Dawn Raffel - Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

The stone is not visible.

“Reason you’re tall,” her brother had said, “is that I am holding you up.”

“ Here is a brand new fact,” she says. “Salt erodes rock.”

The boy asks a question she cannot answer.

“ Water,” she says.

What was she thinking? Wrong for a child — the scarf he wears. A purchase on impulse, too hand-made, an afterthought, or no thought at all. Rummage. Who knew where things came from? The tassels are wet.

“ Jupiter or Mars?” he says. “Where would you rather—”

“Rather be”—an end, not an answer.

A window or fist? A wish or a feather? Candy or rain.

“Rain,” he says. “Don’t want to be eaten.”

“Look at it, look out the window,” she says. Ice falls in drops. She smells the boy’s neck from the back, the nape; his smell a narcotic, impermanent, impossible — she knows it, she does. You do not have to tell her. Bottle it up.

“Rain,” he says.

“Then I will drink you.”

Someone is listening in on them. She hears the woman listen, behind her, intent.

He is sipping a drink from a box she brought. Provisions on her person, always, she thinks. Things stuck to her — a pouch, a container, fluid. Retention.

She says, “I see the future.”

His hair appears slick, poking out from a cap. He is sleepy, she thinks. Must be sleepy, she thinks. You are getting sleepy.

A wish if there was one.

Nausea, or craving, is creeping over her.

“Ask me?” he asks her. “Ask me again.”

Outside the window, seen through a smear: a school she once went to, a world subsumed — there’s nothing as it used to be. “Winter was colder then,” she says.

“When?” he says.

She turns to look behind her.

The boy makes legs on her arms with his fingers.

“ Listen, ” she says. “I would walk home alone, unless my brother was along.” The day that she stripped off her mittens, she says, her brother was someplace, no place, gone. “I wanted to touch the snow with my fingers. Snowballs and angels.” She touches his hand. “Please, don’t do that.”

“Which would you rather be?” he says. “A snowball or angel?”

“I mean it,” she says. “I was crying from cold when he found me there.”

“Who?” he says.

“Frostbite.”

She sees the boy regarding her. Blue, his eyes. She will not tell the boy what she did not tell her brother, her father. What is her job if not to protect? Protect the protectors! “Hands,” she says. “An officer returned me home. My mother ran water.”

The boy is still watching. His mittens are sensibly clipped to his sleeves; they dangle there. He chews the scarf’s tassels, caught in the act.

“ Foolish, ” she says. She feels the chill seeping, the gray of the sky. The driver has killed the heat, she thinks. Hands — the car, the gray of the light.

The parts of her frozen.

Salt destroys rock.

“Angel licks snowball.” The boy is a boy.

“Always wear your gloves,” she says.

Hours at the reservoir, fields, the road, looking for this or that to fear, and finding it, mostly. The boy will not travel alone, she thinks, at least not till he’s older and older again. The girl is the mother of the child.

She is kicked from within.

The doors open and close.

It is all of it used — a saturated wrapper, a patch from a snowsuit, a scarf, too large, in a favorite color.

Hood, sleeve, hat, boot.

A hole from somebody else’s exertions.

See the boy lean into her! “When?” he says. “Mama? When will we be there?”

“Mars?” she says.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Soon,” she says. “Sooner or later.”

Later her husband will carry the boy, beloved and sleeping, aloft, to bed.

Later she’ll take the hat, the kiss, the wet scarf unraveling.

Later she will say to him, “A bushel or a peck?”

All of the houses are yellow-lit, diffuse through the windows. Her belly is growing, even as she rides.

Later the children, as children do, will shield her the best that they can from her lapses, at least for a while.

“A wish or a feather?” the boy demands.

“ Wish,” she says.

He says, “A feather is real.”

Later she’ll think there was nobody listening in at all. That woman has vanished.

“Look,” she says. The street is theirs. The doors have been opened.

He rubs his eyes.

She’s got his hand.

“Home,” she says.

The boy appears stunned, as if freshly awake. “Where?” he says. “Where would you rather be?”

Mother is singing. It is afternoon again, or it is night, maybe later, an end of a day we have lived in our house, we have spent in our house; we are restless and lying in the glittering dark.

She is singing of Kentucky.

Mother, so far as we know her, has never much left the Midwest. La, la, go the words when she cannot remember.

The sheets smell of yard. The yard smells of burning: Grill, brickette.

Meat.

Leaves.

We will sing for our supper: Listen to us!

There’s a trellis out front of roses that climb and that won’t always be here, Mother has said. “Will not, do you hear me?” Mother has said, and not to us, and we have heard.

Mother’s hair is thick and dark. The voice is still darker. The wrist has a scent. It is some type of flower or essence — reduction — or mineral or element.

Carbon.

You is mighty lucky, Babe of old Kentucky.

Wisconsin is our residence, second generation; lucky to be here and eager to leave. Mother is first.

Men appear to like to look. And why would they not? Our mother is a beauty.

Our mother — and don’t you forget it — is ours.

We will sing of the places we will not go.

We will dress in her clothes: grosgrains, velveteens, moirés, swiss-dot samples, sequined bits. The belts and the darts! The height of our mother in shoes dyed to match! Silk if for night. See her drawing a blind.

Our father has left or is leaving again.

He is up in the air. He is standing on a wing in an aviator jacket.

Hand on hat.

Rose on wood.

Oil and water: Mother paints. All over the house are the scenes she has hung.

Her feet are in slippers, her voice in our sleep.

Skin, lamb.

We are counting our blessings, as Grandfather says. The food on the table: sugared and boiled, buttered, cured. Silver and tallow. The jelly is mint. “ Vot is this?”—he says to us, the accent congealed.