The World Blinks On and Off

When we close our eyes

All life’s bruises are broken ships, I thought sometimes that summer late at night when we stood at our bedroom window and studied how clouds seemed a purely surface commotion. And often I imagined that the landscape inside our bodies was a raft, that the days were like crabapples shaken from a bough and whispering, Here is our sour bounty. You were pregnant with our first, and I remember dreaming one night that the world was at war and we sat on the bank of a muddy river, the sunlight anesthetizing our shoulders and making the leaves above us seem almost but not quite transparent. And in the dream, we spotted the carcasses of soldiers floating by, and I remember how needful the water sounded as it made its steady passage across the rocks. And you brought my hand to the slope of your belly, and the movement I felt there seemed a kind of furtiveness or penance. Then we lay back on the blanket and gazed up at the freight train of the clouds. And you said, Our child will be hypnotized by the birds oaring out on their wings. And I said, Look how the light falling through the leaves makes dappled patterns. And we napped in the heat, the hours like the laying on of hands.   

Fourteen Omens in Three Days 

The girl is watching her brothers throwing crabapples at the neighbor’s cat. Watching from the upstairs window. And she watches a raccoon lying belly up on the road, two vultures with their dark shrouds of wings lifting each time a car or truck passes by. And later, when she steps out the back door and feels the soft grass beneath her feet, she looks up at a day moon left like a discarded snakeskin in the sky. And she knows this is her birthright, knows that her brothers are somewhere out there in the woods, maybe down by the river, and when they come back they will throw acorns at her head or spray her with the hose or drag her toward the open mouth of the yellowjacket nest. Once she ventured near enough that she saw the swarm moving in and out of the earth. It was primitive and ancient, like the ground itself was giving birth. And the next day, her dog leaves four bright drops of red on the kitchen floor. And the day after that, she helps her mother find horn worms on the tomato plants, and one of the tomatoes has a dark black opening in its side. In her dream that night, her brothers drown her in the river then leave her lying on the grass. In her dream, she says to her brothers, Please. And her brothers summon the yellowjackets that swarm around her with their dance, and the yellowjackets say, This is your original body.