Catherynne Valente - White Lines on a Green Field

Coyote leaves a hole when he goes. He danced on this town til it broke. That’s the trick, and everyone falls for it.

But they all had kids, didn’t they? Are they remembering that wrong? What happened to them all?

Memory is funny—only Sarah Jane (real estate, Rotary, Wednesday night book club) can really remember her baby. Everyone just remembers the corn and the feeling of running, running so fast, the whole pack of us, against the rural Devil gold sunset. I call that a kindness. ( Why me? Sarah asks her gin. You were the queen , I say. That was you. Only for a minute. ) It was good, wasn’t it, they all want to say. When we were all together. When we were a country, and Coyote taught us how to grow such strange things.

Why did I stick around, they all want to know. When he took off, why didn’t I go, too? Weren’t we two of a kind? Weren’t we always conspiring?

Coyote wins the big game, I say. I get the afterparty.

This is what I don’t tell them.

I woke up before anyone the morning after the championships. Everyone had passed out where they stood, laying everywhere like a bomb had gone off. No corn, no pumpkins, no watermelons. Just that cold lake morning fog. I woke up because my pick-up’s engine fired off in the gloam, and I know that sound like my mama’s crying. I jogged over to my car but it was already going, bouncing slowly down the dirt road with nobody driving. In the back, Coyote sat laughing, surrounded by kids, maybe eight or ten years old, all of them looking just like him, all of them in leather jackets and hangdog grins, their black hair blowing back in the breeze. Coyote looked at me and raised a hand. See you again. After all, it’s nothing we haven’t done before.

Coyote handed a football to one of his daughters. She lifted it into the air, her form perfect, trying out her new strength. She didn’t throw it. She held it tight, like it was her heart.