Zora leveled her cool blue gaze at him. “You
trade
it.”
    And then, while Julian’s mouth still hung agape, Zora went back to making sausages. Dinner couldn’t wait for dramatics or confessions. Once he recovered, she told him about the water that flowed through her and the earth that