What was once one of the fishing fleet had become
driftwood. This wood was beautiful at every stage of
its life and perhaps, one day, its matter would again
become part of a tree.
Angela Abrahams
My mama would sense me in the air behind her and her shoulders would soften. Always with her back turned, when her bathrobe was drawn tight under an apron the color of a terracotta pot.And she’d make room. Pulled my own apron— white with pink flowers on the pockets —off a hook over the pantry door for me ’til I got big enough to get the thing myself. Lucked out on itwhile spelunkin’ through heaps of discounted rags at the Pick-N-Save, ’cause Mama told me the only way she’d let me cook with her was if I found one in my size.
I miss the dance of it. There’s this unspoken choreo you do each time you’re in a place of peace like that. Mama taught it to me one meal at a time, whenever I’d reach through the gap between a hand on her hip, or moments when she’d toe open a cabinet door and I’d limbo under her leg. I was never in her way when we were in the kitchen.
On the rare occasions the boys were good— all of ’em at the same time —we’d do my mama’s favorite: chicken-fried steak on a bed of greens, honey-glazed carrots, and these big rolls with homemade apple butter. Bread’d be baked so warm, it’d brown like sun-kissed skin and steam when you pulled it apart. But only when they were good. Chicken-fried steak was a rarity in the Miller house. When they were tapdancin’ on her last nerve, we’d do stew.
Not as a punishment, though. Wasn’t like the stew was nasty. It’s ’cause stew knocked ’em out. Seein’ as there was no such thing as seconds in my family, the boys’d guzzle down every drop like they’d never eat again ’cause even the stew was made with some kind of magic or another.
I learned at a young age just how sacred a space a kitchen can be. You have to learn it quick: findin’ respite in a house full of boys. Little demons. Boys with black grit under their fingernails, that touch and move and spit the way they do. Boys who, I’m thankful, always happened to be busy when dishes needed doin’ or beans needed snappin’. Maybe it was the clean of that space. No place to spit. Nowhere for the grime that collected along the creases of their palms to go, save for the drain.
That linoleum was holy ground, and demons can’t stand on holy ground for long.
For as long as I can remember, city hall was never made up of people who understood just what it was that made Sonder Port home. The woods around the house were scraggly then, thicker a few miles away, where the river cuts the town straight in half. A river that city hall was determined to turn into a tourist trap, year or two before I was born. Hard hats finally abandoned the construction when the money went, and I got to grow up watchin’ the world take the land back.
The world outside our trailer knows the dance my mama taught me. Looked like saplings curlin’ up into twisted, adolescent trunks. Branches were interlockin’ fingers, holdin’ hands, promisin’ to keep nighttime secrets. And guardin’ the water jealously.
Animals came back a little after the site went belly-up: all the crickets and toads and every crawlin’ thing that filled the world with a constant, subtle, backwoods jazz. The twins griped and moaned, talmbout how it messed with their sleep, but honestly? The older one would say somethin’ and the one born a few minutes later would always follow suit, swearin’ it was their twin telepathy to blame and not the long-staled sour gummies under the mattress they shared.Makes sense it was the twins that doomed us to stew the night I started noticin’ things. The Bucciarelli boy made a joke— who knows what about —and Josiah was on him, rabid and frothin’ like only a boy can be. There was a rage there, too. Foreign. A discoloration untended to that Isaiah must have shared, ’cause he came runnin’ to his brother’s side without a second’s hesitation. Guess it doesn’t matter whose blood ended up where, but that there was any blood at all. Guess it doesn’t matter how old you are when you’re finally grown up, ’cause baby teeth gon’ fall out regardless. Mama left the office when she got the call, but she wasn’t mad. She bought Josiah a Sprite for his black eye, and for Isaiah’s fat lip, a Cherry Coke. She set water aside to boil when the rest of us filed off the bus. Not much magic in the stew that night. Carrots, beef, kale, potatoes, celery, onions, chicken bouillon, bacon fat, garlic powder, chili flakes, and tabasco. It was dense with no real feelin’ behind it. That night, the stew was just ingredients in a pot.
Dinner lost its magic around the same time bills started pilin’ up. The same time spring gave way to summer and people started leavin’ Sonder Port. It’s one of those places outside a beach town that desperately wishes it was a beach town, too. Beach towns have history. Beach towns have houses on stilts and lobster thermidor and more people comin’ in than movin’ out. Sonder Port ain’t got nothin’ but the Chickaleary River and a gentrification problem.
Neighbors we’d known since I was in preschool, familiar faces behind the shop counters in town... gettin’ bought out by the state started to feel like an inevitability. And there’s no feelin’ like it: that encroach of metal and asphalt. Miles of pasture and woods around the trailer turned to acres in less than a year. The jazz out in the backwoods put up a good fight while it could, but the promise of commerce and a new age is a loud one. A bangin’, clangin’, drillin’, rumblin’ thatswallows up every green thing in its path, chokin’ out a sacred, southern song.
