Pennsylvania Lullaby
by Alexandra Banach
BIRD
When I am sixteen, my father confesses that he loves birds. He tells me he had a bird once, when he was young. It was green, small-bodied. The bird used to perch on the edge of his cereal bowl and fetch cheerios with its beak. My father in middle school: knobby-kneed and nervous, hiding his nose in a book while his parents chain smoked around him. Coughing, once, then quiet. Smoke sticking in the black of his hair.
RING
I wear rings from mall stores that render the skin of my fingers green in circles. I think that maybe it looks like gangrene or ringworm, something that used to kill people but now is solved by a tube of cream. The green transfigures my hand into an alien thing.
I have been giving my boyfriend hand jobs for a month when he tells me that the rings I wear hurt him. I keep wearing them, just start spitting on my hand before reaching down between us. The gob of spit glistens in the blue light of his parents’ television.
LOOKING GLASS
In the line for the upstairs bathroom, I fight my older brother for the right to use the shower. I attack him from behind and rake my nails up the length of his forearm as he braces himself in the doorframe. My nails leave pink blossoming streaks of terror in their wake. He yelps and grabs his injured limb while I shut myself in the bathroom, victorious. In the circle of mirror that I wipe from the condensation, crusted drool rings my lips.
CART AND BULL
In our county, Amish people surround us. There is a law against passing them on the road no matter what the center lines say. My boyfriend does it anyway – speeding around the horse and buggies in his tan Camry, the heater exhaling onto the dry skin of my face. The horses are dressed in blinders, so they can’t see right or left, only the long road ahead, flanked by car dealerships and cornfields.
Maybe it’s sort of nice to have a dress code like that, I say in the passenger seat, staring in the side mirror at the wide, straw brim of the Amish man’s hat.
You would not look hot in a bonnet, my boyfriend replies, palming the gearshift.
A DOG CALLED
The man who lives across the street owns one Pitbull at all times. He does not keep her on a tight leash. Some days, she wander across the road and into our kitchen, through the back door that my mother props open in order to listen to the cicadas. Sometimes she brings my mother a dead bird in the soft of her mouth. Whenever the dog dies, from old age or failing hind legs or from wandering in the wrong direction toward the speeding cars of the freeway, he buys a new dog and uses the same name. They all merge into one this way. The old Precious, the new Precious, two Preciouses ago.
Ali Banach is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in the Vassar Review, Observer, and elsewhere. She can be reached at arb2311@columbia.edu.