Prayer
They burst out the front door in frenzy, not unlike the fireflies that would soon surround them. Three little girls, six, seven and eight, all with blonde hair and bare feet. When they would return, just before my voice went hoarse from yelling their names into the dark, their faces would include streaks of black dirt. Their jeans grass stained and threadbare at the knees if they hadn’t worn them out completely. Inevitably one of them would lose something or find something, usually something that breathed, accompanied by the insistence that it be kept in a box or a jar or a makeshift bed made of rags or old towels. Saying no was the hardest part. Little tears always melted out of fluent eyes. These would-be adoptions of course had to compete with scrapes, bruises, cuts and scratches. One of them always needed a Band-Aid or bacitracin or a kiss to make everything better. The third one would suddenly be nowhere in sight, already half naked and running around the cramped house, too small, too old to contain so much life.
As much as they were my daughters, they were also their father’s. I gave them their blonde hair and compassion, he gave them their wild and after the last one was born he gave me heartbreak and lonely and worry. But, like I said, they were his daughters too and who would he be if not the man that left for adventure and didn’t come back. They handed me his possessions on the same dock where I last saw him, where he boarded the boat that would not return him. The wind lifted the salt into the air and brushed across my lips, full of acid I didn’t want to kiss. Beyond the horizon, somewhere his body was salted too, being picked at by birds or creatures in the sea. I didn’t know. Nobody did.
So, we got by. Our sadness is interrupted by the forgetful joy the mysteries of the world offered my girls. It was no use trying to stop them, telling them to be careful, to look out. They were determined to burn through every moment of their lives that they could. Black eyes and busted lips were just par for the course as were the notes pinned to their backpacks, apologies or pleas from their teachers who knew there was nothing that could be done. Friends and strangers would say they’d be so pretty if they weren’t so dirty. But being pretty just makes you lonely, I suspect like everything else. If they are loud and lush, then they are free. If they are free, then they are happy. It means their hearts are still unchained and belong to the world and not the memories that we don’t ever get to bury.
Some things have changed. We don’t use maple syrup but the sugar kind from the unfriendly, clear plastic bottle. I spend more time stitching clothes than reading and I hang the wash to dry from a rack in the kitchen. I go without shampoo and make-up now, save for a little foundation so people stop saying I look tired. Sometimes I trade vegetables from my garden, which the girls love to help me pick, for fresh milk. They know how to cast their own lines and fish from the docks just like their father taught them. They ask if they can take the boat out for crabs, but I am still too afraid to lose another life to the water.
Sometimes there is a man, a boy really, too young for me. He smiles from across the counter at my grandparent’s crab shack where I have worked for 20 years. I’ve been there since I was a kid, not much older than the eldest of my children. Sometimes he will sit with my girls and color with them or listen to their nonsensical stories. Sometimes he will buy them sweets which I try not to fuss over since I can’t afford such luxury. The littlest one asks if he will be their new dad, but the middle one insists this can’t happen. He can’t marry mommy, she’s still too sad about daddy. His face frowns, and so does mine because we both know this is true. Still, I let him come over some Saturday nights. He’ll bring a six pack of beer for us and pizza for the girls. Once they are fast asleep at my feet, finally worn down, I will nuzzle up to him and he will kiss my head. We’ll lie there watching whatever is left on the TV.
On Sundays he sits with his father at church, up the aisle and across the way. He will turn his head my way and I blush while the girls giggle beside me. Some people stare or frown. Others complain because the girls kick the pews during the hymn of the congregation before they are excused for Sunday School. Here too, they come home with notes I find jammed in their little pockets, as if they are the devil’s daughter. But they are brave and probably do not need God the way I do. They don’t yet need someone to blame and curse for their sadness and pain.
The water is so calm at shore, reflective, but distorted. I never realized that the water could be gray just as it could be blue until the older child was sent home with a note, aptly pinned to her front. The teacher had grown concerned about the drawings she colored during art time. She was only four then and he was still with us. It was winter, which is miserable here and everything in her picture, smudges of crayon, were faint and depressing. She hadn’t drawn the world the way she wanted it to be, she drew it as it was to her. They suggested doctors talk to her, hints teachers and others still make today, to ask her questions, to make sure she was happy, well adjusted. But I already knew what was inside her, because it was inside me. He gave them their fanatic curiosity. I gave them sad reflection.
We dangle our toes in the ocean, cool our bodies on the rocks after the sun has descended below the horizon. The older one is slowing down, you couldn’t tell if you didn’t know her, but now she sits with me as her sisters inspect a puddle full of minnows left behind after the tide. She watches the waves with me, gently touching my hand with her fingers. The nails are never short enough not to have dirt underneath. She’s already too big for the clothes she wears and summer is quickly coming to an end.
She remembers that day too. The little ones have no memory of it, their minds erased of the vision of their mother on hands and knees atop the cold and wet docks, water splashing from her splintered fists. They were held tight by their aunts, his sisters, the girls who never knew what it meant to be untamed. But she, she was old enough to know this loss too and as much as I have tried to relieve her of this burden her father cast on us all, I see the weight of it setting in her face. Her eyes are blue, just like his and they will stay that way too. They will always watch the sea and feel sad. The other two will grow out of it, and their hazel eyes, which are just like mine, they will learn to be their own guide and no longer mimic the sullen moods of their sister. She will be the least troublesome. She will be the quiet, contemplative one, buried in her books, lost in her thoughts and yet I will worry about her the most.
But tonight, tonight I just let her hold my hand and watch her feet make circles in the wet sand. I will let her be silent there in her sadness. I will pray she finds a lover that can never leave her side and fill the hole her father left and that I cannot mend. I tell God that he must replace what he took. I remind him that it is only fair.
m.e. gamlem is a non-binary queer anarchist and writer from New Mexico who is interested in the intersection of the personal, historical, corporeal, and political. They are a candidate for the MFA program in Creative Fiction from the University of Las Vegas, Reno. In 2016, while on tour with their former band Rudest Priest, they were attacked by a beaver in the Illinois River. They decided to never bother nature again.