Elizabeth Oxley Elizabeth Oxley

It was nothing for her to turn out two pies after church. Engraved, her napkin holder implored Bless

O Lord. First came gravy and meat, dandelion leaves dressed. In the lull before dessert, my brothers and I

pushed back from the table—parting Victorian shadows, exploring attic nooks. We sifted through

photos, ran our fingers across her typewriter’s cold metal, watched each key throw its punch.

Her house struck us like a temple to a distant age: cut glass jars and standing clocks. When she called us

to the kitchen, we spooned up crusts beneath a picture of The Last Supper. Everything she did, she did in the name

of that man’s heart red as a wild July strawberry. Finished, we slipped upstairs again—children on the quest

for lost things, trespassing through dust suspended in custard sunlight, finding a soldier’s uniform hung

inside a closet as if, sleeved in wool, our grandfather might any minute climb back down from heaven.

Once every week, Larry drives to the nursing home from his downtown beauty salon to paint

my grandmother’s fingernails red. Her eyes are cloudy. He shakes the bottle. I see him

when I drop by to kiss her quiet cheek. The television blares snowstorm news as Larry draws his brush

across her yellow ridges, by a window overlooking fields shorn to the corn-quick, spare woods

where hawthorn each year sprouts its blood-berry, white petals a flotilla of land-stars, floral storehouse

for cosmic remedy. Before plastic bottles of pills, there was willow bark for fever, the sage hand

scavenging medicinal roots and leaves. And what of the hand itself? Its love was present in the poultice.

Larry separates my grandmother’s fingers— thinning feathers through which pale sky passes.

Her smile blooms blank against the backdrop of a hissing oxygen machine. I watch from the door, the nurse

murmuring any day now. Larry gives my grandmother an extra coat, and she lives three weeks more.

Some people stare, searching for a Judas bone, but all they can find are the stems of your arms, the sleek plunge of femur into socket.

These are the usual things, and why shouldn’t they be? You were not a provision of armistice or treaty. You were not born to be nation or diaspora.

The love that made you was simple as the sounds at breakfast: clink of pan on stove, scraping-back of chair. No slave ever rocked inside the boat of your hips, no explorer pried open an African river.

They say the ancestors reside in a sacred grove. Your homeland is wherever you stand. If the gaze lingers, it’s on your spine, straighter than the fence lines at Gettysburg.

I meant no harm when I burned them with a magnifying glass, wishing only to know if it were true: you could channel sunlight.

Prometheus gave humans fire, and for this, goes the story, he was tormented by an eagle. The ants shriveled. My father was a doctor.

After he divorced my mother, I sat in the dirt of his yard, squishing ants between glass slides, slipping them beneath his microscope.

Families are strange creatures: whole one day, broken the next. At my father’s desk, I examined ant armor, pointy swords of their hairs,

too young to consider I caused them pain. What have you learned? the elders might ask in the afterlife. I picture everyone there:

elephant gods, the dog king. We are sitting in a circle, on folding camp chairs like those on summer sale at McGuckin’s Hardware.

When the ant queen turns her gaze on me, I’ll apologize and explain how I’ve grown. Through my father’s strong lens, I saw features

invisible to my naked eye. What, I later wondered, could I not hear with my naked ears, not feel with naked hands? I am certain now

everything is conscious. If you understand me, I bet you’re the type who kisses your cat good night. When your daughter calls you

to her room because a bee is trapped inside, beating its head against her pane, I bet you cover the bee with a Tupperware bowl and carry her

to the garden you keep meaning to weed, where habaneros grow despite you. You shake the bee free on a bed of mint, because you hear and do not hear her

say she is hungry, she is tired. She is buzzing like something gone haywire. You understand— you resemble her in this. You could be sisters.

When the doctor says he’ll need to remove my ovaries, I consider performing a farewell ritual— hippy shindig with altar, candle, and two stones plucked from the river. Instead, I sign in for surgery and awake to a stomach pocked with cuts, skillful breaking and entering, ovaries gone like two thieves stealing away in the night. Nurses roll me into a recovery room. In morphine half-dreams I recall the nude pantyhose my grandmother used for Christmas stockings. They lined her hearth, an eerie cabaret of thrombotic legs into which my brothers and I thrust our hands each year, tearing out what didn’t belong: gift boxes, shiny lengths of ribbon, twenty-dollar bill pinned to each toe like a callus. That night, I sleep fitfully on spartan sheets, and in the morning, a young orderly helps me from my cot to a wheelchair, smiling—beautiful little boy—all the way to the lobby. I can have no more children. I clutch my stomach and grieve, remembering the doctor’s sketches— how my tubes resembled horns, my uterus a skull my brother once kicked over in a field. It was flocked with lichen, lower jaw missing, as if the earth had begun dismantling it bottom up, leaving the antelope mouthing the ground like a bit, so accustomed she’d once been to carrying life inside her.

When the dogwood in our yard drips dry, pink blooms erupt like wounds. Knowing me, my brother once said, be sure to live outside of sadness. I craved storms the way some were addicted to drugs or horses, I adored the word flank for its military muscle. On my left sits gloom, on my right the memory of a Buddhist monk. He was passing through town. I made an appointment. About my daughter, he said, she will do what you do. After that, I sought silver linings without edges sharpened, drank chamomile tea, kept a journal until I turned coward. Finding my daughter in the bathroom, I calculate our odds and press a cloth to her arm. She drops the blade in a corner crammed with dirty laundry. I couldn’t speak until now. No longer captive to her grief, my daughter points to full moons and horses clustered in a mountain field, hooves carving columbine. She climbs the fence, feet covering ground, planted on rock. I think girl and hear thunder.