The Hum of Flame, the Murmur of Honey

Every morning, Da carries my sister Cora down to the hives to check on the honey. She screws her eyes shut and leaves marks in his shoulders from her fingers, legs real stiff so her feet don’t dangle. Da carries her like china, walking careful down the hill so he doesn’t jostle her none. Cora sniffs at the air the whole time; she says she wants to know if air smells the same outside as it does through the window.

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The people at church

poor Daniel
how does he cope
that poor crippled girl
and that boy one of the devil’s own

whisper a lot. Da tells me not to listen, but it’s like the bees’ drone. I can’t drown ‘em out, or ignore it, no matter how hard I try. Even when the preacher’s giving the sermon, I notice them elbowing each other and talking behind their hymnals. Instead of “Nearer My God to Thee,” all I hear is

Bill lost three horses in that fire
of course the mother was no better than she should be
the poor man
but i suppose he’s made his bed

and it’s all I can do to keep from making fists. Cora tried coming once but she said the organs made it even worse, that they were too loud, and it felt like she was in a bunch of places at once. Da makes me go by myself. He can’t leave the bees, and he says it would make everybody too happy if our family stopped coming.

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Da bought Cora a new bed last Christmas and I got her a spice rack. She was so happy she jumped up and hugged both of us. All that day, she played guessing games with the spices, trying to identify without looking. For her birthday, I painted her ceiling with bees and flowers, fruits and clouds. She hid under a drop-cloth with just her eyes peeking out, munching her cake and watching. I let her lick the brush when she asked; she said the paint tasted like old eggs. Sometimes she doesn’t have any sense, when it comes to trying new flavors.
----

They talk even more

hey freak
queerboy
you like fire
i’ve got something hot for you

at school, shoving me against the lockers and laughing. They brag about stuff they did with my mom, tell me what they’re gonna do with my sister. The guidance counselor ignores my latest black eye and pushes the technical school brochures across her desk, smiling. I stare down her shirt to make the time pass; I’m not stupid enough to talk about art colleges. She gets excited when I tell her about the bees, her hands fluttering

family business, how wonderful
that will be a good opportunity for you
how is your sister, dear
she is so inspiring, how she copes with her disability

as she hurries me out of her office. I let her push me. She’s right, of course. I’ll never go away from home. In math, I don’t bother to pay attention, just fill up my notebook with scribbles. The shrink said that I draw fire when I doodle and that I’m trying to release my anger at mom for leaving, but I just like the way the pen feels, that soft glide of ink over the paper.

----

We sell mail-order honey that Da and I bottle ourselves. Cora, tucked into a corner with blankets around her, tells me what to put in each jar. I try to listen, but it’s hard. We melt honeycomb for sealing, and the matches flicker a lot. The fire shines nice against the honey, blue and orange in the pale yellow. Cora yells when I get distracted. She says she can taste the difference. Sometimes she gets so mad that she clambers to her feet and tries to chase after me, but she always falls.

----

When I poured

shh
hsh hsh hsh
hissssssss
shh shh

the gasoline onto the hay, I could taste the smoke in the back of my throat, but it was more than that. For just a second, I tasted the fire that would come out of it, and newly sharpened pencils, and the mud Da uses to treat bee stings. As I stumbled away,

ahhhhhh
hush hush hush
mmmm
shh shh

the world spinning, my mouth watering, I wondered if this was how Cora felt all the time.

And for a second, I hated her.

In Which We Forgot About Magellan

Somebody with a less politically correct grasp of history had named the initial probes to Xithe after Columbus’s ships, obviously intending some grand gesture.

The Nina, largest of the three, miscalculated the entry angle and crashed, killing all but three of its crew of seventeen. They managed to convert their living quarters into a make-shift escape pod and fly out of the atmosphere, where a passing garbage ship picked them up.

The Pinta was infiltrated by an eco-fanatic who disabled the landing gear and trashed the guidance systems. They jettisoned him but could do nothing about the damage, so were forced to turn back home without making landfall.

