Who hasn’t walked through a life of small tragedies? ‘Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.
Everyone else has gone away. And now coming back home isn’t really coming back home at all.
A front porch swing thirsty for oil.
But damn, am I hella tired, Iris. Hella tired.
The Hocking River moves like a flowing arm away from the Ohio River runs through towns as though it’s chasing its own freedom, the same way the Ohio runs north from Virginia until it’s safely away from the South.
Finally sixteen and the moment like a hand holding me out to the world.
But she didn’t believe in God. Or Jesus. Or Satan. Or prayer. I believe in words, she said. I believe in numbers and all the history I understand. I believe in things I can see. When he was a little boy she used to hug him and say, And man-oh-man how I believe in you, Aubrey. My love. My light. My life.
When my mother comes home from the hospital with me, my older brother takes one look inside the pink blanket, says, Take her back. We already have one of those. Already.
Even when my girls were little, we’d go down there, my grandmother tells us. And people’d be marching. The marching didn’t just start yesterday. Police with those dogs, scared everybody near to death. Just once I let my girls march.
Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn’t one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.
As the orchestra lifted into “Darling Nikki,” I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this – to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.
But what is the father of the child supposed to do with his hands? His big open hands. Where were they supposed to go when all they wanted was to reach out for this child hug her, hide her from the world?
When you have so much real drama in your life, it’s hard to think about fiction.
They had always been soft-spoken. Because they had always been afraid.
But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty.
Would the tragic comedy of memory ever stop replaying?
Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you’re standing outside your life.
You the first in your tribe to go to college? Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.
So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken?
Maybe this was love – wanting someone with all the senses.