- Tristen Stafford
I was born at witching hour. Panic filled the doctors fingers and I arrived in the world held by unsteady hands. Spiders crawled on the ceiling, landing on my face and climbing inside my mouth; eggs laid in the veins of my wrists shuddered my skin to my bones and closed me off to the world.
My brothers, born to affliction and drawn to scissors that cut more than paper, pry warmth from their imperfect blood to swim with sharks toothless in feature, lost at sea and afraid of the sun and folks in their water.
My sister, a half-generation away in a place unfamiliar to her and equally as unwelcoming knows more about stitching together hands for safety, crossing highways brimming with nobody going nowhere and fast.
Safety keenly found its way into the spirit of my niece; her shadow an illusory vestige of those that came before her serves as a reminder that growth will always nip at her heels and the tar is sticky: a quicksand through streets that, in the blink of an eye, can become home.
Stretches of asphalt bringing the late summer heat to a boiling point open doors and windows to a lonely breeze slithering through the valley and onto my beaded sweaty forehead. Eating dirt out round the meadow hidden on post-marked land lost to time without technological grot, children follow trails left by their fathers and mothers and their friends that meander crickside atop broken stone; a slime residually ditched along with coke cans cigarette butts becomes less litter and more a tool to walk through a historyless place.
Fire would beget my father anew; forgotten are the days of a home stentorious in Godly voices and whispers of uncertainty. Buried with his mother, teeth knocked out by his father, trash bagged shoes wrapped in duct tape are no match for the cold winter air of yesteryear, only a needle in the side of his red-hot skull. The shape of his brain would never be the same.
I heard that his mother was buried next to an innominate grave -- a reserved plot of land on the side of a highway and tangled in the weaving of vineyards and cobwebs -- and in the empty dirt, a neighbor to her was her stillborn son, unnamed and lost along the threading of time. An eternity is a long time to stay asleep dreaming of the world outside of a box.
Only planning for an afterlife, my paternal family saw no reason for Earthly goods other than soil, water, and anything the Amish were selling. My mother’s country boots and white heels were purchased at a JC Penny and Fashion Bug respectively, filling the soles of her feet with an undiscovered sense of foundation not present in her years old trailer.
She didn’t know her mother, instead finding repose in the lies she’d tell her surrogate grande dame, caught in the webs vining from her mouth intended to catch insects and vermin. I knew my mother most riding shotgun in a Pontiac or out cold left frozen next to the week's worth of Kids Cuisine and Hot Pockets in the family freezer.
The vantage point atop mountains of skeletons ripped from their closets is breathtakingly haunted.