The Santa Maria made it onto Xithe without any problems. However, the ship touched down in the territory of those people later nicknamed “Wildings.” An attempt at communication ended with the Wildings eating all eight crew members and pushing the Santa Maria into a lake.

When the Santa Maria’s flight recorder returned with the news, (the ‘bot so upset from its dunking that it gibbered and threw sparks), the UN of E urged calm. But the released photos of the crime, and the Wildings’ appearance (lanky apes with dinner-plate-sized squid eyes,) created a public outcry that couldn’t be quenched, so the Lusitania was duly equipped with a double cargo of peace-keeping materials—loaded with both heat- and bio-seeking missiles, just in case.

But Earth is civilized, so the Lusitania hovered in mid-air above the Wildings camp and offered up their terms of surrender.

It was then that they learned the Wildings’ aquatic nature, as the still-working gun turrets of the Santa Maria erupted into action, a grinning Wilding clambering over each weapon. A lucky shot hit the fuel tanks and the Lusitania exploded. A few made it to their parachutes and jumped out.

At which point the Wildings emerged, tracked them down, and ate them.

Furious, the UNE sent a dozen warships over, each bristling with the latest in planet-cracking arsenal. Giving the order to fire, the commander was surprised to see the Santa Maria limp out of the atmosphere, battered but transmitting the desperate cry of a Lusitania crew member, who had somehow hidden from the Wildings. The commander told the nearest ship—which happened to be the Hindenburg—to assist the wounded vessel and bring the survivor aboard.

It took only fifteen minutes for the Wildings, who were giggling in the voices of their various meals, to sweep through the Hindenburg, gain access to the controls, and blow up half the fleet. The rest of the ships fled.

As they sped away, they noticed that the Wildings were busy collecting the few intact bodies left in the devastation.

Closer examination revealed that they were licking their lips.

Practical, Not Lyrical

I must not be a poet,
for in my night
there is no beautiful moon,
no mysterious stars,
but a porch light
with a cracked shade.
Moths skitter on my face
and I itch in disgust.
Where there should be
bumps in the night,
there is a cat-food stuffed possum
that shuffles into the bushes.
It smells like wet dog.

I must not be a poet,
because I am not remembering
a long lost love,
but instead wondering
if I will ever get the correct ratio
for the weed-whacker’s fuel.
I’m sick of sputtering one minute
and the kind of roar that makes me worry
about explosions the next second.
The stars remind me
of the grocery list I promised to make—
do I need milk?

I must not be a poet.
A mosquito just bit my elbow
and it itches like hell.
The cream better not have expired again.

Cross Country

She hates to run long distance. She hates the grueling pump bump pump of racing over courses that a goat would balk at. She hates getting lost, and she always gets lost, ending up in front of people who left her behind twenty minutes ago. They look at her with red eyes and she flushes, stepping aside to let them pass.

Once, stumbling along on tired legs and leaning against a stitch in her side, she came across a deer on the path. It stared at her, wide-eyed, before racing into the trees again, and she knew that she was so far behind that the huffing and puffing of her teammates had faded from even the timid fawn’s ears.

The coach speaks to her only when absolutely necessary, treating her with indifference the rest of the time. They both know she’ll never be an asset, never be one of the girls standing on a platform accepting a cheap metal medal on a patriotic ribbon. He mumbles lukewarm encouragement as she passes, her hair soaked in an attempt to stay cool. His face is already turned to the runner behind her, a boy who wears the coveted spikes purchased for top runners.

Oh, she tries, though she hates it. She attends every practice, lagging behind with a grim face, sweat staining the brace she wears on her left knee. At an invitational, she dry-heaves near the end, her stomach shuddering as she spits into the yellow grass. She feels a weird sense of pride for this and goes to her couch to obtain approval.

So, did I give 100%?

No. Maybe 93%.

