Hey hey! Prose.

Go with it.

-

When he stands in the fields, he knows it is unreal. There are endless stalks of grain, but no
fertile earth, sky, always sky, a constant wind that shifts just barely. He thinks that it is
always the same wind, restless, never very large. When he stands, the rest of it does not move
around him. Brick building, tin playground, road that leads to nowhere. He knows it leads
nowhere. No one comes down it. Even the wind will not go there.
Today he watches the boy's sister. He finds her in an autumn room, warm and full of sleep. She
is tiny, eight, sitting outside the door jamb. She peers at the clock. Inside sleeps the mother,
who always sleeps, especially now. The girl tips in and creeps forward. Her hand spreads over the
methodical body. The mother will sleep for hours and hours, until night falls.


He doesn't ask because no one knows. He tries to run down the road, only once, and goes nowhere.
He doesn't eat because he cannot feel hunger. He sleeps but it is the sleep of daysleepers and
his eyes could well be painted on his lids.
The Sister says something about a car, and a deer, the long winding road from the orchard, the
rainy night. She had said it was no one's fault, the deer was alive, the car could be fixed, his
parents were alive.
She tells him this while he sits on the hollow metal swings. The black bird of her body moves
up and disappears into sky and grain and quiet.


He saw his mother while she bathed. Ran hot water into a metal tub, stripped down, watched her skin turn pink. The color moved in regulated lines, from ankle to thigh to hip to breast. In this, he understands how she has hated her body. She hates the swollen hips that mean nothing now, the stretch marks, the loose sex. He can catch her reflection in the faucets, the whiteness of skin. How endless and without meaning it all is. From the edge she takes the scrubbing rock and begins to peel away. Only in water, from neck down, can she love her body. Only then. The skin comes off easily, floats in the water, new layers reddening, anklebones tearing. Still, he is too young. He stops looking.