Wash Day by Stephanie Mullings

“Cow so evil, so bully, knock your spirit right out yuh chest. Fall on yuh ass and pray to God yuh ain’t dead,” Lilith’s Uncle Man told her before she left. Her grip on the barrel of clothes had already numbed her tiny fingers; she was headed down pon river for wash day. 

“If cow knocks out me soul, how me pick it back up?” she asked him. 

“If yuh lucky, hold out yuh hand and God hand it back. If yuh unlucky the other man, one downstairs, not be so polite.” 

Lilith and Gerald met at Reynolds Farm, where they would walk to the river together on wash days. Not together, according to Gerald, when the other boys teased that Lilith was his girl. We walk with space in between, yuh heard? Nough space put a whole boat between us. It is proven that Man and his woman don’t walk like that.  Gerald had been attempting to calculate the exact distance between their feet after one of the boys had asked him exactly how far apart, in real measurement. He thought it could be anywhere from seventeen to twenty-one inches apart, typically depending on if she had a large load. The larger a load of laundry, the more she lost her balance and stumbled, always to her left side, where Gerald walked alongside her. He would stick out his elbow, knocking her back into place. Cyaan walk in your own place? Lilith poked her tongue at him. She had even licked him once. Across his cheek to his earlobe. At least seven feet, Gerald told the other boys. 

“How yuh look evil cow right in da eye?”

 “What fool look evil cow right in da eye?” Lilith asked Gerald. 

“A fool who know how to get cross to odda side. Me ain’t scared no cow.” 

“Now yuh know Reynolds been keeping a mad cow. Say his horns made of iron, and he want to be fed meat.” 

“Me ain’t scared no cow. Me stare right into it. Me tell it, I dare yuh come chargin’ at me. Me take yuh by da horns and flip yuh right on yuh backside.” 

“Boy, yuh done know who yuh mess wid.” Lilith kissed her teeth. They crouched together at the wire posting, which marked the start of Reynolds’ cattle field. The mad cow had put three farmers, including old Reynolds himself, in the hospital. Broken tailbone. Bust his ass, Gerald had laughed. No one could get rid of it. Mad cow was rooted in the ground. Declared itself whole. Full up of pride. Lilith’s Uncle told her that Reynolds put rifle in between its eyes after his recovery but couldn’t pull the trigger. 

Why Uncle? 

Someting fight so hard for life, yuh best let it live it. 

“Me say yuh head dere, to the right. Me head left. We confuse it dat way, won’t know which one of us to take and by da time it decide—” Gerald clapped his hands softly together “—We meet in da middle and run like hell down pon the river.” 

Lilith clapped her hands against his, sandwiching them. His skin was rough. She already knew what it tasted like. She had licked salt, earth, ocean water. Dried, like the Leaf of Life, what her mother said cleansed you from the inside out. 

“We go on three.”  

Lilith looked ahead, over the iron horns of the mad cow, past the cattle field, down the dirt hill, through the gravel, to the softened soil where the river water flooded and the sun came doubled, overhead and at the surface. She closed her eyes and counted. Faster than Gerald. Who kept his eyes open, seeing only what were in front of him, their hands, wound. He whispered slowly, starting at zero, in time with her breaths, knowing that she would get there before him. 

Stephanie Mullings is a fiction writer from Chicago, Illinois. She is a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program and a recipient of the Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship and Roy Cowden Memorial Fellowship. Stephanie is a winner of the 2021 First Pages Prize, and her writing has appeared in Open Ceilings Literary Magazine and Bat City Review. Presently, she is a doctoral student in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

15 October 2021