Two excerpts from a new book by Sonia Gutiérrez ~ Dreaming With Mariposas ~ FlowerSong Press, 2020

Cover art by Jorge Garza “Quetza”

The Story of the First Year 

In our backyard on a Sunday afternoon, finches flew from tree to tree as Tía Alicia and Amá sat surrounded by Spanish moss hanging from our apricot tree’s branches. With her sharpest knife, Amá cleaned the nopales, removing the espinas with ease. The thorns fell on the newspaper she had placed on the grass. Underneath the tree’s shade with her hands resting on her lap with a calmness that comes with age, Tía Alicia sang and shared her stories.

The Martínez Castillo had a way of telling stories. While we were growing up when she visited us, Tía Alicia’s stories had always made us giggle and sometimes even cry. The story Dad’s sister told us this time—she made it very clear—was about Paloma and my future. Taking a blade of grass to her mouth and in deep thought, Tía Alicia began the story of the first year. From where we sat on the grass, we stared at her large brown eyes and listened attentively as her eyes became wishing wells for her two young nieces.

“Paloma and Sofia, mis hijas, blood of my blood, my mother never warned me about marriage. Instead, your Abuela Chucha told me to carry my cross after my first beating. I can assure you the first year together will be the most important year of your lives since it will mark your destiny. I’m telling you this because I don’t want the same thing that happened to me to happen to either of you.

The first year—if you wash all the dirty dishes day in day out—you will always wash them. Always. The first year, even if you fall ill, you will wash piles and piles of clothes. For the rest of your lives, you will never get a thank you for a single drop of sweat. Believe me, at first, he will be very angry, but with time, he will learn to wash for himself, because like any human being, he will need clean clothes. Let’s say one day he washes your clothes and ruins your favorite blouse—don’t complain. Say thank you, and teach him what his mother and father never taught him. If one day he decides to cook for you and the food isn’t good, don’t complain. Say encouraging words and teach him. Praise him. Tell him his cooking could use more spices or this or that the next time. One day, when you are no longer in his life, he will be grateful for making him the well-rounded man he became. Queridas sobrinas, Paloma and Sofia, learn to live a happy life—do not sacrifice your own happiness for a man. Both of you are still young. Let my story teach you both a lesson. These are the humble words I leave you with. Take my words, and remember them when the time comes. Do what you must do because in the end everything will be okay.”

After the story of the first year, Mother looked at her sister-in-law and thanked her with a smile, and I wondered if Tía Alicia was going to die or if there was something I didn’t know. Why had Tía Alicia told us this story? Tía Alicia and Amá stood up, straightened their long-ruffled skirts. They went inside to check up on the pot of beans, cook rice, and dice onions, tomatoes, and cut cilantro for the nopalitos we would be eating for dinner. Meanwhile, the men in our family sat and drank on tree trunks, played guitar, and sang while they collected empty Budweiser cans under the eucalyptus trees’ shade. Next to the thick large Canary palm, Dad prepared the grill for a carne asada.

“Paloma, did Mom tell you something I don’t know?”

“No, Sofía. Why do you ask?”

“I just thought it was strange to hear Tía Alicia warn us about marriage as if she could foretell the future.”

Paloma and I lay on the grass in silence thinking about Tía Alicia’s words and our future with our hands behind our heads looking up through the guayaba tree’s branches at a washed-out blue sky with passing white nebulous clouds trailing behind and our homework due Monday morning.

Renegades

We were back in Vista—this time on

the northside in the outskirts of the city by the nurseries. At her front door, Doña Paula, wearing a purple checkered apron, waited for us. By her feet, a little spotted dog wagged her tail and jumped up and down.

“Pásenle, muchachas. My niece called to tell me you were on your way. I was beginning to worry.”

“Doña Paula, we’re so sorry we’re keeping you up this late—” Paloma apologized as her voice withered.

“Don’t worry, muchachas. What matters is that you’re both safe. I just finished watching my novela. Pintinta, ven pa’ acá. Deja a las muchachas en paz.” Her eyes squinted as she glanced at her clock and her dog. “Siéntense en el sofá, muchachas.”

I wondered if Paloma was hungry too because Doña Paula’s apartment smelled like tacos de papa, and my pansa was starting to growl. In her living room, dolls were neatly lined up on a shelf mounted on the wall. From where I sat, I could see a sewing basket with a tortilla napkin with yellow and turquoise flowers on a wooden hoop, a remote control, and reading glasses. Sitting next to me, I could see Paloma’s eyes looked as if she had an allergic reaction. Swollen. I put my arm around my sister to comfort her.

“Muchachas, vamos a la cocina. Seguro que tienen hambre.”

“Doña Paula, por favor, no se moleste.”

“¿Cómo que no? Vengan.” Doña Paula with great big arms of a luchadora led Paloma and me to her kitchen.

“Doña Paula, thank you so much for taking us in. We’ll call my mom tomorrow. This incident caught us off guard. We didn’t know what to do, so we ran to our car and called up your niece. She didn’t think it was a good idea for us to stay—even if it was across the street.”

“Muchachas, we can talk tomorrow. No se preocupen.”

“Doña Paula, did your niece tell you my sister and I go to college and work. We’re not planning on missing any classes. We’re getting ready for our finals.”

“Yes, Irmita, did tell me that. Don’t worry. You can stay here until you find another place. My roommate left for Honduras. She’ll be back in two weeks. Pintita and I could use the company in the meantime. When she gets back, we’ll make room for all of us. Hasta en el piso se pueden dormir.”  

“Thank you, Doña Paula.”

“Doña Paula, I have a question for you.”

“A ver, muchacha, pregúntame.”

“When you were a little girl did you have dolls?” I asked as she grabbed napkins for us.

“When I was a little girl, my parents couldn’t afford toys. One day on my birthday my mom surprised me with a doll she made from a flour sack. Ay, mi mamita chula. Como la extraño. Pintita, ya te di de comer. Hazte pa’ allá sino te voy a sacar al patio.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” I said as I glanced at the wall, “So now that you’re older, with the money you earn, you buy as many dolls as you wish?”

“Ay muchacha, I’ve never thought about that. It’s possible. They keep me company. My children live up north in Merced and Sacramento; ya se me casaron todos. ¿Les gustaron los tacos? Híjole, se me olvidó el quesito.”

Doña Paula’s tacos were incredibly delicious, and her salsa roja was perfect—not bland nor too salty.

“Sí, Doña Paula, que ricos están sus tacos.”

“Y también su salsa de molcajete,” I added.

“Gracias muchachas. Es secreto de familia,” Doña Paula winked her left eye, and her smile widened. “Pero a lo mejor les puedo compartir mi receta. Se llaman tacos de canasta. Tienen su chiste. Eh. Bueno muchachas, let’s clear up the table, so I can find you clean cobijas. On weekdays, I wake up at five o’clock in the morning to get ready to cook and pack up my lunch. I hope I don’t make too much noise in the kitchen.”

“Don’t mind us. We don’t know how to pay you back for this huge favor. We didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“We can talk more tomorrow. Get some rest. You’ve had a rough night. I’ve been there too. I left my husband and ran away with my three children. Antes de que se duerman, las voy a barrer para que descansen.”

---

Praise for Dreaming With Mariposas

“Overwhelming with tenderness, humor, hurt, and determination, Dreaming with Mariposas is the compelling story of the journey from childhood to young womanhood, to writing, and to self-actualization. Disarmingly vulnerable and poetic. Gutiérrez puls no punches when it comes to the issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, education, immigration, addiction, and violence. Most strikingly, this is the voice of a young brown girl coming into her own—not powerless, not a victim—a young brown girl with clear vision, a willingness to fight back, and a powerful drive to speak.”

—ire’ne lara silva, author of flesh to bone and Cuicalli/House of Song

“Sonia Gutiérrez captures dreams and memories with Dreaming with Mariposas, her latest literary collection. The poignancy of Dreaming wraps the reader in memories and wishes and dreams deferred and fulfilled. A Family of Butterflies forever traveling through dreams and reality.”

—Kim McMillon, PhD., Black Arts Movement scholar and playwright

Sonia Gutiérrez carries the torch of her literary forbearers Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros, powerfully and poetically capturing what it’s like to grow up a brown girl in America. Dreaming With Mariposas takes us from Idaho to Southern California, detailing the struggles and joys of a working-class immigrant family, and shows us with fresh eyes the lessons learned navigating childhood’s difficult terrain. Gutiérrez pays homage to the classics of Chicanx literature, but this book is also a necessary update, a coming-of-age story for our time.”

—Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza

Editor’s note: Sonia Gutiérrez’s book can be found online at FlowerSong Press pick it up, you’ll be so glad you did.

Sonia Gutiérrez

Sonia Gutiérrez teaches critical thinking and writing, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and multicultural studies. She is the author of Spider Woman / La Mujer Araña (Olmeca Press, 2013) and co-editor for The Writer’s Response (Cengage Learning, 2016). FlowerSong Press in McAllen, Texas, recently published her debut novel, Dreaming with Mariposas, written in a Chicano/a vignette style. Her bilingual Paper Birds / Pájaros de papel is forthcoming in fall 2022. She is also a moderator for Poets Responding. “The Story of the First Year” and “Renegades” appear in Dreaming with Mariposas.

Cattails in the Fall By Tiffany Lindfield

Cattails in the Fall

1. And unto the Earth She fell. She fell onto its rolling grasses and wept. She beat her fists into the dirt of the Earth, cursing Earth. 2. Unto the Earth, She cursed. She cursed the Earth for indifference. 3. She cried unto the Earth, “I curse you Earth! I curse you so that you can no longer bring forth.” 3. She tried to end the life from which She had sprung but the sun shone through her eyes, revealing the sight of cattails; seeds. 5. At once, She stood close to the edge of a pond where cattails in the fall stood. 6. She cupped her hands around them, touching them unto her face; large and soft; fragile for a wind to carry them to soil. 7. Seed; She was seed; bore seed. And unto the Earth, She and cattails in the fall stood. 8. And unto the Earth a mountain lion and her cubs stood, a coyote and her cubs stood, and cattails in the fall stood.

 1933   

That was one of her visions. She had them often. Sometimes in her mind, sometimes in the dust—maybe her mind was dust, too, she thought. The whole place was dust. She’d walk about the yard as if walking through a vast sandbox. And sometimes she’d see visions right there in the dirt.

Dirt. Dust. Sand. 

It wasn’t all the same was it? She’d scoop some of it in her hands, wondering from where this batch blew in from. Someone at the feed store had said it was Topeka dirt. That was why when the clouds came up it was black, they said. In other parts they said it was a brown color; others talked tones of orange.            

This day she laid right out in it, her skin a burning crimson, open blisters on cracked hands, hoping for the next dust storm to blow her away. Let the wind carry her like it carried those seeds but it was a calm day. 

The wind was strangely absent and still no rain. Laying down on the ground, looking up, she saw a crystal blue sky, white puffs of clouds drifting in a lazy stroll. She saw a bird or two take off, flaps in the air. It was funny, she thought. Grounded, birds were miraculous in detail. Down to the fuzzy holes on their beaks. Were those noses? Intricate claw beds and songs to sing. But up there, far away, they barely had a shape against the blue canvas of sky.          

She remembered the time she saw a hawk carrying a snake. The serpent’s body violently twisting, trying to escape the grips of a tenacious beak—escape fate; the inevitable. In another vision the snake fell. What happened? She didn’t know. Did the hawk let go by accident or did it grow weary of carrying? It’s a thing—growing weary of carrying. 

No matter, that devil fell right beside her, his body a thud in the dirt, the impact throwing dust in her eyes. She was used to the dust and did not even blink. The snake stared at her with two small eyes, black beads and let out a red tongue, still worked up. That was the body’s way. It keeps going on, laboring, revving up—after things like that. Near death and all. It fascinated her. The way the body grips and holds onto life. She saw it in her husbands’ hands—hands still toiling and wrist deep in the dirt—yet not one damn drop of rain. 

She felt it in her bones, life tugging to remain. She was too stiff to move but still piddled in that sandbox, hunger stabbing at her sides, and her throat dry with a voice catching on dust, suffocating her words. She felt her whole-body shriveling from death, like grapes under suns, no shade.  

When would the next storm come and carry her with it? She closed her eyes. Soon, she thought. The storms always came now, roaming the countryside, settling in the creases of old woman’s fat, in the lips of their vaginas, the wombs of their bellies, in the cereal and the cracks of their kitchen tables.            

And she saw it again. Cattails in the fall. This time on the slope of a mountain where a mountain lion with a supple, brown coat stood, grounded on large paws. The lion's coat was the same color as the swaying cattails. The lion’s long tail curled at the end—lest it drag the ground—as she preyed upon someone to eat.       
“Mary Bell, you just gonna give up, huh?” Timothy asked.

She turned to see her husband on the porch, petting a small dress over his knee; he was watching Mary’s flapping arms and legs make angels. Mary and Timothy had seen children do this in Kentucky’s snow—before leaving. It snowed there, and rained so hard people would say, 'It’s raining cats and dogs.' They had trees and mountains and wildflowers in Kentucky, too.  

1928   

She carried some of those wildflowers with her—to Oklahoma—in the family bible when Timothy and she made the drive from Kentucky.      

Timothy and she had just got married. How could she refuse? He was a tender-hearted man. Gentle as balmy rain. She could sit for hours listening to him talk, content as his words tumbled out slowly, cautious with pauses to make sure he was saying the right thing. She was lucky and she knew that.            

He had run home one day, revved up with a brochure in his hand. They didn’t have to stay in Kentucky, in the backwoods, among the mountain folk mining, he had said. They could pack up and drive to Oklahoma and be farmers, have their own piece of land. Everyone they really loved was dead or stupid anyways, she had thought and there was something bewitching in his eyes. He had talked quick about it, without a single stutter. She knew he had caught a hold of something wild, by the tail; It was a dream.      

So, they packed up the little they had. He helped her climb in the truck and held his hand on her belly, swollen with child as they etched closer to dreams of wealth and ease. She held up that brochure, sleek finish, as their beat-up truck bounced along the road to new places, new land. They would grow wheat, golden wheat in the heart of Oklahoma and prosper—the brochure read. 

“I think we’ll get in trouble out there,” she said, sucking on the bottom of a weed.

“Why you think that?” 

“Just so many people digging up all that land. Don’t the land need what we might be digging up?”          

“People farm in Kentucky.” 

“That was different. You can’t really dig up a whole mountain. But look here at this picture. It’s all flat. We’ll be diggin’ up all they is to dig. People are okay with you takin’ a little or some of what they have. But we thinkin’ of taking everything She has.”              

“She?”            

“The Earth.” 

Timothy laughed, then smiled with endearment. “You really got some strange notions, Mary Bell.”

                                                            ***

First two months in Oklahoma with her back bent to a flat Earth, the sun beating against it, she miscarried their first child—right there in the wind-slapped grass—watching as the green blades seemed to wave her comfort. She screamed as her body forced death from the womb. She yelled for him, but Timothy was riding on a borrowed tractor, ripping the soil, in a straw hat with a pipe in his mouth, fresh tobacco.

By the time he made it home, the sun resting behind him, she lay naked in their marital bed with her legs open, staring at a red spot in the sheet, crying; her body shaking.        

He instinctively put his hand on her belly. “Mary. No.”

“No baby in this belly. She’s out there in the yard. In the grass…She…She was a girl,” Mary said with blood swiped across her cheeks.                

Timothy placed his face in the space between Mary's arm and shoulder. Mary could feel his hair wet with sweat, smell the fortitude in his weakness.       

The next day, he dug a hole and laid the baby in the ground, wrapped in an old sheet. He went to cry but wiped his face. “She up in heaven with Jesus. Ain’t no need in me fussin.’ Lord, I ask that you look after her, now,” he said, tears streaming down his face, despite the prayer.  

1929   

Lindsey was born in the summer of ‘29, this time right in the middle of their plot of field. Mary was carrying something to Timothy when her water broke. And she squatted under the same sun, on the same Earth and gave birth—this time to a live baby girl who came out roaring, howling like coyotes. As the child broke from her body, a vision of mountain lions chasing prey pierced Mary's mind.

Mary could see Timothy running to her, his hands flapping. His face widened into a dazzling smile, under a lambent sky when he saw the baby. He placed an earth laden hand on the baby’s head, mixing blood and dirt. And husband and wife walked back to the house, Mary holding the baby and their umbilical cord. 

Late 1930  

Sam, a stubby man from church, was passing around the town’s paper. The front page read: ‘The Great Depression.’ Timothy couldn’t read or write, but Mary could have been taught by her grandmother, and she read it cover to cover while Pastor Tom bellowed about hell and fire, sweating, and wiping it away. Maybe he was already in hell, Mary thought.

"That man could find sweat in a snowstorm,” she whispered to Timothy, who flagged her off, intent on the preacher’s words.               

Later on: “What that paper say, Mary? Timothy asked, as they sat by a fire she had made with chicken in his teeth.       

