White Lines on a Green Field Read online

  All the girls screamed. Even the ones only a month or two gone, clutching their stomachs and crying, all of them except me, Bunny Rabbit, the watcher, the queen of coming home. The melons split open in an eruption of pale green and pink pulp; the squashes cracked so loud I put my hands (which were paws which were hands) over my ears, and the babies came like harvest, like forty-five souls running after a bright ball in the sky.

  * * *

  Some of us, after a long night of vodka tonics and retro music and pretending there was anything else to talk about, huddle together around a table at the 10 year and get into it. How Mr. Bollard was never the same and ended up hanging himself in a hotel room after almost a decade of straight losses. How they all dragged themselves home and suddenly had parents again, the furious kind, and failed SATs and livers like punching bags. How no one went down to the lake anymore and Bobby Zhao went to college out of state and isn’t he on some team out east now? Yeah. Yeah. But his father lost the restaurants and now the southland has no king. But the gym ceiling caved in after the rains and killed a kid. But most of them could just never understand why their essays used to just be perfect and they never had hangovers and they looked amazing all the time and sex was so easy that year but never since, no matter how much shit went up their nose or how they cheated and fought and drank because they didn’t mean it like they had back when, no matter how many people they brought home hoping just for a second it would be like it was then, when Coyote made their world. They had this feeling, just for a minute—didn’t I feel it too? That everything could be different. And then it was the same forever, the corn stayed yellow and they stayed a bunch of white kids with scars where their cars crashed and fists struck and babies were born. The lake went dry and the scoreboard went dark.

  Coyote leaves a hole when he goes. He danced on this town til it broke. That’s the trick, and everyone falls for it.

  But they all had kids, didn’t they? Are they remembering that wrong? What happened to them all?

  Memory is funny—only Sarah Jane (real estate, Rotary, Wednesday night book club) can really remember her baby. Everyone just remembers the corn and the feeling of running, running so fast, the whole pack of us, against the rural Devil gold sunset. I call that a kindness. (Why me? Sarah asks her gin. You were the queen, I say. That was you. Only for a minute.) It was good, wasn’t it, they all want to say. When we were all together. When we were a country, and Coyote taught us how to grow such strange things.

  Why did I stick around, they all want to know. When he took off, why didn’t I go, too? Weren’t we two of a kind? Weren’t we always conspiring?

  Coyote wins the big game, I say. I get the afterparty.

  * * *

  This is what I don’t tell them.

  I woke up before anyone the morning after the championships. Everyone had passed out where they stood, laying everywhere like a bomb had gone off. No corn, no pumpkins, no watermelons. Just that cold lake morning fog. I woke up because my pick-up’s engine fired off in the gloam, and I know that sound like my mama’s crying. I jogged over to my car but it was already going, bouncing slowly down the dirt road with nobody driving. In the back, Coyote sat laughing, surrounded by kids, maybe eight or ten years old, all of them looking just like him, all of them in leather jackets and hangdog grins, their black hair blowing back in the breeze. Coyote looked at me and raised a hand. See you again. After all, it’s nothing we haven’t done before.

  Coyote handed a football to one of his daughters. She lifted it into the air, her form perfect, trying out her new strength. She didn’t throw it. She held it tight, like it was her heart.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: df0800d2-a98e-4508-a82a-67871c90e1d7

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 29 September 2011

  Created using: FictionBook Editor 2.4 software

  Document authors :

  Isais

  Source URLs :

  http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2011/fiction-white-lines-on-a-green-field-by-catherynne-m-valente/

  Document history:

  1.0 — создание файла, структура — Isais.

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