Her muscles clench and she walks away, looking for something to put into her stomach so that when she throws up into a port-o-potty, it won’t hurt as much. A shoelace flops and she ignores it, the aglet tangling in dirt and pine needles. She wonders if anyone else on the team knows what an aglet is.

Eventually, the season ends. There is a dinner and she goes, eating squares of pizza and watching the seniors accept their praise and farewell gifts. She doesn’t know any of them except as irritated profiles. The coach does a small speech about each team member. She doesn’t remember a word he says about her, and doubts that he does either.

And then—track

—jumping—she laughs, smiles—

jumps and jumps and jumps—and wins

—her stubby legs are springs—and she bounces

—through the air—her socks stained by pit sand—

sunglasses tumble off her face at every leap—

nobody can touch her—she flies

—she thinks that—

Summer comes, and with it the end of the year, of the season, and something of her joy spills into the endless long distance practices that return with the heat. She finds a bit of wind in her and sprints around the lake, whistling at the frogs that part as their crowd thunders past. Time drops off her in chunks and suddenly she understands the group meetings, her arms propped on the shoulders of her teammates, chanting before their race.

Junior varsity, where she runs, is a dumping ground for the young and superfluous but she doesn’t care, treasuring her first medal as if it were important. She pounds a nail into her wall to display it, still wearing her shorts and tank top and now two knee braces, her slim ankles tan. The closet acquires a bevy of cheap T-shirts with ugly logos, her name usually spelled wrong, and she wears them to school, smiling when she finds a twin.

Deep down she knows that their section win really has nothing to do with her, she can still squeezes into the team picture, eyes no longer obscured by glasses. She grins from the top of the pyramid their limbs can hold only for a minute before it collapses into a heap of giggling girls who rub elbows and heads and throw beans at each other.

She is happy.

And if the pizza at the end of the season dinner still tastes like seasoned cardboard, at least this time she shares it with the girls who run fifty miles a week and think nothing of it. They drink too much pop so that their conversations get loud, echoing in the school cafeteria as their coach talks to their parents.

When the girls in her grade stand up for their individual speeches, she ends up in the middle, a little awkward in her skirt and heels. She fidgets as she waits for her turn, detached enough even now to want to roll her eyes at the stirring phrases he uses for each girl. They are all wonderful athletes, all tough, all fighters. . . she tugs at a seam as he says her name, smiling for the flash of her mother’s camera.

Jenny has very little running ability.

She blinks. The camera doesn’t flash and it takes her a moment to figure out why, a moment to notice that the room has gone silent with embarrassment, and then she takes in another gust of air and his words register. She flushes and lets out a ragged laugh, her breath skittering in her lungs like she was at the end of the third mile.

He continues speaking, now back to the familiar format of trying hard, and the steel pity goes out of the cafeteria, but she doesn’t really hear anything.

very little running ability.

When he presses the “most improved” plaque into her hand—an honor he gives to another girl as well, the first double award they’re ever had—she feels nothing. The polished red glints against her eyes and turns smeary for a second until she can find her other arm and wipe her face.

little, very little

Her friends congratulate her timidly as the next group files onto the stage. They pat her as she places the award upside-down on the table.

ability

She drums her feet against the chair with heavy thuds.

The Returning Tide

Grinding it to sand,
the ocean pulls my body
cell by cell—
out of landlocked earth
that smells of pine and coal,
and never of salt.

Who would have imagined
my death so far from home,
my hands grasping at air
instead of sand?

Thank God for the moon,
the creeping water,
a sea that doesn’t abandon its own.

Only at These Times

I love to say I love you:

by whisper in the middle of the night,
my words an emu’s wings
brushing across your slumber,
disturbing not even the spider
that crawls between the curtain
and the rod.

I love to say I love you:

in triumph,
shouted at the end of a race
or when I’m proven right,
my tone like orange bells
dredged from a century’s submersion,
gasping on shore.

I love to say I love you:

to lampposts at dawn,
near tortoises that gather by the roadside,
with the sort of thick throat
that precludes a tumbling out
of a lie, a secret, or—at last resort—
the truth.