“Says the Depression is coming.”     

“We’ve heard about that,” he said.    

“It’s coming to Oklahoma. And we ain’t getting’ no rain either. The crops gonna die.”     

“It ain’t.”        

“It is,” Mary Bell said, wrapping Lindsey tight in a pink blanket the Havemeyer’s had given her. It was soft, all the way from New York, Mrs. Havemyer had said. 

Baby cooed.   

“Lindsey says it's coming,” Mary said.       

Timothy reached for the baby and put his face to hers. Timothy was like that with things smaller than him. Mary would catch him in the hen house, petting the heads of their chickens with just one finger, bent down to see them—to see their eyes. 

Early 1931 

Maya’s General Store sat in the town’s square, and of all things it was run by an old widow woman, named Maya. Maya’s nephew, John, helped her with the store’s busy work. Mary Bell loved going to the store, watching how Maya told John to do this or that and he’d hop this way or that in the prettiest skin she had seen on a man.

“Oh, now nothin’ stays the same. Things always changin,” Maya said, handing Timothy change as Mary noted all the lines on the widow's face, like chicken scratches across dirt. 

Another store patron, June spoke up. “Ya’ know I heard that all that rain that was a comin’ was nothing but a fluke. My husband heard it from some Indian man whose family been livin’ on these plains for more than any of us could count backward.” 

“Woman, what ya’ mean a fluke?” Mr. Massey, sitting near the store’s heater asked. 

John chimed in with a bag of potatoes slapped across his back, “hog pussy. We just goin’ through a lil’ dry spell. A small spell and well, no harm in that. That rain is just around the corner. Bet your bottom dollar on that. Yep, come the end of this month and this area will be flooded.” 

“We ain’t been on this land long enough to know what it gonna do or not gonna do and even if we got a sense of what she's aiming to do—that when She’ll change on us. Like I said, things are always changin,” Maya said.           

Timothy and Mary listened to the chatter, then walked out into a windy breeze, as Lindsey waddled behind with a sucker in her hand. “Pa, look!” 

Lindsey held the red pop up to Timothy who saw it was now spotted with black soil. Ain’t nothing but a bit of dirt. Lick it off. Won’t hurt you none.”     

Lindsey put the candy in her mouth. 

                                                        ***

The end of the month came and the next, but John’s flood never came—or even a light shower. Timothy was a sight to see, with his shirt undone, sweat slipping down his neck, and chest. An old, dirty hat sat crooked on his head, his face tilted to the sky, and his eyebrows furrowed. “You think it will rain?” He asked Mary Bell. “Looks like it wants to.”  He pointed to the sky. “I saw lighten’ earlier. Yonder up."

Lindsey pointed her finger up to the same sky, snug on her mother’s hip. 

Mary Bell swung herself around in a circle, whirling Lindsey around who grabbed her mother’s shoulder. "Weeee."

“Weeee,” Lindsey repeated with a bright smile, dimples resting in new skin.

 Dinner came and went and still no rain, despite the lighting. And then late in the night, they all heard it. Thunder roaring and crashing against their one-room house. Timothy jerked out of bed and ran right into the yard. 

Mary followed, and the toddler waddled behind them both. “Ma. Pa."       

“It’s gonna rain. Baby told you it would,” he said with sweet relief, his grin showing teeth unattended to.           

“You gonna get struck by it,” Mary said.   

“God ain’t gonna do a good man like that.”  

“Ain’t no rain coming, Timothy.”     

He stopped awing the sky and stared dead at her, in saggy underpants, the elastic worn. “Why do you go and say somethin’ like that? Maybe you want us to die out here?” He walked right past her, with his bottom lip tucked under crooked teeth.      

He was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands when Mary and Lindsey walked back into the house. His shoulders shrugged, and his fingers were dirt black; He knew the land, could feel wind before it came, and smell rain before it fell. He knew the buffalo grass; it’s root. The feel of it in his hands, turned over in calloused palms. He knew the chickens in the yard; knew all their names: Lucy, Lucky, Betty, Boop, and Tom.               

“I can only tell you what I think is all,” Mary said.     

“Mary, somethin’ is changin.’ Somethin’ coming like we ain’t ever seen,” he whispered as if speaking above would give the dreaded thing nearing Godspeed.    

“I told you we done took too much from Her.”        

Timothy jumped up as if a ghost conjured poked him in the rib and he ran outside, and again his family followed him. 

“Pa, lookin’ for?” Lindsey asked, watching him dig barehanded in the ground.

He looked up, with his eyes reflecting the moon. “Y'all 'member when we first got here? Remember we could dig deep as ever, and the ground was wet?” 

Mary sighed. “I remember. The grass had those deep roots that kept the water locked in the ground. But we done dug them all up.”                  

The dry dirt crumpled like small rocks in his hands. “Well look here, it’s all gone. Dry as a bone,” he said. 

Mary Bell leaned her head on his shoulder; his face still bent to the Earth. 

“I’m scared we're gonna starve out here. The wind blows the damn seed right out the ground and what we do grow ain’t worth nothin’ now, " he whined.

“Timothy, we done took too much from her." 

He pushed her and walked away, towards the field, cursing Her under his breath. 

1932   

They were driving back from town when the first real dust storm came and decided to set up house. Her and Timothy and the baby girl had been sitting outside the feed store, sharing a coke and some caramel for Lindsey’s birthday. Getting in the car, the sunlight seemed to dim—just a tad—but as they began to drive, they saw it. Hell, they were driving right into it. A large black cloud enveloped them.              

Timothy got wiggly in his seat, pointing, “What’s that...that rain?”

Mary Bell craned her neck, straining her eyes. Timothy stopped the car and got out. Mary Bell put her head out of the car window, feeling grits of sand hit her in the face. She then got out of the car, too, telling Timothy, “It’s coming.”               

Timothy stared ahead. “What’s comin’ Mary? What the hell is coming? Just say what’s coming!” He screamed, spit flying from a mouth twisted.

They all got back in the car, as another motorist headed their way. 

Mr. Paul from the feed store pulled beside them, rolling down his window. “It’s the end of the world. Calvary is coming!" 

Mary Bell held her tongue as Timothy stared on.     

“It ain’t rain, you think?”      

“That ain’t rain, son. That’s the end of the world,” Paul answered, then sped off. 

“Does he expect to beat it? The end of the world?” Mary asked. 

Timothy started the truck back up, driving fast, saying he would get them home and keep them safe. One hand was on the wheel and his other went from Mary to Lindsey, making sure to touch their face or pat their knees. But the dark cloud grew closer and swallowed them, like a heap of moving tar, stealing the light from the sky. 

And then it fell, the dust—all a sudden—in a frantic whoosh, stopping them dead in the road; like a blanket being pulled over their faces, smothering them in heat and darkness. They could barely hear anything but the rage of it and covered their ears, then their mouths and eyes as the dust blew in sideways through a window stuck open. 

Mary Bell and Timothy hovered, in obscurity, over Lindsey who was squealing, trying to shield her. It seemed like hours before it passed over, but it was only minutes. The same cloud of dust that had moved over them, was now rushing behind them, as they started the truck and drove home in near darkness, wiping dirt from their faces. Lindsey cradled, knobby kneed, in Mary’s lap. Timothy shook so hard, relief and fear, that his hands barely kept the steering wheel steady. When they got home, they saw the cow turned over in the yard, only hoofs sticking out, and the chickens clucking wildly, flapping dust off their bodies. 

Inside, their fingers felt a thick sweeping of dust over everything in the house. Mary made a fire and in its glow their faces lit up like charcoal drawings, eyebrows fixated in shock.         

“God done forsaken this place,” Timothy said.        

"We did this,” Mary Bell responded. 

1933   

Timothy, Mary Bell, and Lindsey stood on the porch of the Havemyer’s nice white house, removing the makeshift masks they had been wearing, but Lindsey cried when Mary tried to remove hers, saying, “I need it, mama.”                

“We safe here,” Timothy said, but Lindsey held the knot from being untied with small hands.     

Inside, Mrs. Havemyer ran about the kitchen, talking, chattering. You couldn’t get a word in. And Mary Bell didn’t have many words to get in. Her stomach ached as the smell of biscuits and a pot of greens stewed. Mary Bell watched Havemyer glaze a ham, slowly, methodically as if she were painting some masterpiece to hang on the wall. She had fancy things like that all over her house: Pictures, glass animals, books, even rugs, a housecat, and a small yellow bird sitting in a cage.

Lindsey sat in Mary’s lap whimpering like a rag doll. The child hadn’t eaten anything but a potato in two days and now a glass of cold milk. 

