I hated everything that year we lived in the valley. The small house with moss-covered shingles, the way the mice scurried beneath the floorboards at night, and the way the rain fell in sheets every time we put clothes on the line, such that my memories always include damp jeans.
Mornings, I’d wake to the slender reed of our baby’s cry—bare feet, cold oak. Her face, a carnation’s red, when I cradled her like a football in the crook of my right arm. Match lit sky. A row of silent conifers and loud crows watching from the boughs. While she cried, I cooed; the wind tunneled through trees, ruffled patches of dark water, and I yearned for sleep.
Before we left the city, I decided, as everyone seems to, that I’d be a writer. But language abandoned me in that valley. I collected hours and hours without finding an original thought, as though they were fireflies, flame-less. Time was desperate there, wiping fleshy bottoms, listening in pitch dark for breath.
I hear you from the porch stirring through the currents of the morning. Outside, blue sheet of sky, clouds like patterns. And I knew that I should walk up behind you, wrap my arms around your waist, show you the child’s peach of cheek. But I’m on the porch, watching cloud shadows sift the terrain. And you’re alone, puzzling the day.
I thought that time was passing me by. Time, which I always measure, clocks, phones, accomplishments, failures, doctor’s appointments, hours, days, years. The crows drift down; bathe in the puddle, wings ablur. And you’re still folding loneliness into sheets. I thought that there was something beyond pink penny shaped toes, jets of urine, something beyond the wind, ants fracturing the soil.
Years later, a cold February day, dark bruise of sky, traffic whirring below; it is as though a window has opened in my soul. I see that everything in that valley carried with it, not the tinge of loss, but the possibility of another warm day—the child asleep, you rocking next to me, as we harvested the last of the light and carried it with us to bed, bodies radiant, in the dark.
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away from You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and the forthcoming essay collection, The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. He is currently the Visiting Writer at American University.
Image: flickr.com
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Heavy Feather Review 