Breadcrumb #628

VALERIE HUGHES

My sister digs, a greased up ring of hair falling in front of her eyes, clinging to her gaunt cheekbone, but ultimately failing to break her concentration. Wavering above her on tired feet, I smell the ripeness of her, three halos of sweat ringing the armpits and collar of her yellowing t-shirt. Her hands plunge into the earth, coming up and looking black in the moon’s glow, darker than blood.

“Stop.”

She doesn’t flinch.

“Christa.”

Nothing. Bending down, my fingers find her shoulder but she wrenches away and stumbles over her long-forgotten shovel. Dodging the holes she already made--who knows how long she was doing this for before I woke up--she thrusts her hands into a new spot of grass.

There’s no need for her to fully look at me; I know she’s high. My stomach feels alarmingly empty but if I tried, I could throw up. Despite the summer’s thick night she wears her pink hoodie, sleeves religiously at her wrists. Scabs across her face are caught in the moonlight, the bridge of her nose shadowed with dirt. Her lips move so fast that I’m not sure if she’s saying anything until I hear the stream of words knotted together in a guttural murmur.

She gives up digging in one spot to turn to the next with me lamely trailing after her, my feet getting caught in the holes. More than once I find myself standing on the edge of one of them, the dirt crumbling underneath me.

Following her brings me back to when we were younger, of me always just at her heels and itching to play with her toys, read her books. She enveloped my whole world and I held a pressing awareness of her habits. I scorned Mom’s black bean soup even though I loved it, painted my nails a muted brown for months just because she gave me the polish. And all the while, Christa would watch me under heavy lids, brown eyes turned gold, and smile. A genuine smile, glowing. My best friend.

“She enveloped my whole world and I held a pressing awareness of her habits.”

Now I can’t remember the last time we had a chance to be alone like this. For the past few months, her bedroom door has almost always been closed. She’s grunted at me in greeting and walked out the front door with purpose, calling to Mom that she was off to work. There was that night in June when she didn’t come home and I called her eight times, getting angrier at her voicemail each time her chirp greeted me, “It’s Chris, you missed me!” She came home at dawn and I was in her room, waiting. She looked sick, her skin sticking to her bones like it belonged there, but her voice was so smooth. She never once looked away from me. “Jesus, Karie, relax. I got drunk and stayed at John’s, didn’t want to drive. Don’t tell Mom and Dad about this, they don’t need to freak out over nothing. Can you let me sleep, please?” No room for my voice to fit around hers but I went along with it anyway.

A lump beings to grow in my throat. “What are you looking for?”

She never looks my way.

Exhaling sharply through my nose, I say, “I know about the library.”

Finally, she stills.

“Laura told me they fired you, she offered me your job. What have you been doing this last month? Where were you tonight?”

She clicks her tongue, eyes flicking up to meet mine as she lifts her middle finger. “You don’t look like Mom to me.”

I go to touch her but she jerks away, out of reach. “Why are you pushing me out?” I ask, my voice cracking. Hot tears roll down my cheeks and I wipe them away quickly, frustrated at myself for crying. “I’m the only one you have left.”

She haughtily shakes her head at me. “That’s not true.” Lifting a chunk of grass out of the earth, she gasps and further shoves her hands in deeper. She looks like a dog, squatting with her feet apart so she can push the dirt between her legs. Laughing, she pulls a small wooden box out of the earth. It’s the jewelry box Grandma gave her for her eighth birthday, one with a fairy that spun around when she opened it. She was distraught, howling, “I didn’t want this!”

“What the hell’s in there?”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” she snarls while tripping over the destroyed ground. The box flies from her grip, sending a bunch of crinkled dollar bills across the lawn.

Even in the darkness, I can tell that they’re only ones and fives but Christa yelps, feverishly shoving bills into her pockets while hissing, “I’m leaving, I’m leaving!”

I launch towards her when she glances at her car at the end of the driveway and latch onto her arm. I’m crying openly now, wet snot on my upper lip. “Don’t go, this isn’t you. Please,” I whisper. I hate myself for being quiet but yelling for Mom and Dad will really get her to leave. Our house looms behind her, the blank front windows gawking at us.