Mrs. Havemyer handed the child a cookie. “Let’s go ahead and give this baby somethin’ to eat." 

It was only then that Lindsey let Mary take the mask off. Mary Bell stared at the yellow bird, wondering what it must feel like to have flown once, perched in trees, to now sit behind copper wire.

 “How old is the bird?”          

“Oh, Birdie…Birdie is, well, honey, I don’t know. She came all the way from Tennessee. Forgot what they call them now. Mr. Havemyer may kn—” 

“--He doesn’t sing much," Mary said with a blank stare.     

“Oh,” she said, surprised. 

Mr. Havemyer, followed by a few other locals, including Timothy walked in. “Hole is dug,” Mr. Havemyer said, with a clap of his hands, proudly. 

“Oh, dear. Poor little souls,” Mrs. Havemeyer said in habit.

Chairs pulled out, and people gathered around the dining room’s large oak table. Mary knew it was the biggest meal many of them had seen in months—years, or ever, except for Mrs. and Mr. Havemyer. Lindsey stared in awe at the food before her, timidly bringing food from bowls, platters, and trays to her plate.           

“I just can’t understand burin’ good meat when so many starvin’?” Jefferey said, without a bit of shame in his low status.      

“Like Wallace said, we can’t go around nursing pigs til’ calvary. But everyone sittin’ here…everyone helpin’ me with this will get a hog a piece. Okay, Mary? If you can feed more, you can have more,” Mr. Havemyer said.

 Mrs. Havemyer smiled wide, moving her eyes along the faces of the men, sternly. “How about that preachin’ this morning?” 

“Ya know some people are packin’ up now. They say it better to leave now, then stay here and wait on somethin’ that may never come,” Thomas, a young buck from Alabama said. 

“Where can they go?” Jefferey asked. “The depression is worse in other places.”  

“But they have rain,” Jean said.        

Everyone looked at Jean, who rarely talked, and noticed his eyes were swollen from tears held back.                  

“I’m so sorry about Helena,” Timothy said to Jean, who nodded.   

“She’s in glory, now, right next to the golden throne!” Mrs. Havemyer sang out, clasping her hands to the ceiling.         

“Right, she is,” Thomas said. 

And then everyone went on about the bread, the butter, the ham and all the fixings as Mrs. Havemyer glowed. Then the frenzy of forks on plates settled, and everyone pushed back their chairs to make room for their guts.

 Mr. Havemyer said, coolly, "It's time.”     

Mary watched as the men stood up, Jean last, adjusting hats over heads, and mask over their faces.

“Oh, dear. Poor little souls,” Mrs. Havemyer said.   

Mary Bell could hear the pigs squealing outside as the men rounded them up. Did they know? She was sure they did, and she sat, holding back what she knew to be rage, as Mrs. Havemyer went on and on about passing through Nebraska, her sewing circle, and something Ruth said from the bible.           

Later that night, lying side by side with Lindsey wedged between them, Timothy told Mary about the burying of those piglets and sows alive; said that he and the other men shot as many as they could, so they didn’t have to die—like that—so slowly, dust-covered. He said the babies screamed, that the sight of their legs, tails, the flat part of their noses, their mouths opening—revved up, hanging on, begging for mercy—for life—was tormenting his mind. Mary put her hand on his cheek, and he spoke the truth of it, passing it to her so he could sleep. 

“It was nothing short of a crime,” the preacher man said a week later. "Killing off good meat, when people all over God's Earth are starving," he went on.            

But Mary knew his cows had died that same day, and in the same way as Havemyer's pigs. The paper passing around the church that day read, ‘The Great Culling.’     

That night, after Sunday’s sermon, Lindsey’s cough worsened, rambling them awake through the night like thickets brushing against the bodies of birds. Lindsey was dying the same way Jean’s wife and many others in the town had died—were dying. Ammonia from breathing in all the dust. 

Mary and Timothy sat with her through that first night, the next and on the third night, her last night. Mary Bell felt that same revving in her daughter’s hands, hands refusing to let go. Lindsey tugged weakly on her mother’s dress, pulled at her own mouth, crying as death called, taking what it could. Mary thought of Oklahoma sand choking her daughter, fragments, pieces of old life lodging in her daughter’s new lungs.

As Lindsey wailed against death, the sow the Havemyer’s had given them hollered from the yard, her screams echoing off wind and it was in Lindsey's eyes that Mary saw all mother pigs calling out with mouths wide open, when Lindsey finally let go. Death came and took everything; it takes everything. Even the memories fade. She let the child flop down on the floor as a vision of a coyote in the mouth of a mountain lion seared her mind.

 Timothy threw his hands down to catch the child, asking Mary, “What you doin’ woman?” but she didn’t hear him. She watched the mountain lion walk back with a kill, blood on her face, to a den of two hungry cubs, and the cubs pawed the body of the once powerful creature, devouring its flesh. Timothy held the dead child, limp in his arms with his head leaned back on its atlas, mouth wide open, spit at the creases and the rot in his teeth showed.                

Mary didn’t move for hours as Timothy mourned in fits and grunts. He slapped Mary, leaving a print of his hand across her dirty face, and still she sat seeing vision of this and that. He called her crazy and said maybe if she had kept Lindsey out of the storms, she’d still be alive. 

Mary stood up and went outside at that. "You did this,” she said bluntly.   

Mary sat under the stars, cursing every one of them, sometimes more than once until she fell asleep. She awoke and cursed some more.

Fall of 1939  

And here she was, only days later—or was it months or years—laid out in the yard, her mind held captive by visions, flapping her arms and legs. Timothy watched from the porch with Lindsey’s dress in his hands.

And then it rained. 

And she could finally let the tears roll from her eyes. She wiped her face, but the tears kept slipping. And tears, rain and dust covered her face. She didn’t know when Timothy came to her side, but he did. He had her in his arms, holding her to his bony chest, heaving, the rain soaking them both wet.           

“Mary Bell don’t die on me. If you give up, I’ll have to give up, too. Don’t you see that?”

They raised each other up, onto the Earth, and stood tall. She realized—Earth—was strong and that She could go on for a while longer; a little while longer. 

Tiffany Lindfield

Tiffany Lindfield is a social worker by day, trade, and heart working as an advocate for climate justice, gender equality, and animal welfare. By night, she is a prolific reader of anything decent, and a writer. 

Remembering Coyote By Janet Rodriguez

Remembering Coyote

I’m forgetting the stories of Coyote, not the cartoons with the road running bird, the bird we think is as fast as wind, but the real coyote. I forget the stories in the people tongue, not in the pictures in my head.

“Don’t worry,” Edgar, my cousin, tell me. “They’ll come back when you go back home.”

Home is Shiprock, where the purple, green and red sky remembers me and my language. Home is where my people still grow corn and water it by hand.

“Not that you’ve helped,” Irma says on the phone. Irma is my great-grandmother. She still hasn’t forgiven me for marrying Pablo and running away to Arizona. Not the people’s land in Arizona, but Phoenix, where there is work. Pablo erects big buildings with iron structures and makes enough money to feed me and our three boys: Joe (6), Caleb (4), and Gabe (18 months old). Pablo says Irma hates him and will never forgive him. I don’t tell him he’s right.

He drives us to Shiprock anyway, in his 2010 Chevrolet Silverado 1500, a truck he loves as much as he loves me. I don’t care. I don’t need a lot of love. Love is overrated anyway.

                                                              ***

We stop at the Giant gas station outside of Sanders, Arizona. I can feel the family I have—the ones who are buried in Houck, a place we call Maʼiitoʼí—rising up from the land and trying to enter the bottom of my feet. I get Gabe out of his car seat.

“Your Aunt lives just over there, right?” Pablo asks me as he starts to fill up our tank. He points toward Maʼiitoʼí.

“Yes,” I say. Joe and Caleb are asleep but I wake them up to use the bathroom. If I don’t, Caleb will pee his pants.

“Do you want to go see her?” Pablo asks. I know he’s trying to stall. He doesn’t want to spend too much time with Irma and her husband, Ted, in Shiprock. I want to get to Irma’s as soon as I can because she thinks we’re coming for dinner. I don’t tell Pablo this.

“We need to get there before dark,” I say. “Because we still have to check into our hotel in Farmington, right?”

“Yeah,” Pablo answers. He’s watching the digital readout of the gas pump. His truck drinks more than an old man who’s just lost his wife.

                                                                     ***

We’re on the old Route 66, in Apache County, but this is Dine land. I think the whites named the county Apache County because Lewis and Clark or some other white tribe couldn’t believe how large the Dine were. The Apache and Dine were rounded up here, put on a big farm by an Army base, and told to get along.

