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Think of a time before last winter. Think: on your forty-sixth day since running away from home you visited my grave. The winter you saw boys kill squirrels with their hands, their palms slick with blood. The shotgun, the dead birds crumpled at your feet. The way your tongue hurt when the boys forced you to rename all the dead birds after gods. You named them all Apollo to make it easy. You brought me my first starling, a shivering heap of feathers to quiet my ghost.
Think back to a time when you learned to stop apologizing from how your father’s palm struck your frostbitten cheek. Or before you were born (or after, depending who asked) in the parlor, an artist’s steady hand inking a parable from your clavicle to your waist.
It was 1983, the year I began to haunt you from your hip. I buried myself in your ink fable on your body about the fox and the glass moon. But your reincarnations never remember much–only the brush of a stranger’s hand. Or the grave of someone they must have known in another life, because why else would you feel compelled to sit here in the dirt and wait?
The forty-sixth day you pick apart my grave with your teeth. Raving mad, hungering for my touch like you did in your first life. You brought me bird after bird, arranging their crumpled bodies by their names: blue jay, goose, passerine.
You began talking about the foxes, unsure what it meant.
I began to talk about the constellations you mapped, how you exhumed secrets about planetary systems with your palms.
You screamed about the foxes, about the night you ran away until your lungs burst. You screamed about your father with hands turned a ghostly blue like mine, about how much I looked like your father.
I decided there was no point explaining what you couldn’t hear. And I couldn’t stop looking at your blood stained hands. I couldn’t stop thinking about how, in another life, your fingers were stained with berries you stole from an arboretum. How, in another life, I was your fox. How I licked pomegranate juice from your moon-soft hips while I patiently waited for you to remember me watching you from berried trees.
Brianna McNish is an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut studying literature and film. Her writing previously appeared in Juked, Unbroken, among others, and she currently works as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications.
–Art by Ashley Holloway