“This isn’t me?” she laughs coldly, wrenching her arm away. Her eyes are wide, jumping all over me, from my face to my slippers to my stained sweatpants. With a smile, she flicks her wrists to sling dirt onto me. “I feel good, Karie. And here you are taking that all away from me. All you ever do is hold me back and all of you,” she waves her arms to gesture to the house, “are so manipulative, this is what you all do-- you look at me and beg and beg me to change but I don’t want to fucking change! This is the best I’ve been.”

“You’re high.” It’s all I can think to say.

With a scoff she says, “You know I love you but you make it hard. You can’t even see that I’m happy.” Her eyes fall from mine as she digs into her pocket to unearth her car keys.

My breath hitches. “Don’t drive, Christa. Just come inside. We want to help you.”

She bolts for her car and I dart after her, trying to grab her, my hands skimming through her hair, so close, but she’s faster, closing herself into the driver’s seat with a slam of the car door.

“Mom! Dad!” I scream, banging on Christa’s window.

She stubbornly stares straight ahead and jams the key into the ignition. Tears run down her cheeks and I keep yelling, the words straining against my throat, my palms burning from slapping the cool glass and there’s the creak of the front door but it’s too late, Christa throws the car into reverse and careens down the driveway. I run after the car, stopping in the middle of the road, breathless, as Christa flies away from me, the summer’s sticky darkness pulling her in. The car’s taillights are red mouths closing, silenced by the night. Sobs race through me and I look back at the house to see my parents’ silhouettes, tall and nameless. Cheeks tight from crying, my eyes catch on a steady and perfect square of light from our living room window splayed out on the grass, creating the illusion that someone’s home.

• • •

Breadcrumb #627

TSAHAI MAKEDA

We want them to love us
We want them to find glory
In between the spaces that
No one dares enter
For fear of getting lost
In the search for
Innocence
In a place where
It never dwelled

We want them to see us
See us for the beings
That we really are
Whole and sure
See us for the strength
That we embody
See us for the power
That we carry

We want them to hear us
Hear us moan in the night
Alone in the bed
As we long 
For them
For what we want 
From them

We 
Want
Them

• • •

Breadcrumb #626

ERIN DORNEY

Each time I add a shell to my pocket, another disappears. Bright pink and tiny as newborn nails crumbling to dust between my fingers. The sliding glass doors in the lobby double onto themselves and I study it—they’re my mentors now. On all four an etched wave multiplies, never quite aligned but almost. 

The waves are there to protect people, children, birds—all who mistake glass for mirror, search for glimpses of their next selves. The waves double and undouble, the girls follow each other around the trickling fountain. 

Overhead the chandelier sways like a slow zoom. I haven’t yet told anyone how I can make things larger and smaller with my eyes. How I can shrink a woman down to crib-sized and fatten a man until he bursts. How scale changes meaning in a heartbeat, the amount of time it takes for the next wave to come once you’ve already heard the first crashing. 

“How I can shrink a woman down to crib-sized and fatten a man until he bursts.”

The waves, I tell the child hiding behind the sticky wicker chair next to the Birds of Paradise in stinky water—the waves are the only ones who touch my other body, the only ones who know it’s there, a small shell crumbling in a clenching and unclenching hand, a girl knee-deep in the mosaic fountain. 

The child turns, runs, topples the “Check Out” sign, and falls. We watch the mother scream. The doors open again and again, an insatiable mouth—sometimes at the last minute, sometimes when no one is around at all. A wave is always there just in time, ready to wrap itself around you. The steady pressure of water, open arms.

• • •

Breadcrumb #625

LINDSeY FRANCES PELLINO

it’s hereditary, isn’t it?
the morbid heirloom. a tradition 
in which i dissect each disaster
frog belly in the lamp light
slime yellow skin peeling its curtain
prematurely, as practice. 

i have taxidermied the death of my family
in a thousand different ways. the mind is not a prison
but a factory.

the first panic attack i can remember
blooming its moon flower in my amygdala
i sit on the floor, using the couch as a desk,
doing my homework, using one of those
“scalp tingle massage” wands on head.
my mom goes out to dinner with her friend,
and the thought - the eerie smoothness
of a riverspun pebble - lodged, seedlike,
lodestone, homebase.

she is going to die.

she didn’t, she doesn’t, she hasn’t,
yet. but that antipearl of angst
still worms its way through
the meat of my skull. age nine 
to now. a fine wine.

this thread i’ve shared with
those who can’t leave the house,
can’t cross bridges, can’t fly on planes,
can’t breathe, can’t reproduce 
without post-partum psychosis,
can’t make it without at least one
attempt to check out -

this thread quilts me in,
one soft square,

in its tapestry of mirrors.