The whites told the people they had to round us up and train us to be farmers. That’s what I heard anyway, which is a big joke. Didn’t the whites have to be taught by the Native people to be farmers?

Anyway, they put our peoples together, tribes that were as different as red and blue corn, but it didn’t matter to them. To them, we were still corn. They ate corn. The white men love eating corn. They tried to eat all of us—they tried to eat up all of our lands and they almost did.

Irma tells me that some old women that were rounded up swore they would haunt the whites and their families forever. Now everybody says Route 66 is haunted, and there are so many accidents there. Irma knows it’s the old women who died but wouldn’t die. The old women who chose to starve to death rather than eat the white man’s food. The women swore to be ghosts and never rest in their tribal lands in peace. Never, never.

As I go inside the Giant store, I hear the tongue of the Dine—Navajo is what they call us now—being spoken by people buying chips, drinks, and beef jerky inside.

Coyote meets us at the bathrooms. He’s switched the men and women signs on the bathroom doors, and a man runs out of the women’s bathroom, shamed and humiliated. Women are screaming inside. He zips up his fly. There is a urine stain on his front.

Joe and Caleb are wiping sleep out of their eyes, but they laugh. They look up at me like it’s all a big joke, but I scowl at them.

Never laugh at a white man, I start to say—that’s what Irma always told me—but I realize they don’t speak Navajo. A young teenager, snickering in the corner, points at the embarrassed, urine-stained man.

“Dude!” he says to him. “Did you just go pee in the ladies?”

Hello, Coyote

                                                                     ***

Irma serves us corned-beef hash and green beans from cans. She wouldn’t have ordered lamb from the butcher for this dinner, and if she did, she would never serve it to Pablo. The table is her long, wooden picnic table that usually lives outside. The weather is nice enough, but Irma brought the table in the house to show Pablo she’s no fool and knows how to eat with knives and forks. The table is so big and bulky that it’s up against the sink on one side, and pushes up against a window, where Pablo is sitting. I know the seating is like this on purpose. Irma is at one end of the table, next to the sink, so she can reach things on the counter. Pablo is sitting underneath the window so he can feel the slow chill as the sun sets and the breeze starts to whistle through its uninsulated frame. Irma has decorated the window with curtains made out of pink sheets, and they push against Pablo’s big shoulders like long braids.

She speaks Navajo to me.

“There is a place for you to sleep in the back,” she says.

She feeds Gabe corned-beef from a small wooden spoon, the same one she used to feed me with. Gabe eats on her lap like Irma is someone he sees every day, but this is the first time I’ve been back home since any of my children have been born. Joe and Caleb are as jittery as birds, and they watch Irma and Ted like they’re a strange YouTube video. I can feel the weight of Pablo’s gaze and Irma’s expectations hanging on me, like steel balls hanging from a yoke, strapped to my back. I know the “place to sleep” Irma is talking about. It’s a shed that Ted built for my mother when she came home from jail. He bought a pre-fabricated kit from his Uncle, who runs the Navajo hardware store, meant to store garden tools and lawnmowers. He made a twin bed from old barn boards and slapped a twin mattress on it, then put a small chest of drawers at its feet. Mom lived in that little closet of a house for two years before she ran away, or before Irma kicked her out. No one will tell me why Mom left, or where she is. I think Mom brought men home, and one day Irma had enough. I’m surprised the shed is still there.

“I have three kids,” I say, trying to laugh like I think she’s joking. Irma looks at me. I can tell she’s serious.

“Let the kids sleep in that bed,” she says. “You and that man can sleep on the cots outside. 

“There is no rain or snow tonight.”

I know Irma is testing me, to see if she still has any influence in my life. If I stay with her, I honor our people and this sacred land that we have somehow held onto. If I go back to the hotel in Farmington (where our luggage is, where there are two clean king-sized beds, where there is a bathtub and shower, where we already paid our room tax and lodging fee) I have become a traitor, a white-loving woman. I have taken the side of the oppressor, who waits for our people to hurry up and die out, already.

                                                                   ***

The boys have never shared a bed in their lives—Gabe is a flipping fish when he sleeps—but they sink into the twin mattress, with Gabe in the middle, like they are made for it. Within a half-hour, they’re asleep. The door to the shed will stay open throughout the night and maybe the boys will wake up with mosquito bites like I used to.

There is a small glowing light is on the dresser, plugged into an extension cord coming out of Irma’s bedroom window. A kind, gentle, illuminating glow spills from the shed, allowing Pablo and Ted enough light to set up the Army cots. Irma and Ted regularly use these when they go the All-Nations PowWow, or when they visit my auntie’s family in Maʼiitoʼí.

 “These don’t look so great,” Ted is telling Pablo. “But they are comfortable. Like a hammock, almost.”

“Yeah,” Pablo smiles. “I used to be in the Army, so I’m used to sleeping on these.” 

“Really?” Ted asks. “Did you serve in Iraq or anything?”

“Nah,” Pablo says. “I couldn’t because of my eyes. I got a pretty bad astigmatism, which I only found out about once I was in.”

“Yeah,” Ted says. “I got the glaucoma.”

Me and Irma look at each other and try not to laugh. Ted doesn’t have glaucoma, but he says he does so he can smoke weed and justify it. Ever since he joined the Mormon church, he feels guilty for partaking in the weed ritual.

“I’m surprised you’re staying,” Irma says, only loud enough for me to hear. She is speaking Navajo, but I hear her as easily as if she’s speaking English.

“Things aren’t that bad in Phoenix, you know,” I say. “And Pablo’s family has had it as bad as we have.”

As soon as I say it I know I shouldn’t have said anything. Irma and the women all know the Navajo were betrayed by the Mexicans, who were supposed to protect us. They know there is a greater wound to our people because the Mexicans still have part of their land and ours has been taken from underneath our feet. I know it all by heart. I know better than to open my mouth, but it’s too late and I know I deserve everything that will come from Irma’s mouth.

I wait for her rebuke, but she suddenly turns to a rustling sound in the bushes.

“What is that?” she says in English.

The men look up from putting sheets and blankets on the cots. We hear the cracking of twigs and leaves in the hedges behind the water spigot, and I walk toward them. There is a flash of something leaving—the dark shadow of a cat or a dog running away—but so fast that I can’t tell which way it went.

“What in the hell?” I say.

“Coyote?” Irma says, in a slow voice. She looks back at Pablo, whose face is more pale than normal. He looks worried, as if a snake or a bat might plague us once we’re asleep.

I look at Irma and smile.

“I saw him earlier at the Giant gas station,” I say. “He switched the signs on the bathroom.”

“He does that,” Irma says. “That’s why I knock every single time. Were you on the border of Navajo and Apache land?”

“We were!” Pablo says. He looks at Irma the way I used to when I was ten years old. His eyes are wide, and his cheeks suddenly have color. “The Giant station just outside of the city...”

“He likes it there,” Irma says. She starts pushing a small stack of plastic chairs toward our cots.

Ted stops her and picks them up. He places them in a half-circle, around where Pablo and I will be sleeping.

“In fact,” Irma says. “I can tell you a story that I know from a long time ago....”

Pablo and I follow her to the chairs. We sit down. The little light spills out from the shed. It glows like a big apricot at our feet. I can Pablo’s feet, once he takes off his steel-toed boots and white socks. Irma tells us the story of the time that Coyote changed the mountains when the world was asleep. We listen, and I get so caught up in the story that I don’t even notice when Irma started speaking Navajo.

She knows that our tongue is the only one with the power to parlay Coyote’s spirit. He’s smart enough to trick the whole world, but sneaky enough to be hated by everyone in it.

The neighbors to the east have gone to sleep. The neighbors to the south are gone, visiting their daughter in Nevada. There are stars and crickets. Irma’s story is musical and filled with bitterness. It has become a creation song that cannot be interrupted, no matter who is listening and who can understand.

Even Pablo understands this and is silent.

Janet Rodriguez is an author, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. In the United States, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, Salon.com, American River Review, and Calaveras Station. She is the winner of the Bazanella Literary Award for Short Fiction and the Literary Insight for Work in Translation Award, both from CSUS Sacramento in 2017. Rodriguez has also co-authored two memoirs, published in South Africa. Her short stories, essays, and poetry usually deal with themes involving morality in faith communities and the mixed-race experience in a culturally binary world. Currently she is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she serves on the magazine, Lunch Ticket.

Spectrum by Toti O'Brien

SPECTRUM

Pea-green, like the boat upon which the owl and the pussycat had embarked. Apple green, juicy, and tart. Leaf green, so sheer it looks unreal—a fake color, too pure, shade of molten glass and dewdrops.

