Always the wind, the wind that tried to bend us, break us in this new development so unlike where we’d lived, that outer-city of bungalow, alleyway and asphalt grid where the wind dismembered itself to get around edges and corners, and now here, on this parcel only just prairie, where our fathers signed the realtors’ contracts on muddy paper-roads over bottles of pop, our fathers who craved natural forces to thrust against after desk-job days, under-the-hood weekends, here, the wind sneered at the bi-levels and stiff lawns and measured side yards, the barefoot volleyball and circle games, contorted the smallest of us into unnatural shapes, plastered our dress-up to our limbs, fed on our brains in our dreams, the wind, hating our mothers for their foul dishes, bagna cauda and deviled eggs and creamed chip beef, smells like the crotches of underwear, that clung to our mothers’ shifts and pixie cuts, our mothers who stuck cotton in our ears and told us to get used to it, the wind, mourning the lost soft stalks we learned in school, Big Bluestem and Indianagrass and Dropseed, the wind, hating our parents for their heavy drapes and blocky ashtrays, their smoky abstraction on living room couches, their fancy wrapped candies with liquid centers like tailpipe exhaust, the wind, hating our fathers for their astronaut haircuts, their belted slacks and undershirts, their guffaws and cans of Hamm’s and pinches of other wives’ asses, hating them so much that it took one on a Saturday afternoon in March, knocked him from a ladder as he was fixing a gutter, as he reached from the top rung, a rogue gust, and his body falling straight, like a felled log, as if he were telling the wind it might break him but he would never, ever bend.
Eileen Tomarchio lives with her family in New Jersey, where she's worked as a librarian for 18 years. You can find links to her publications at https://eileentomarchio.webnode.page/.
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