• • •

Breadcrumb #624

GWEN VAN VELSOR

This place is not my home anymore but it once was. Kombucha is for sale at the newsstand and a white guy with greasy hair plays acoustic guitar in the airport. I wonder if he gets paid to play or if he does it just to turn people on. Native place names still exist here: Tacoma, Tualatin, Tenino, Willamette. Just names to many of us now but also remnants of who this place belongs to. Like finding an old cement foundation in a field where a house used to stand. 

The freeway turns into dark highway turns into darker road with a yellow dotted line up the middle indicating freedom to pass a slow truck even in the rain with no street lights. The glow of deer eyes on the shoulder around every bend causes me to grip the wheel too tightly, repeating the mantra to drive through the deer if they decide to bound into my headlights, instead of slamming on the breaks. 

The coffee pot perks its never-ending song all day at my sister’s house. We share marionberry pie and pass the new baby around from embrace to embrace. Salt air makes its way up to the second-floor bedroom where I go to sleep early under a homemade quilt. At 5 am my eyes won’t stay closed any longer and I get dressed and drive the seven minutes into town to find an open coffee shop. 

“We share marionberry pie and pass the new baby around from embrace to embrace.”

The dark roads are illuminated by the Astoria Column, still lit up in holiday colors. I detour up the curvy road, guarded by endless deer, and park in the misty rain. This tourist overlook is home to a painted column for tourists to climb and admire the view. I trudge up to the old wooden door in an inadequate cotton jacket. Somehow, at 6 am, it’s open. I climb the metal spiral staircase, up and up, 164 steps to another wooden door leading to a small balcony overlooking the mouth of the great Columbia, where fresh becomes salt, the sea absorbing this massive river without effort. It’s dark now, nearly two hours until sunrise, but it’s easy to make out the swathes of land and water below, sprinkled with red and white light. 

The Columbia was once a wild thing, waterfalls and rapids spilling over boulders and carved rock. But now it’s nearly placid, deep enough to support huge freight ships that twinkle in the dark of the early morning. The dams make this body of water a wide one, supporting electric life on either side. This river runs deeply inside my body, a cold aorta slowly carving canyons through my flesh. I am home. This is my place, although I’ve denied its memory. I see my reflection in the heavy clouds, my face in every drop of rain. 

Later, under filtered daylight, my nephew and I squat in the backyard near a crumbling old stump covered in slippery black mushrooms and pale green moss, a fairy house. We find tiny purple flowers and thumbnail-sized pinecones, wrap them in alder leaves and place them near the door of the house as gifts, in reverence to this forest, the roots of these trees and to our own connection to this place we were born. 

I dig into the loamy earth and find pieces of my fingernails, clumps of hair, groundwater tinted with my blood. All around me the ferns and colored mosses are remembrances of who I once was, the makeup of my bones. 

Since I’ve been absorbed by the salt I’ve forgotten so much of this place. I don’t know if my soul remembers it, or longs for it. But my bones do. They know the rain, not as cold dampness, but as the source of my life. They know the land, as their own brothers and sisters. 

Back at the airport, a man plays “Come Together,” on an electric xylophone. I sip a perfect foamy latte and breakfast on chia seeds and yogurt. I don’t long to come home here, but rather allow myself to be from here. Allow my bones to long for the soil from which they came. I don’t know how far I’m going, or if I’ll ever come home. But this is my place. 

In the sunrise distance, aboard the plane, Mt. Hood comes alive. Stone covered in clean snow against milky clouds. The man beside me lets out a low gasp.  Frozen waterfalls suspend their spill into the river at the foot of the mountain. I breathe a deep, warm breath, and remember.

• • •