I remember: I had been crouched on the felled tree for a long unfettered second now. The bark had begun to press a reminder of itself into the back of my thighs, and stinging scrapes and scratches from the climb had lessened in their song. The oak had been struck by the storm, whether by wind or lightning I was unsure of. All I knew were lined across the perpendicular branches like a breathe in a pair of lungs.
The green canvas satchel propped against the nook of wood, filled with erasers and charcoal pencils, sharpeners, colored lines of string, a plastic notebook and a handmade wooden handled knife tipped in bronze; made by him.
He was the storm, crackling in the air like a dragon drawing its last breath. I had prayed, written in the notebook asking God to heal the splintering bits of my home. It would not happen. Not the way I foresaw it.
I noticed it was time for my retreat.
I scooped up my knowledge into the satchel and hooked it around my neck, standing up haphazardly, wanting badly to be a tree elf, like in the fantasy books I unrelentingly swallowed up, to have the limb walking skill imprinted in my bones like marrow. But I was an eleven year old girl in glasses and a skull tshirt, with a knack for knowing when Mom needed me back inside the farmhouse.
I remember: A consuming, a starving child staring at a sticky frosted red velvet cake three times the size of her head like it had been delivered in the relief of an angel choir. Three, thick, avarice slices of that cake cut with a likeness of the taste of cold spring water on a bleached-bone dry day.
I read her birthday card. They always come with that yellowed memory of the first time you held a cotton flower. She'd taken some from the field by the house. And that memory when she took off the top of her hair and began brushing it. You only learned it was a dream when you asked your mom where Gramma kept her wig.
She sends a card every year. Those dollar store ones with the checks for twenty dollars slipped like a knife between the crevice. Recently, past three years or so, she has begun writing you your own letters to go with the card. Granpaps name was on a few, always in her handwriting, but this year, it was just hers. She wished you'd live closer so she could make you a huge red velvet cake.
Just like she did for your birthday one year...were you four? Your grandmother told you not to eat too much or it would make your tummy hurt. You took it as a challenge. She said you came up to her with a red mouth and told her you thought you'd done it. Three gorgon pieces, all twice the size of your stomach...
when you read that letter, all you could see was your grandma sitting on the porch of that damn house by herself, your grandpa in the den watching television as his eyes sunk into his skull, mad as hellfire he wasn't back in the country nailing sheet metal to pecan trees.
You cried, so hard, that snot ran down your face and your tears blurred the ink. You hadn't even been able to get past the first two sentences.
I remember: Him. the chicken coop in the backyard. You. a nest full of eggs, a basket to collect them, a six-year-old understanding of life and birth and death and mistakes. Him. it was dark, sunset like a badly blended crayon drawing, and he had a shotgun and cowboy boots with spurs. He shot the chickens like they were target practice. Mom screaming and crying and begging him to stop. Him putting her behind the screen door and locking it shut.
Continuing with the slaughter. Man on a mission. He broke the backs of them, curving their glittering cobalt and scarlet feathered bodies like one molds clay. He stuck their limp heads and feet in the earth, next to the monkey grass, lining the garden with their corpses like they were some organic kind of brick scalloping. And all the while the sun burned like an omen, pink and orange splashed across in the sky like a Jackson Pollock.
You crinkled with the daybreak and looked at the gardens in a sweat like dew. The chickens in their coop as safe as shade. You walked around for twelve years wondering why Mom didn't mention the chicken genocide. It was a dream, darling, nothing more than a dream... and a fundamental understanding of danger. You were too young to know.
As you grew, childhood grew, plump as the figs on the tree in the backyard. Childhood was plucked from the stems and bled white thick sap. Innocence withered on the window sill like an anxiety attack. And you were caught in the undertow like a grain of sand. Forgive me for hating you.
I didn't know any better either.
