Water by Alison Jean Kinney
Mother is weaving a net on the ceiling made of sailors’ rope. She braids, knots, and untangles, muttering instructions from a maritime book she found in Granddaddy’s collection. It will be sturdy and beautiful, she says. When it’s done, we’ll climb in it, hang upside down from it, and sleep in it.
Mother is always working and so she is always above us, looking over us as we play. Sometimes she curses and sometimes she sings. When she sings, we ask for pie.
We are building a mountain of pillows. Mother calls down to us to find our baby sister, so we pull her from beneath a boulder. She stops crying and jumps back onto Pillow Mountain only to fall into a crevasse.
“Don’t worry! We will rescue her!”
Granddaddy died. Mother says that means he’s gone forever, but she won’t say where. She says he’s not coming back but won’t say why. I ask if that means he isn’t her dad anymore. She shakes her head, no, and turns back to her rope.
Brother makes a new rule on Pillow Mountain: no questions, no questions at all. I make a new rule too: no dying, no dying at all. Everyone agrees to the new rules, and we get back to work: building and trampling.
I am a rabbit now, hopping with all my might to my burrow. My baby sister is just a little bunny. She can’t keep up, so I drag her into the burrow for safety. Brother Eagle is circling, calling out the cry of a patient hunter.
“No dying at all!” I yell from inside my burrow. But Brother is relentless. He swoops down, destroying our burrow. “No dying!” I yell again, this time to Mother because now I am crying and Baby Sister is sliming my face with her drool. When Brother Eagle grabs hold of Baby Bunny’s foot, she laughs. She doesn’t understand the danger.
Then, a catastrophe. Or maybe a miracle: the moon begins to fall to earth. A white balloon which we had called the moon and tied to Mother’s net just that morning, sprang loose and is floating down slowly toward Pillow Mountain, or what’s left of it. Brother Eagle swoops beneath, holding the moon high upon his golden wings and tosses it back up to its home in the sky. The animals rejoice. They jump, they cheer, they take each other’s hands and spin round and round until they fall to the floor laughing.
When father gets home, he stands beneath Mother’s ladder and holds the rope on his shoulders, inching it up to her, so that the weight of it doesn’t burden her body any longer. She works late and we lay on blankets beneath her. We ask her questions, and she tells us about the things that she knows. She calls these things poems.
In the morning we wake to water. The tide has snuck in on us again. Mother is lifting us up the ladder and laying us in the net on the ceiling, now nearly finished. Father is moving about in his mud boots lifting furniture onto cinder blocks. Water comes in under the door and through the cracks in the floorboards.
In my nest I wrap myself in a blanket and somebody sits on me. This is how we play Mama Bird and Baby Bird. I like to be the baby.
Father climbs the ladder with coffee and a plate of toast and blueberries. I squirm in my blanket egg, then pounce out. I make a show of it, with a lot of little tweets and squawks until somebody brings me a blueberry to eat.
Brother says if we live in this nest long enough, we’ll learn to be birds. When the Big Water finally takes our home, we’ll fly to the mountain top. And, if there is fire on the mountain, we’ll fly to the marshland and feast on fish.
Father frowns and says: “Our kind is a wilting rose.”
“At least we know love,” Mother replies.
I say that Brother’s idea is good. In fact, my first feather could be sprouting now from the crook of my elbow, so I flap my arms, to show them what it means to be wings. But my left wing hits against something hot. I have nearly spilled mother’s coffee on Baby Sister. Mother says I must calm my body, but I cannot stop flapping my wings or I will fall.
I call down to my family that I will miss them, that I regret that they too did not grow wings. Mother looks angry that I am leaving her behind. I tell her that I will visit and that I will bring fish to feast on. She is climbing down the ladder now, out of the nest.
“Ducklings in a row,” she says, and we know she means business.
Brother hurries over. We follow suit. Even father gets in line behind her. We hop from the ladder to the couch, and from the couch, through the living room window to the dunes behind the house.
We walk the path through the wooly sunflowers to the highest dune with the Bay to one side and the ocean waves to the other.
I know of a place where the tufts of dune grass grow in a circle. I will build my nest there and search for bugs.
The baby tries to keep up with me as I hurry up the path, but she slides down the side of the dune, taking in a mouthful of sand. I try to take her by the straps of her overalls and hold her upright, but she pushes me away. Mother tries to pick her up, but she screams.
“She wants to do it herself,” I say.
“Stubborn girl,” Mother says with love.
Mother says that we’ll have to be stubborn to make this life beautiful.
Alison Jean Kinney is a writer based in Arcata, CA. Fine art books featuring her work have shown in galleries such as the San Francisco Center for the Book and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Her stories have appeared in The Normal School, Spartan, and others.
5 July 2024
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