Marie.
By L. Shepard
There are days I catch glimpses.
Of a girl with black ringlets and knobby knees,
racing down a grassy path toward the sea.
Glimpses of deep brown eyes, the stubborn pout of a mouth,
Flashes of a child always a head shorter and a step behind her sisters,
Always the youngest.
Of a girl with a heart too big for her chest, with a heart bound to bleed.
It’s through years of moves, of labeled cardboard boxes, of tearful goodbyes that I see her.
Obscured by a tomb, a shroud of her own making.
I see glimpses of her through the looking glass of my memory.
I remember rings of laughter,
petty fights over Barbies,
a make-believe wedding,
plastic flowers.
She is the same and she is not.
Slowly, she has danced away from me,
spinning, in slow motion into a cocoon,
enclosing herself away.
Sealing herself up.
She fades as the sea-foam. There altogether, and then not at all.
Brown eyes dimming, rimmed with deep purple,
her once shining ringlets have dulled, lost their bounce, hanging stringy over her shoulders.
Her thin soprano still sings, though.
Deep ballads of melancholy over the strum of a guitar.
Her shoulders and collarbones jut, thinned by a years’ long winter, chilled from the wind.
She is there and she is not.
A caged bird, she flutters,
longing to soar,
and staying still.
She is there and she is not.
As a spector, hanging on the edges,
clinging to the bare bones of a house,
haunting us.
She loves us from afar.
My aunts exchange wary glances,
an anxious fog hanging over our heads, but still we hope.
It is not a fragile hope.
It is not the fluttering of monarch’s wings, not wisps of angel’s hair, not eggshells, too delicate to
touch.
This hope is a splatter of blood and grime,
it is the jagged edge of a scar, cracked fingernails.
It’s a glare. A defiant, steely gaze at a stormy sea.
Now, she races toward that sea,
sky heavy and waiting,
she’s racing down the grassy path again.
I follow, bounding behind her, a step, a skip, a beat behind.
Through the surf, she dives, headfirst into the waves,
engulfed by the violent tide.
I race after her, but the sand chains me down,
tethers me to the shore.
The cold sea brushes my ankles, the brine stings my eyes, and I wait for her to emerge,
and pull herself from the deep.