The River
The girl was certain the kerosene heater—glowing atop the brown shag carpet in the center of their single-wide trailer like a fiery bird caged in waiting, talons click-clicking, warming her home while they slept—would thrust its licks of flames between the wire grill and consume the flimsy wood-paneled walls and maim her little brother’s plastic dinosaurs and ravage her crayoned drawings taped to the bedroom wall and devour the leather belt her father wielded to enforce her obedience and set brilliantly ablaze the white daisy-printed curtains her mother sewed that swayed in sorrowful defeat like flags of surrender and feed off the half-empty bottles of alcohol like little bombs and seek out the sleeping bodies tucked beneath blankets, flesh roasting
like rotisserie chickens.
By day, she sprinkled into the river alfalfa blossoms and quail feathers and hollow flutes of cattails and tiny shells and smooth skipping stones—offerings to protect her family—chanting incantations of please please please. At night, she could feel the wildness rustling inside her and laid awake in bed, eyes clamped shut, tracing the path to the Rio Grande in her mind, winding past the horses and through the fields, her legs tense, muscles taut and ready to flee to the nearby riverbank below the towering cottonwoods if she should hear the crackle of fire breaking free of its cage, praying to a god she didn’t believe in and to a river she did: if only one of them could survive, let it be her little brother; if she couldn’t make it to the river with him, let the smoke gently fill her lungs like water before the flames find her skin, and let her ashes float down into the placid river, luminous white-gray flecks of a small universe, extinguished.
Agency
Hunting, but do it with a child. A ten-year-old girl. Put a gun in her hand. Teach her how to take aim. How to strum her small finger around that trigger like it’s a musical instrument eager to be played. Order her to be quiet, patient, alert. Fear ripples around you. Not yours, obviously. You are afraid of nothing. Smell the pines, musky and bright. Watch the birches shiver as you scan the landscape for movement. So peaceful. As you crouch with the girl in the tall grass, point out the dove. Order her to remain still. Doves have sharp vision. Tell her to stop crying. When she doesn’t, remind her what will happen if she persists. She will stop. She understands the stakes now, your hand gripping tight the bony flesh of her upper arm, so slight you could snap it in half. Tomorrow there will be bruises, dark stains of defiance. The wind whips her tears away, those pathetic saline streaks. But it makes her aim falter. Grip her arm harder, and don’t let go this time. She needs that guidance. Feel her muscles quake beneath your fingers. Make sure her arm steadies. A son wouldn’t flinch. The shotgun gleams magnificently in the thin autumn sunlight. And what a sight. The dark metal trained on that white dove. She knows she cannot go home without it. As it stirs to lift off, you hiss, Now, and wait for the bullet to sing through the air.
Crickets
In retrospect, it was unkind to title the subject line of her email to him “Dispatches.” She didn’t really think she’d hear back from him. And she didn’t.
Crickets.
What a strange turn of phrase, using crickets to signify silence or the absence of communication or some metaphoric void, because crickets are distinctly sonorous—lilting orchestral instruments disguised as insects, their music replete with meaning.
When she wrote to him, “I don’t love you anymore,” she meant, “I love you so much my bones ache but your love is inadequate and I can’t accept that disparity.” And when she wrote, “I don’t think I can make you happy,” she meant, “I can’t compete with simulated dopamine.” And when she wrote, “Our incompatibilities are irreconcilable,” she meant, “I can’t watch you destroy yourself anymore.” But when she wrote, “I never want to see you again,” she didn’t mean, “I want you to overdose from heroin alone on your kitchen floor.”
She heard the news while she sat on her front stoop, knees pulled close to her chest, cellphone clinging to her ear like a leech until it dropped to the ground next to her, unlatched from its host. The air around her felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out and replaced with thick wool, impenetrable, leaving her gasping for breath while the cacophonous broil of traffic disassembled around her.
And somewhere in the distance: the piercing trill of crickets, a death knell.
Jessie Carver is a writer and editor who lives in Portland, Oregon, but grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her fiction and poems have appeared in publications that include Hobart, Entropy, Barren Magazine, Watershed Review, and the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems, and she co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. She tweets at @Jessie__Paige
Instagram: @jessie_paige Facebook: facebook.com/jessie.paige.carver
Photo by Sindre Strøm from Pexels