That You Blessed but Set Fire To
The skin of the world is black and then it is tan. Foaming with snakes and gasses, leaking all the time, and holding nothing inside it. My body is also leaking and I tell somebody that I hate them, or that they are a kind of person that everybody hates.
Now I want to take this to the edge of the world, where the forest cleaves and the sea is a mouth of foaming teeth. A woman has just arrived with her family not by boat but by foot and wagon. You can picture a movie if you like or a longer novel and all the things happening within that. I believe I read, or I wrote, “the children beneath their bed steamed like crabs.”
So her children are dead then, burned or boiled alive, a terrible thought that cannot touch fact. And she thinks how she was rough to bathe them, and to make them sit and not fidget to eat the potatoes boiled in the saltwater, and how once the earth did widely open its jaws to take flesh it did long stay open. For the deaths of life have followed her every decision.
“Dear Sister, Home is a bouquet of feeling, of tastes unremembered.” But this is before the conifers lit like tall fire from firelight, and further up the hill the smoke poured thickly from the eyes of her house.
She thinks only of Hannah, her large darting eyes, and she cannot bear to recall her ways. The small feet forced into small shoes.
She removed them in the fields.
On the trail there were tracks and shadows, the smell of sulphur off the trees. And the snakes flickering at the edge of sight. Horses, wagons, and husbands began to come apart. Private odors stalled felicity, dignity. The children were sure to be dull and feral.
I am only saying that the skin of the world comes apart, and the fissures hiss, and out of that hissing comes a bad odor, a fleshy wet odor, that is the hot and sticky coursing stuff. And we cannot stop it. Nothing can stop it, and it is no use packing up the babies and the dresses.
Hayley Boyd is cocreator and editor of EATING IN MY HOME, a literary journal in the style of a food blog. Her writing has appeared in Anderbo, The Collidescope, and The Masters Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon.