XVII.
There is news along the Ohio river: a young man has tied his loosening jeans up with twine and huddles into his denim jacket, a bird peeking out of a nest, but the fabric may as well be a brittle photograph wet and dried a hundred times before he taped it over the crack in the rear window of the sedan where he dwells. He calls out to the gods for proficiency enough at survival but his prayers don’t count, he knows, not when his dad’s a good Christian who votes for good Christian men who walk around unconcealed, brown silt loam fertile and sanctimonious. His eyes look wet when he asks if you’d like some company, slurs beautiful and body into a rhythm like Sanskrit and the Empress card flashes an image of sherpa and steaming broth where his mama combs the mats from his hair but all you can muster is that’s sweet, love, but I’m married and you are even if he lives five-hundred miles south, even if he had the same mind-altered gait not so long ago, even if you want to tell them both things have a way, things have a way, we’ll be okay, but you know how easily comfort slides from our hands.
XXI.
There is news along the Ohio river: he comes to visit and asks about her anger, how it’s doing, like her shadow’s learned to breathe. She tells him it’s still there but maybe not quite as bad with some distance, wonders if he has any idea how difficult it was to keep him alive. She shows him the Big Four, buys them cappuccinos from a shop that hosts Dungeon & Dragons tournaments. She used to be the master sometimes, she confesses, but not on the real game, on the version she and her elder sibling played out in the yard when their mama was at work and they looked after each other on sick days, teacher work days, most of summer. She has never recovered from that period, not really, and the old anger mixed with the new has driven her to drink, walk, weep, on repeat like some tragic Victorian protagonist not yet sure she can untangle it all. He misses her more when he’s packing his things. She shimmies and sings to seventies rock in the kitchen where the dogs join in with their dinosaurs and the pot’s about to boil over. She sends her husband postcards, still trying to add brightness to his fractured days. She does not tell him about the divers who go deep into the river or how they recently found tennis shoes tied to a cinder-block a few feet off shore.
XXVIII.
There is news along the Ohio River: you speak to mother for the first time in months. Early January and she warns of danger, tells you to stay off the streets. Stolen elections and scamdemics. To stock your nine hundred square feet with dry goods and water. Dry goods and ammunition though you have no gun. You rub your ragged jaw, your body keeping the score, holding neglect and rage there so much it has begun to crumble as you search for words to unknot the tangles from a mind you once respected.
XXIX.
There is news along the Ohio River: a woman crosses the Big Four today in ice maiden boots, dreaming of the break of pine trees in an ice storm back home, the way she can breathe in the same smell her people way back smelled when they had to hunt and skin and build fires for cast iron pots—she feels these women in the ache of her right hip, where repressed sadness goes to hide, a spot no one’s kissed since the worm moon years ago. She slides in spite of thick rubber traction, but the bridge is open so she walks on. All of yesterday’s footprints have formed memories, slick, ephemeral joy occasions, snow day occasions, in a path around a frozen field mouse whose pulse there’s no use in checking, but since no one’s looking, she leans down and speaks her sore heart.
Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), Winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize and short-listed for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. Born and raised near Charlotte, she and her house full of critters now call the Charleston-metro area home. She also lives with c-PTSD and is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.
Image: usatoday.com
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Heavy Feather Review 