In one of the houses along the hillside is a girl from school, whose hair
is done up – cropped and puffed and pale – like the silkie chickens our biology
teacher keeps. During class, she cuts pages from the textbook, often burning the
scraps later as if to erase the past. Tonight, she sits in the window of her home
in a smart grey turtleneck and eats with a fork and a knife and a lipsticked smile
on her face. She and her parents are listening to her little brother, who talks with
constant and fitful gesticulations. Occasionally, the swing of his arm discreetly
brings a cut of ham to the golden retriever lurking beneath the table.
The dog is the first to see me standing in the road, and hurtles toward
the window. It barks and scrabbles at the glass so loudly that I can hear the faint
squeak and howl that disturbs those inside. The mother stands and yells at the
dog, but her voice remains confined within the room.
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She and her husband do not notice me - it is their daughter who stares,
her lipsticked smile fading. She waves the hand on her lap beneath the table,
as if to shoo me away, but I’m too attracted to the dog’s thick breath across the
window. Finally, the father stands and pulls the dog away by the collar, while his
daughter draws the blinds. Soon after, the darkness engulfs my feet and legs and
body. I am completely lost in the calm, almost kind blackness of the night, almost
sinking into it, until the sharp scent of burnt dogwood forces me back to the
presence of my skin and muscle.
III. Father
Before dogwood there used to be the sweet scent of burnt cedar or oak
– sometimes even hickory, which smells so much like baked ham – that wafted
through the trees on my return from school. The fire pit, surrounded by a wall of
blackened stones, was Mom’s favorite place, and I think that’s why Dad never
tore it down. Before she was hospitalized, she sat out there in the sweaters she
kept from high school, too big for her even then.
My father doesn’t only burn wood anymore, but sweaters and dolls and
photographs. Tonight, books curl in the flames, their pages spinning in the heat
and the wind. I suppose that Dad found speckles of blood on them, like he’s
found on so many other things in the house. Mom had such a tendency to bleed;
the slightest brush of a kitchen knife, the prick of her fingers on raspberry thorns,