Heavens

"Heavens!"  Mary Anne was stymied.

"Is there more than one?"  Ashley's tone was the half-way point between sarcasm and curiosity.  The static of the contradiction was good cover.  Perhaps the fog was generated by the friction itself.

What Ashley's mother chose to hear as honest incredulity was--I think she knew--only her youngest child's hostilities masquerading as boredom. Both smiled without conviction, the way they had last winter in matching sweaters for the family Christmas card.  It was Ashley's (just) frustration bubbling up, gas from the miasma.  She was a pretty girl, taller than her mother now, and she was finding her voice.  But Mary Ann, having raised children since she was Ashley's age was, undeniably, at the end of the unraveling, proverbial rope.

What made Mary Ann crazy was the pressure, the claustrophobia of movement and action, of action and silence.  She straddled the fault.  She felt the tear.  Cracks had been made in the a skittering fit, a map that might (finally) explain some purpose.  

Years before, dragged by the same college crush into the dense center of these unruly giant ferns, Mary Ann had experienced something for the first time:  she had recognized the dissonance that follows passion, the embarrassed adrenaline of dressing, the bizarre transition from a sexual act back into the public, that self-consciousness.