Two Grasses

I was eight when I learned my tincture leaned duskward. Late, perhaps, though in the cornfields everyone pretended the sky had only one obedient shade, cloudless, a single note held too long. Recess: a boy asked where I came from, harmless if your body keeps the color of milkglass or limestone or the soft interior of shells, less so when your ancestry thins into fog past father’s mother and slips toward the mountains purpled like half-healed bruise. I almost told him I’d been steeped in May, that my family bent toward sunlight the way tall grass leans toward water. I was simply devotion fermenting on the dermis.

Years later I heard people like me were “nice, real polite,” praised like a hound that has learned to swallow. Call it a compliment if you must, tilt your head as though tuning a cracked satellite dish, hoping the static softens into something like recognition. Now I’m older, enough to know the land keeps its dead stories pressed into the loam, and each time the wind exhales it lifts a little history into my mouth. Some days I taste sifted bone-dust, some days only soil, but never myth.

And still I return to that boy at recess, to the impossible urge to unfasten the whole of me like a garment left out and sunburnt, to drape it across his shoulders and say here, try it—it’s not heavy, only warm, a little wind-scorched, a little full of inherited light. It belongs to me now, even on the days I flare too brightly for this prairie hush, even when I feel like a wildflower blooming out of season.

Another Lesson

Dad called the storm company. He said it was polite to let company in, even if it knocked too hard. The rain obliged. And I believed him, because I was six, and already fluent in obedience, disciple to sound. The rain was rehearsing its psalms upon the roof, each drop a syllable of undoing.

He handed me his phone the way a priest offers bread. “Hold this,” he said. I held it like foresight, numbers gliding down the screen like ghosts migrating south. I couldn’t tell what was calling, or who was listening. Norman was dissolving, one billboard at a time.

When we stopped, he looked at me strangely. As if I were a photograph that had come to life. “Go get granny,” he said. The word get opened into something enormous, a gate I couldn’t close, wide as hunger, wide as the distance between knowing and being known.

The wind was cursive by then, writing my name again and again until the door refused me. The handle was a bone unyielding, my hands confessing weakness. He watched the house bend into vapor, his eyes mirrored water. I thought men weren’t supposed to cry. I thought roofs didn’t vanish. But perhaps we had been living in weather all along, my father’s body only an apartment rented by breath.

Later, beneath the soil’s pulse, we waited. He said something about strength, or safety, or maybe time. It was hard to tell over the radio static. I nodded, faithful, unsure of his language, his jargon. I asked the silence where the walls had gone. Was home a place or a condition? It said nothing, only pressed its damp ear to mine.

That night I learned that they never knock. They seep. They blur. They enter through the seams of light pretending to be rain. By the time you realize their name, it has already washed itself away.