This country is no place for daughters. This country—my country—is a wild place, an untamable place, a place where I weed lies from our garden bed and sift half-truths from the baking flour. Here, I lock my trust in an iron vault and stack my disappointments alongside the wood in the shed. Here, people show only half their face; the other half chases me through the dark, rides the waves of my sleep like a shark.
I have been shivering, and not from the cold. Something is coming. Something is billowing across the sky, singing with a voice I sense more than hear. Like a dog whistle, it brings the wolves out to bay.
It has grown nearly impossible to feed myself or my daughter. The refrigerator is full, but the food has been poisoned. The apples are full of rot, the fish full of plastic. The well has run dry, and the water we buy at the store stains our tongues with the taste of mold and disease. We cannot drink it. Instead, we catch what rain we can in a barrel, and when the rain doesn’t come, we shoulder the thirst.
We cannot stay here. I fear what is coming. I tremble as it cascades from the sky like a waterfall, like a piece of silk unfurled and rustling. I spend too much time pretending I am not afraid, pretending for my daughter, who does not yet know what a country is, who has not yet pledged allegiance, who, just yesterday, climbed her first tree, and today announced, in a series of chirps, that she has learned to speak to birds. I tell her the dark is our friend. I convince her to love the night, because I know, when I take her away, it is the dark that will cover us, that will protect us. She smiles and tells me her bird friends will keep us safe.
I do not know where we will go, but the thought of staying is a knife that slices me open and spills my guts across the floor. There is a hollow in my stomach where once there was hope. I cannot tackle the mess in the kitchen; let the dishes pile, let the garbage rot. No one is eating dinner tonight, anyway. Our appetites were carried away by the wolves, who are baying at the thing in the sky we cannot see, but somehow know is there; we feel the weight of it approaching, the dread it kindles.
Soon, it will be too late to run. They will come, grab us up and lock us down. The thing in the sky, the thing seeping into our soil, hitching a ride on our airwaves, has convinced them we are dangerous, that we are witches, that we are monsters. There is a contagion of fear, a pandemic of rancor. They say this is the age of monster hunting, and we are the monsters: mothers and daughters, heroines and crones. The stench of us riles them. The sight of us sets them to howling.
Tomorrow I will pack our bags—mine and my daughter’s. With her books and her crayons and her tatty stuffed rabbit, we will set out. We will sneak across the border, wend across mountains and deserts. We will keep moving. I will tell my daughter there is still some small corner of earth where food tastes like food and the water has not been tainted by violence or ruin. She will believe me, whether or not it is true.
My daughter does not know how to swim, although she will tell you she does. She will tell you she wants to be a scientist and a ballerina, that the trees are the most important part of our city, because without them we could not breathe. She will say the world can be saved. I do not tell her she is wrong. I tell her to pack.
This country does not deserve her, this child who dresses for kindergarten-picture-day as though it is 1987 and she is going to prom, who gives her love to bullies and thieves because, she explains, someone has to teach them kindness. You cannot have her. I will not let you strip her down and put her in the kitchen. If she goes barefoot, it will be because she enjoys the squish of mud between her toes after the rain, not because you have stolen her shoes. I cannot abide a place that denies a child her shoes. I cannot fathom a place that denies a child her mother’s hand.
The days are growing shorter, folding themselves in upon each other. Soon, the sunlight will be origamied behind the moon; soon, there will be nothing but darkness, a darkness we will use to bury our footprints, a darkness we will use as a passage—a tunnel—through which we can run. And on the other side? My hope has been spilt across the kitchen floor and eaten by wolves; I harbor no fantasies. On the other side of this darkness will be more darkness, but we will keep walking. And when my daughter grows tired—her legs are short and her stamina is only five years-old—I will carry her. I will crawl through the mud and fight off the leeches, as I have spent my life doing, the same arm over arm drag used by all women to get ahead, to get anywhere—we women know the particular way you must crane your neck up for air, how you must gasp before plunging, again, into the mire. These are the things I will do so she does not have to. These things, I will not let her learn. I will carry her through the dark to solid ground. I will hold her hand. She is under my protection, and you cannot have her.
Sarah Twombly's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Atticus Review, among others. She has received the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Glascock Prize in Poetry, the Katherine McFarland Prize for fiction, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives in the woods of Maine with her wild family and very tame dog. You can find her on Twitter @sarahtwombly.
Photo by Sourav Mishra from Pexels