I had never cared for green or yellow. Salad colors, I used to call them—way too neutral and cool. As a child, I was keen on passion. I loved pinks, reds, and purples. Green and yellows reminded me of car trips during which I felt nauseous. I sought solace staring at the landscape with its pallet of mint, pistachio, ocher, gold. But those distinct nuances soon morphed into a muddy ribbon, mirroring my severe vertigo. Therefore, I started to dislike them.

Until, in my thirties, I got pregnant, and my eyes began craving a single shade I needed as a medicine. Anywhere—on a T-shirt, plastic cup, notebook cover. Even a square inch of light green would nurture and balance me.

Green had been my mom's color. Not the kind that is now enthralling me. She wore olive and sage on her blouses, matching similarly sedate beige, brown, rust for her skirts, echoing her irises, complementing her ash-blond hair.

Those tones made no sense on me, a roughly-tinted girl—black eyes, raven hair, scarlet cheeks. I found them hopelessly dull, but they befitted Mom, whom I loved. Tenderness unavoidably seeped into those shades, always wrapping her like a second skin.

"Green is gray," she used to say. Not her observation. A girlfriend of hers—a painter—once claimed it. Mother liked to repeat it over and over. I am not sure she knew what the sentence meant. I suspect its sibylline tone made her feel important.

She did that quite a lot—reiterate for an insane number of times a favorite saying, with the poise of one suddenly climbed on a podium. Those pearls of supposed wisdom were never replaced by a new comment—something she would have conceived on her own. Perhaps she didn't dare.

As a child, I didn't notice her lack of originality. I believed her the wisest and smartest, of course.

Greens are not grays. Her friend meant some of them, those Mom mostly liked, functioned for the human eye as grays do—mediating brighter patches of color, providing a rest after the excitement of a crimson, a canary, a royal blue.

The pea-green I craved in my thirties was something else. It vibrated otherwise. I don't know what it did to my cells, hormones, nerves, or soul—what its peculiar frequency aroused. Maybe a sense of renewal. Hope, perhaps.

Green—all kinds of it—happened to be my child's favorite. While my craving subsided, his preference lasted. I resumed my old fancies and a sort of adult neutrality.

*** 

Orange-met me with the same abruptness when I approached old age. In less than a month, I had hung orange curtains in my room, thrown an orange blanket on my bed, and was wrapping myself in apricot, lobster, peach and tangerine, mango, and papaya clothes. The insistence on tropical fruit isn't casual. They often came to mind when I looked at the curtain, at my earrings or jacket. I could make out their smell.

Yes, the color came with a fragrance and a kind of pleasant warmth—like a distant fire, harmless, revitalizing. I fell into orange as I had fallen into green decades earlier. It befell me, in fact, without warning.

Orange didn't bring up any memory. It was nobody's color. But I had grown up in a citrus grove, after all, spending my toddler afternoons under trees, picking up fallen fruit, piercing the rind with my nails to release the scent. When I was born Grandpa planted a tree, and he gave it my name. The plant is no more there. The entire orchard is gone. It might have returned metaphorically, haunting me from the inside—a memento of impending harvest.

It is not the autumn tone of rusted leaves obsessing me, though. It is a living hue, fluttering like butterfly wings, tenderly explosive. It is juice spilling out, needing to be expressed, to flow.

Toti O'Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in Zingara Poetry, the anthology Finding Light in Unexpected Places (Palamedes Publishing), Green Briar, and The Moth.

The Story of Us By Arielle Irvine

May 2010

Shallow, quick breaths escape from my lips. Sweat trickles down my forehead. Fingers twitch nervously. Looking over the steep descent, I retreat backwards. 

“We should rethink this.”

“What’s there to rethink? We agreed.” Halle smiles and my world shifts on its axis. She continues speaking as she steps towards me, “It’s good for us to take risks once in a while.”

Her hands reach out for mine and pull me closer, steadying the wave of anxiety coursing through me.

“We didn’t think it through enough. What if we get hurt? Or worse?” I ask. My fingers trace her smooth, coconut-scented arms up to her face, where they rest on her rose-colored cheek softly. “I can’t lose you.”

She puts a finger to my lips and shushes me. “Stop worrying so much, Tasha. Everything is going to be fine.” She grabs my hand and squeezes it. “Better than fine—great! People do this all the time!”

“Yeah.” I face the endless pine trees that surround us on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. I could run away if I wanted. To safety. To stable ground. To a marked path. The option is literally sitting five feet away and surrounding me. But I turn back to her. “I know.”

She lets go of my hand and dances away towards the edge. Her bare feet kick up small clouds of dirt around her legs. Her short rainbow hair sparkles in the sunlight. She moves before me like some mythical, magical being. I could never run.

“Nearly a year together and I still forgot how much you worry,” she says. She twirls back and forth, dancing to the beat in her mind. Nearly a year together and I still always forget how fearless, headstrong, and adventurous she is.

  “I worry for good reason. Bad things happen all the time. Why increase those chances?” 

“Tasha! Baby, listen, what is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” She stops dancing and smirks at me. 

“First, don’t quote John Green to me. Second, don’t be cute right now. Third, there is nothing remarkable about this. In fact, it’s a very ordinary thing to do.”

“Exactly!” she runs to me, grabs my hands, and pulls me closer to the edge. She’s still closer with her back to the waves crashing below. She runs her hands up my arms and through my long blonde hair. When she pulls back, she says, “So ordinary that we might as well do it.”

I sigh, and nod. I could never resist her. 

“Might as well,” I repeat.

She squeezes my hands tightly before letting go again. She strips down to her skivvies, then helps me with mine, too. After, she grabs my face and pulls it close.

“Thank you for doing this for me.” She lays a soft kiss on my forehead, then my lips. “I know how much you hate this stuff, but it’s the perfect anniversary gift.”

I nod and wrap my arms around her waist. I squeeze so hard I’m afraid she might break, but she never winces. Instead, she places her lips against my ear and says, “You can do this.” 

I take a few steps forward and stand on the edge beside her. 

“I love you,” I say, forcing myself to breathe slowly.

“I love you, too,” she says, and I don’t have to look to know she’s beaming. 

The deep ocean blue is moving with life fifty feet below us. Our fingers weave tightly together as we prepare ourselves for what’s to come. Nodding in sync, we take a step back, then jump. Towards our fate. Whatever it may be, I’m with her and that’s all that matters.

We land in the water, far below the surface, our bodies still sinking when our hands reach out and find each other in the dark. I hold on to her tightly as we kick our way to air. Gasping as I breach, laughing and coughing up water. My heartbeat thumps loudly in my ears as she pulls me into her embrace.

“How was it?” Her eyes are expectantly waiting as I laugh. I can’t stop. “That good?”

“It was incredible!” I shout when I’m able to take control of my hysterics again. Looking out at the miles upon miles of open water beyond us, it’s unlike anything I could have ever imagined. Every color in the world is brighter, the sun is hotter, the air is purer; it’s all so beautiful. So perfect. I look back at the woman beside me. “You’re incredible.”

She grins before diving under the water, tickling my feet as she passes by. 

I follow as she swims towards the beach. We collapse onto the dry sand breathing heavy, side by side, hand in hand.

“Let’s do it again,” I say.

August 2011                            

We walk, Halle’s arm wrapped around my waist, and mine around hers, along the boardwalk admiring the variety of booths and food trucks.

As we pass by a ball-pitching booth, a man eggs her on, “Win your fine lady a prize?” He flashes us a crooked smile and raises an eyebrow, then continues, “If you knock over the top bottle you win a small stuffed animal, take down three and you get a medium-sized one. Get all six and win the big stuffed animal: bear, tiger, cheetah, whatever she wants!”

Halle reaches into her pocket.                                                                           

“Don’t, Halle.” I hold on tight to her arm and shake my head.

“Baby, it’s just for fun.” 

She laughs, kisses my cheek, pulls her arm free of me, and pays the man ten dollars for five balls. She prepares her arm by swinging it around very dramatically a few times, then throws. The ball hits above the top metal bottle, then smacks into the fabric backdrop before thumping to the floor. The man laughs at her misfire, and she turns to me and grins.

I got this, she mouths. 

On her next pitch, she takes a few seconds then chucks the ball as hard as she can, hitting just below the second row of the pyramid of bottles. The bottles loudly tumble from the stand, the pyramid now in ruin on the floor.

The man scoffs and challenges her further. “Lucky shot. Let’s see you do it again.” Halle raises her eyebrows at the man. “Take down this set over here with your remaining balls and I’ll let you take away three of the big stuffed animals. Your old lady will walk away a real lucky woman.”

