—BUILT A HOME AND WATCHED IT BURN

 

 

Kite

 

She is waiting for time to change, the day and years to change, the numbers on the scale to change so that she can be someone else, unrecognizable, thin as a groove or a butterfly that can slip through air unnoticed. Yet she stays standing on the bathroom scale, heels bent back, looking for a different set of numbers, ones that won’t excoriate her. Her mother said, “Too much sugar turns a girl into a pudding whore,” and all these years later she’s still trying to decipher that warning, if it meant anything at all, other than contempt or the bee sting on her cheeks that day.

In the bedroom, even this late at night, her husband is swilling from a bottle, his breath a blow torch, raspy and ripe like kerosene. They haven’t touched, not like that, in months or years, and she’s certain her rolls are the issue, their sponginess and hanging.

After an hour of staring at the digits that never falter, she steps off and walks out the door without even grabbing a coat. In the chilled darkness, she can see no birds, but she feels their eyes on her nevertheless, alert and expectant. She hums the remnants of a song she once loved as a young girl, something fairly buoyant, when a coven of starlings shoot out from the evergreens, lifting her by the shoulders, sending her flying like a kite with no tail, like an angel that needs no wings, yet knows precisely where it’s headed.