Mama ran to it every night; she’d sneak out a few hours after dosin’ us with a stew dinner. The youngest boys could sleep through a tsunami, but I tried fightin’ it every time. I watched my mama through my bedroom window, sprintin’ full-force and barefoot into the black maw of overgrowth behind the trailer.
Percy, bein’ the oldest, got roped into it maybe a month in. He turned to me, knees borin’ dents into my pillows and his elbows propped up on the windowsill.
“Whatchu so worried for?”
I took a breath. And then another.
“Runnin’ through the woods in the middle of the night ain’t weird to you?”
“Mama gon’ do what she wants to,” he hissed outta fear of rousin’ the younger boys. “Ain’t finna keep gettin’ me up for this shit.”
“Fuck a duck, Purse,” I hissed back. We only ever cussed when Mama was outta earshot, and, at that age, every dirty word was sweet potato pie in my mouth. “Think I’d keep you up if I won’t worried?”
Mama was late for breakfast. Her hair was supposed to be curly from sleepin’ in a braid under a silk scarf, but that next mornin’, it was matted down with slickness, and she was trackin’ grass stains on the shag carpet. Percy knew it the moment he took a bite of his runny scrambled eggs, seasoned with nothin’ but salt, hot sauce, and a couple stray bits of shell: his little sister was right.
We did everything we could think to do to help, shy of an intervention. Percy went under the house to check for whatever dead thing was causin’ the smell that’d been plaguin’ us for months— a possum, drowned and rotted in a coolant leak. Went under armed with nothin’ but a N95 and a pair of oven mitts I’d burned holes through. The boys even tried cookin’ a few times. I did whatever chores needin’ doin’ without a word of complaint. Phoned Mama’s sister here and there, but Aunt Ramona got swept up in the first few waves of buyouts. She moved to some big place where life moves without your say so and the cars drown out the bugs at night. It’s enough to make anybody forget where they came from. Enough to make you forget everybody back home who still knows the night song by heart.
When police found a nightgown on the banks of the Chickaleary, there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind who it belonged to. I was for the first time in my life, I hated my mother. I hated cicadas and beetles. I hated the sun for risin’ on a world that she wasn’t in. And she, without warnin’ or letter or a word of goodbye. What signs could a child have seen to stop it? Was she performin’ her sanity, day inand day out? Did her hands cook and crochet and brew coffee each mornin’ ’cause that’s what they were expected to do? To tuck us in and lick a finger when she turned the page of a book? If it wasn’t performance, if she really was happy... only option left was that our mother made a choice. Mama chose to leave five kids in a doublewide in the middle of the woods. Five kids that never asked to be brought into a world movin’ too fast all around us, and she let it. Think Purse blames me ’cause he figures he can’t blame nobody else. Can’t blame Mama for the world closin’ in, or the police, or the family that didn’t feel like showin’ up to see an empty casket. Can’t blame himself for not knowin’ to take my worry more seriously.
We stayed in the system ’til we all aged out, one by one. Percy was first, and took to a chop shop for a couple years before he opened his own out in Bergville. Then me. Trevor next. He’s been in and outta jail the past few months. Drugs. Resistin’ arrest. Arson. Isaiah died in the fall of ’79, and Josiah’s been tryin’ to find his footin’ as one-half a pair of twins ever since.
Fifty-six years since Mama killed herself, come September.
I don’t wanna die. I’ve decided that. But I thought about lyin’ down in the grass before, allowin’ the benevolent god of green and jazz to swallow me up in a field and leave nothin’ but my clothes behind. Think I’d like to be flowers, should the next life exist. A patch of them, or maybe even a superbloom along some highway or another. Short-lived and marvelous. A sister to myself, all tangled at the roots, thankful that even the bullets of a hailstorm might prove usefulcome mornin’ .
Maybe that’s why I came back to the trailer. A dead body of a double-wide, overrun with crawlin’ things and mold inkin’ every inch of the interior. Flowers would thrive in a place like this. So I planted myself in the filth and I drank myself stupid. I drank until my body abandoned me, until it got up and walked without me havin’ to tell it to. I stumbled past the field where I lost my virginity on a tractor. Be lyin’ if I said it won’t comfortin’, seein’ that the world of Sonder Port hadn’t changed much after the four of us got out.
Walked for hours until somebody stopped me. Pulled up beside me in a cherry red Camaro. Vintage, the kind you only ever saw in black and white on TCM.
“Ma’am? You okay?”
The woman in the driver’s seat had more meat to her than I did. Freckles on brown arms and spattered across her nose. A gap in her front teeth. I know because she smiled at me. Outta concern, I’m sure, but still warm like she meant it. I must’ve been a sight. I’d lost a shoe somewhere back with my virginity, and I’m guessin’ the other one didn’t feel like takin’ the trek along I-48 alone.
I took a breath. And then another.
My body answers for me: “Think my story’s almost over.”
“Can’t say that. Where you off to? Ma’am? Why don’t you lemme give you a ride? Bet your feet could use the break.”