“And if I fail?”

He digs his thumbs into his chest and says, “I win.”

“And winner takes all,” Halle says. She looks over at me and I shake my head. For a moment she hesitates, but then she sets the remaining balls down. “I’m done. My young ladywill take the big ass elephant up there.”

The guy sighs, looks up and grabs a rod from the wall and hits the elephant lightly until it topples down into his arms. He hands it to Halle over the counter, who she smiles wildly as she hands it to me.

As we walk away, the elephant head-locked under my right arm with my left around her, I whisper, “Do you really think that was fair?”

“It’s a game, Tasha, it’s fair. Some people are good, some aren’t.” She wraps an arm around my shoulders, and I wrap my free one around her waist.

“You played softball all four years of high school and all through college.”

She laughs, then swiftly changes the subject, “So now, the Ferris Wheel?”

“Can we?” I ask, facing her.

“God, I hate these things,” she says as we approach the line. “But for you . . . ”

“We don’t have to—”

“No, you want to go, so we’re going.”

We join the line of people waiting and I rest my head on her shoulder.

“Hey, dykes, how about some tongue-action?” Some guy’s voice yells from behind us. Halle looks around before landing on a group of douches laughing off to the side. She flips them the bird. 

“Up yours, assholes.”

“Come on, line’s moving,” I say, dragging her forward.

“Someone needs to shove a d—” she begins to yell at them until she sees the mother and young daughter standing in line ahead of us staring back at us, “a rainbow . . . in your f’n mouth.”

I laugh. “That’s what you came up with?” 

She shrugs as we move up the stairs to the entrance. “Better than what I could’ve said.”

I nuzzle my nose into her neck and whisper, “You’re sweet.”

She brings her lips to mine and whispers back, “No, you’re sweet. I’m spicy.”

“Or cheesy,” I say, kissing her nose.

We reach the front of the line and the operator asks for our tickets. Once Halle hands them over, he ushers us to the enclosed seats. I scoot in and set the elephant on the floor as Halle gets in and sits beside me. He closes the door to our bucket, then gives us a thumbs up before hitting a button that raises us.

The ride moves up and forward slowly as the operator lets more people on, one bucket at a time. Halle has her hand tightly clasped over mine. 

“We really didn’t have to do this,” I say.

“Yes, we did,” she says, looking over at me.

“Why?”

“Because you need to know how much you mean to me.”

“Hal, I already know.” 

We move to the top of the wheel, now overlooking the fair and the city beyond it. Halle shifts in her seat so she’s fully facing me. 

I smile at her and say, “Are you trying to get fresh with me right now? Because I don’t think we’re supposed to be moving around so much in these things.”

“Natasha, just shut up for a minute.” 

“Halle!”

She gives me a look. The look. The raised eyebrows, the puckered lips, the cheeks flushed. She is serious. So, I shut up and listen to her.

“I love you more than anything in this world. You know that.” She reaches into her pocket. “I would go to the ends of every world for you. I would name every star after you.” She smiles and takes a deep breath, then continues, “I would do anything for you. Even go on a stupid kid’s ride that scares the living daylight out of me. I love you. I have since the moment I met you on that bus to Minneapolis three years ago, and I’ve only fallen more in love with you every adventure since. And I would love to love you forever if you let me.”

She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a small robin’s egg blue box. “And since we will, hopefully, soon be able to get married in this country, I would be the most ecstatic person in the world if you would do me the honor of being my wife the second it becomes legal.” 

She opens the box and resting inside is a silver ring with a blue jewel setting. 

My cheeks flush, pulse races, world stops. My lungs are empty as I stare at her, mouth agape. The only thing left is her, sitting beside me with my future in her hands. Our future. Together. 

“Of course!” I wrap my arms around her neck and kiss her. “Of course, I’ll marry you!”

We fall back against the seat and wait for the wheel to start spinning again. She pulls me against her tighter and I hold her equally as close.

“You are super cheesy, though.” I say, shaking my head and smiling back at her.

“Maybe, but I knew you’d love it.”

“And I do. It’s the perfect start to forever.”

She kisses my head, then says, “I thought so.” 

 October 2012

I’m sorting through boxes in the bedroom when Halle enters and leans against the wall, watching me. 

“Have you found the box with your hair thingy in it yet?” Halle asks while chewed-up chip bits threaten to escape from her lips.

“The diamond-encrusted hair ornament that my mother gave me as ‘something old and something blue’ that I am supposed to wear to our wedding, which is less than three days away? No, I have not found it yet.”

“I’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times, Tash. I didn’t mean to pack it with the rest of your bathroom stuff. I didn’t know what was in the white box on the counter. I just assumed it was more makeup or something.”

I shake my head. It’s not worth the fight. Not now. It’ll turn up eventually.

“We should have waited to move,” is all I say. “Until after the wedding.”

“Baby,” Halle says. She rubs my inner thigh with one hand, tossing her empty chip bag in the trashcan near our nightstand with the other. “You know this place was too good to miss out on.”

I stare at her, eyes wide. “A month before our wedding, Halle. A month. Before our wedding. We moved. Who does that?”

“Free spirits. The daring types.” She leans in and nuzzles into my neck. “It’s fun. We have all these new things to explore in our new home with our new rings and new titles.” She kisses behind my ear. “I’d like to introduce my wife, Mrs. Flynn . . .”

“Halle . . .”

“I promise I’ll make it up to you on our next adventure.”

“How about for now we cut back on the adventures?” I ask as I pull away from her embrace. I take a box off the bed and bring it into the bathroom. She follows.

“You mean until the honeymoon, right?” she asks from the bedroom.

“I mean, how about for a little while at least, we stop calling careless mistakes adventures and stick to being—oh I don’t know—a little more careful instead.”

“Ouch,” Halle says. She’s leaning in the doorway, arms across her chest. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t patronize me, Hal. If I can’t find that stupid thing before the wedding, we’re both dead.”

“We will find it, baby.” She gestures to the boxes in the bathroom. “How hard could it be?”

 June 2013

The hot water steams up the bathroom quickly and I get out just in time for my body to be completely obscured in the fogged-up mirror. Grabbing a towel from the rack, I wrap myself in it like a burrito while dancing across the floor to the sink, singing along to the music booming from my Bluetooth speaker. I pick up my wedding ring off the counter, slip it on and wipe off the mirror with a hand towel, then use another towel to wrap up my hair.

The front door slams shut, breaking my nighttime grooming routine. I rush to the bedroom door and listen closely. Halle’s yelling. 

“Halle?” I call into the hallway towards the foyer. No response. I move silently on the plush carpet, towards the living room. 

“Barb, no, it won’t work. I told you that already. I can’t do this right now,” I hear her say in a hushed voice as I turn around the corner and enter her line of sight. 

I turn my head sideways and mouth, Who is it?

She shakes her head, fed up, and mouths back, Work.

I tap on my wrist where a watch would normally be, and mouth, You’re late.

I know, she mouths, then shrugs and turns away from me. She says into the phone, irritated, “I have to go.” After a few seconds, she says, “Fine, bye.”

She throws the phone onto the couch and crosses the room hurriedly, pushing me up against the living room wall, kissing me eagerly. A picture frame jabs into my shoulder blade as her hands maneuver around the towel, loosening it so it falls. 

“Whoa, Hal, what was that about?” I pull my lips away as she moves on to my neck.

“I don’t want to talk about work,” she mumbles, her mouth against my flesh, her hands groping me.

“Hal, stop. I don’t want to do this. What is going on? Why are you—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.” She lets out a loud breath and pulls her head back. “So, let it go.” 

“No,” I say. I stare into her eyes. I’ve rarely seen her this irritated. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fucking fine.” She pulls her hands away from me and puts them up in mock surrender. “Can’t I just want to have sex with my wife?”

“Not like this.” I pick up the towel, shaking my head. “Definitely not like this,” I repeat while turning around and heading to our bedroom. 

She follows and grabs my arm from behind. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop it, then.” I pull back and walk with her right behind me.

“Natasha, please, I’m sorry.”

“Fine,” I say as I reach my dresser.

“You don’t seem fine,” she follows and stands beside me while I pick through the top drawer searching for underwear. She reaches for my hand but pauses before she touches me. “Honey, please, stop.” 

I do. I completely stop. I don’t move. Not an inch.

“Work was long and there are a bunch of new people in the office, and they don’t know what they’re doing, so all day I had to help them. I just wanted to come home and let loose for a minute.”

I stay still.

“Sweetie, I just went about it all wrong.” She touches my chin and turns my face towards her. “I’m sorry.”

