Sunfield, Michigan 1919
Once the sun sank into the sweet corn, the cows pull the night into their lungs and warmed it until it could crouch and watch from the kitchen corners as your father spread your mother flat as a communion wafer, her wrists tied to the table legs, her teeth clamped down tight on a wooden spoon. With a solution of lye, a hose, a knife, he dissolved his third daughter. She was nothing but an inconvenience, an expense his beans and corns could never feed. Two stubborn women gone, he muttered while your mother died, her blood pooling like a dinner plate.
You choked on your oatmeal the next morning at breakfast, quiet as the cool cellar where the preserves waited patiently for her humming to fill the shelves. Your toes stretched down to those jars, anxious to ask them questions find out if they’d heard anything more last night. You’d tried so hard to beat off your nightmares and outlast the whispering.
Two weeks later you woke to more whispers stacked under the curtain keeping you from your father’s bed. Your sister spent the rest of her nights flying back to the Daniels’ field to stare at the cloud pictures. For you Mama, she whispered.
The following fall when your breasts started to push the buttons of your nightshirt apart, she stuffed you out the bathroom window while your father pounded on the jammed door with a broom handle. With the road still warm you ran to my mother’s farmhouse and my grandmother quietly pushed her daughters closer to make room for you in the feather bed. You woke up to five new brothers and sisters. Your father vanished. Your sister was sent to a cousin in Grand Rapids.
When I was 20, as I swallowed my valium and spread my thighs to a sterilized glove, my lover in the waiting room, I thought of your mother: her death with no gravestone, her daughter who ran for help.
-Melanie Figg