Anybody from Sonder Port could tell by her accent that she wasn’t from around here. She thought ma’am was a one-syllable word. If she was local, she’d stretch it out to two. I wasn’t mad at her for bein’ from someplace else. For bein’ somewhere she didn’t belong . At any rate, the bags in her backseat told me she was just passin’ through to get to a beach town. All the evidence I needed that she saw Sonder Port the same way everybody else does: a liminal space you don’t stay in for long.
Still, my body answered. “...Beach. Don’t matter which.”
And I hopped into the passenger’s side and let the stranger take me anywhere. Floored it, too, and filled the silence whenever I didn’t have a response in me. Probably thought I was homeless and outta my rabid-ass mind. A few hours left to walk cut to twenty-three minutes under the wheels of this girl’s cherry red Camaro. Never got her name. Know she likes Fleetwood Mac, and that she’s got two dogs stayin’ with her roommate back home. I know she was happy, and didn’t waste a second of happiness judgin’ me.
Don’t remember the last time I went to the beach. Maybe my body thought sand would hurt less than Chickaleary silt. My new friend watched me for a while before speedin’ off, the sun spillin’ orange and pink across the Camaro’s hood. Night made the water infinite here, like somebody forgot to finish this part of the world. Just stars and the great, black deep. Was my mama lonely? Did she have an ecosystem inside of her that needed waterin’? I lay back and make a bed out of the dunes, and I remember the god of green and jazz. The promise I made him in exchange for flowers. A deal the god of sand and stars would surely honor.
Maybe that’s her, I think: a woman in the water, come to claim her quarry.
The woman’s eyes are black against skin that shines as if somebody carved her from raw crystal. She watches me curiously, cockin’ her head before swimmin’ my way, webbed hands perfectly engineered to cut through waves.
When she crawls up from the surf, I finally see her up close. The siren has no breasts, but gills that follow the curve of her pearly ribs, purple and green dapplin’ climbin’ up and down her form. Moonlight sparks off her like stained glass. Her lower half is mostly fins, long and feathery like chiffon. The ocean toys with them, hurryin’ her home. This, I understand, must be her: the goddess of sand and stars. The angel of death. Every place has gotta have one. And the angel of the water has chosen me.
“You gon’ kill me?” I ask limply. “Like you killed my mama?”
The siren’s eyes narrow, and a sound comes out of her like a train whistle. A long, mournful cry as she wraps her webbed hands around my calloused ones and leads me into the water. I don’t fight it. This is what I asked for. But why would she let me go? She pulls away once the water’s up to my chest, just before the sand drops toward the deep. Her dark eyes study me, my arms pinwheelin’, reachin’ for nothin’, toes splayin’ and stretchin’ for a foothold in the falloff. Idon’t understand. I wanna be a kind word. I want to be seaglass.
Dark shapes curl and ripple in the water around me, and I’m surrounded by them before I realize what’s happenin’: a chorus of women. Tails where their legs should be. All shapes, iridescent scales of albacore silvers and sailfish blues. Teeth like razors, eyes that shine back like a wild animal’s.
As the water laps at their collarbones, I half expect them to open their assembly to the deep. To wait for me to swim out to my doom in a ceremony crafted only for us chosen women. Maybe that’s what they all are. An army of women at their wit’s end. Women who came to the water to wait for some sacred song or another to swallow them whole.
When they do part, halfway wanna blame the familiar pricklin’ at the back of my eyes on the spray curlin’ up from the water. But one last siren has her back to me. She senses me in the air behind her and I watch her shoulders soften. She turns, and the crinkles of my mother’s smile are exactly how I remember them. Scales glint in the creases now, pitch black eyes where her browns used to be. With every breath, gills flare and contract on either side of her neck.
“I don’t—,” my voice hitches with the threat of a sob. Is my mother mine? Ageless, sunspots on the same sunny face. Well, not quite the same. The skin of her cheeks are pressed together like a cheshire scar, where her jaw no doubt unhinges like an eel when she catches her prey.
Mama knits her brows together and cocks her head, and a sound like a violin comes out where words should. The webbin’ between her fingers is almost translucent. I almost forget to feel it as she reaches for me. Her sisters do, too, pullin’ me from the safety of the sandbar and finally under the surface. I don’t fight it. Don’t have much fight left in me.
Still, I panic when the give of sand falls away, my mouth full of one last gulp of air.
My body lurches in the deep. My mother smiles as she drowns me. And the angels watch, and the nighttime jazz that I’d so carefully, methodically cut outta my brain comes rushin’ back. It floods my lungs, electricity down the throat, settin’ every synapse on fire. Flashes of gills and Percy. Fins and Isaiah’s fat lip, Josiah’s black eye. Trevor’s laugh a siren’s song of yore.
Can I join in? Is a deep blue lullaby that haunts a not-quite-beachtown’s backwoods mine to sing? Mama says it is.
So I push out every bit of air left in my lungs.
And then I take a breath.