“What was the phone call about?” She lets go of my chin. 

“I told you it was work. They just wanted to know where I put some papers or something.”

I turn away from her gaze as I remove the towel and slide into a pair of underwear and strap on a bra. I grab a large plain blue T-shirt from a drawer and slip it on. Halle grabs the shirt and pulls me in closer to her. 

“Do you forgive me?”

“I don’t know.”

She frowns and kisses my cheek. “But I love you.”

“I know.” I look into her eyes. “But I didn’t like that.”

“I know.” She kisses my lips. “I’m sorry.”

I sigh. “You better be.”

She takes my hands and slides onto the bed, patting the spot next to her. “Join me, please?”

 February 2016

I roll over in bed and reach out to Halle, who’s sitting up. She pulls away from my touch and I lift my head. The alarm clock shows it’s a quarter past three in the morning. 

“Halle?” I sit up and turn on the lamp on my nightstand. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing, just go back to bed.” She turns her head to me just enough so that I can see smeared lipstick around her mouth. She’s looking out the window, dressed in jeans and a low-cut black tank top. 

“Did you go out?”

“Tash, just go back to sleep!” she snaps as she stands and leaves the bedroom.

My heart drops as I stand and wrap a robe around myself. I follow her out into the kitchen. “Where did you go?”

“God dammit. Leave it alone.” 

  “Stop it.” She looks away as the waterworks begin. “Don’t you dare look at me that way!” She turns back and points a finger in my face. “You have no idea what I’ve been going through.”

Dumbfounded, I stumble back against the wall and look away. 

“This was never supposed to happen. I didn’t mean for it to.” She paces around the kitchen hurriedly, her arms flailing around. “It just did.” She turns to face me. “And I’m so sorry.”

“Are you drunk?” I ask quietly.

“That’s not the point. Tash, I—”

“Don’t. I don’t want to know.” I shake my head. When she reaches out for me, my hands shoot up to push her away. “Whatever you did, I can’t know.”

“Tash, I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

She heads towards me like she’s going to kiss me, and I can’t, so I throw her arms back and step further away.

“Are you going to leave me?” she asks.

“I love you, Hal. Regardless of your selfish, stupid mistakes. When I said those vows, I meant them.”

“I know . . .” She crumbles to her knees in front of me and reaches out her arms for my legs. “And I love you so much.”

“Don’t touch me.” I step back. “I can’t—”

“Baby, I’m so sorry.” She holds her head in her hands and sobs into them. “So sorry.”

“Why are you crying?” I ask. She looks up at me, mascara running down her face. I push the tears back down. “How could you do this to us?”

Her eyes are different than usual. I search them for a place that I can still call home. I look for the woman that I love. Not this replacement in my lover’s body. But not just my lover: my confidante, my wife, my everything.

She shakes her head, crawls across the floor and grabs my legs, wrapping herself around them, sobbing into my robe and stopping me from moving. “Because I’m stupid. I’m so, so stupid.”

“Yes, you—”

“Mama? Mommy?” Our three-year-old boy sleepily stumbles into the kitchen, a thumb in his mouth and his favorite blue blanket in his arms, trailing on the floor behind him. 

“Oh, honey,” I say while shaking Halle’s arms off me. “Come here, baby. Did your sister wake up?”

Brice walks into my arms, shaking his head. I lift the nearly thirty-pound boy and rest him on my hip. “Okay, we’re okay, sweetie.” I wipe away unwanted tears on one side of my face with my free hand and he touches the other side and wipes them away with his pajama sleeve.

“You’re crying, Mommy.”

“I know, baby, but I’m okay.” 

With sad brown eyes, Brice looks down at Halle on the floor and asks softly in my ear, “Did Mama make you cry again?”

April 2017

“Tash,” Halle begs, “Please, just let me try again. Can’t you see how much this is hurting me?”

“You?” I snap while packing a suitcase full of clothes that aren’t mine. “How much it’s hurting you?” I’m too mad to cry. I’m too pissed off to shed a goddamn tear for her. For everything. Our marriage, our lives, our children. “I gave you every chance!”

“I know and I’m so sorry. I can’t go, I won’t. This is my home, too.” She cries on the floor, drunk again. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and she stayed out late after work again. For the second night in a row.

“I can’t do this anymore, Halle.” I zip up the suitcase and pull out the handle, then push it in front of her. “Now go. Get out.”

“No! I can’t go. Where will I go? I love you. You’re my everything.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t have slept with half of the female population!” I shout, shaking my head. “I won’t put our children through this and I will not go through this anymore. We tried breaks and I tried sticking it out and living with the fact that I wasn’t your 'only one,’ but I can’t do it, Halle. Because it is killing me. Youare killing me.”

“But you love me. How are you going to survive without me?”

“Do I?” I ask, not intending to hurt her, but to genuinely question it. I didn’t even know if I loved her at this point. Not in the way I once did. Every time I looked at her in the beginning, I felt that fire in my chest, that warming of my soul, but now? I didn’t know what to call the feeling inside. Dark? Cold? Empty. I square my shoulders and shove the suitcase at her further. “I have a steady job and our two children. I’ll be just fine.”

She uses the suitcase to stand up. “You can’t take them away from me, too. I won’t let that happen. I won’t let you do that to me.”

“Do that to you? You did this to yourself, Halle. Now, you can sleep around all you want and do whatever you want all the goddamn time. As long as it never affects our kids, I will not ‘take’ them away from you. However, the very firsttime,” I say, pointing a finger in her face, “You ever bring them back to me late, or you miss another one of their events, or you handle them while you’re drunk, I will make sure that you never get to see them again. You understand? Those kids are my world.”

“You’re my world.” She nearly falls over when she attempts to reach for me. I pull back and she screams, “I can’t do this without you!”

“Shut up and get the hell out of here before you wake them up again.”

“I . . . I . . . don’t know where to go.”

“Get a hotel room or something, just get out. Now.”

“Natasha, please, just give me one more chance. I love you. Please.”

“Halle, listen to me carefully, and I know that might be hard considering your condition, but I don’t love you. Not anymore. Not for a while. So, you need to go. Because you are only embarrassing yourself.”

May 2018

Brice and Faith run around the playground. He’s teasing her, but even still, he never takes his eyes off her. He always knows where she is. 

I’m sitting on a park bench, watching them play around the jungle gym, a book in my left hand barely being read. My eyes are glued to the most beautiful people I have ever seen. They’re so happy, so free, and full of life and with everything else that a child should have.

Brice is running around, tapping her on the back, then running away and returning. I smile but decide that Faith has had enough now that she’s sitting on the wood chips cross-legged with a pouty look on her face.

“Brice, Faith, come here,” I say just loud enough for them to hear. They look up and Brice’s head falls, knowing he’s done something wrong. “Sweetie, you’re not in trouble.”

He smiles and helps Faith up and together they walk to me holding hands. “Yes, Mommy?”

“Were you teasing your sister?” He looks down at the ground.

“No, Mommy, I was just playing with her. She was laughing.”

“Not when I looked up.” I say, pulling three-year old Faith onto one leg and my big five-year old onto the other leg. “You have to be nice to your sister.”

She looks up at me grumpily, her arms across her chest. “He was mean.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Brice says, looking directly at her and reaching for her hand. “I’m sorry, Faith.” 

She looks up at him, tears dried on her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything, but her slow-revealing smile indicates that she’s forgiven him. I give them both a quick kiss on the forehead.

“Mama is going to be here to pick you up soon and you both need to behave for her.”

“We will,” Brice says, sliding off my leg onto the ground. “Can we play some more?”

“Yes, go ahead, but be nice.” I smile as he helps his sister down and holds her hand as they walk away together. “I love you,” I call after them.

Brice and Faith yell over their shoulders in unison, “Love you, too, Mommy.”

I glance at the parking lot and see Halle get out of her car about ten yards away. She walks across the park to join me on the bench. Without a word, she sits beside me.

For a long while, we sit there, watching our children play before us. Years ago, I might’ve reached out a hand to cover hers, or buried myself in her arms, all while she whispered sweet nothings in my ear. Just a few months back and I’d have been digging my nails into my palms sitting this close to her. But now as we sit beside each other, two very separate, but thriving entities, we simply bear witness to the most beautiful, intelligent, and kind young children that this world could be blessed with and all I feel is joy. 

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Arielle Irvine is a writer, former bartender, and current 8-to-5-er. She graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in May of 2018, then moved to Des Moines, Iowa, with her fiancé and their three cats. She loves elephants, books, and “The Reader” by Bernhard Schlink.