Goodnight, Little Mama
I brush my mama’s hair in long and steady strokes to loosen all the tangles, the same way I brush the horses at the barn. My barn chores are the chores I love, and my mama chores are the ones I don’t love because they make my shoulders ache like the soft space in my chest. I forget to eat sometimes. A day starts early and ends late, always with an orange disc at the horizon. I take a break midday when the sun is merciless and swim in the river, floating on my back in the shallows to spot golden eagles. I saw one once, circling above the canyon, wing tips flashing white under the desert sun. When I die, I want to come back as a golden eagle. So I can hunt my prey. So I can carry off small animals and lick their bones dry. So I can spot the rattlers from far off and keep my toes safe. Except I’ll have talons, no toes, a real treat. I can feel myself soar above the rushing canyon roar. These are the things I think about when my mama’s falling asleep at night, when I hold her sawdust-dry hand in mine. When the day has once again sputtered to an end.
I’m only seven but I know the best stories. I don’t tell my mama the bad stories, only the good ones made up of lies.
I don’t tell her lots of things: How I cracked Conrad’s nose at recess the other day because he said I had no daddy and a bats-for-brains mama. Blood ran down his face like beet juice. He cried like a little girl because one of his teeth fell in the dirt, even though I saw him wiggling it with his tongue earlier in the day. It wasn’t like I knocked it out. How just then—this I won’t tell her, it’s a story just for me—a golden eagle swooped down and snatched me off the playground in its claws. How we soared through the air, over Conrad’s head, my hands gripped tight to the bird’s feathers, the wind a mad rush in my hair. Over the canyon and into the tree line, past the burn scar from last summer’s wildfire. To where the trees turn green again and the river becomes an echo.
Things I won’t tell her: How the eagle fed me meat pies and mouse-bone tea, preened me like I was her baby, and not a human girl who needed to get back. “I have chores to do,” I told the eagle. She blinked and cocked her head. I explained the playground at recess, the boy with a bloody shirt, a teacher who’d scold me for starting trouble again. Once my belly was full of meat and sloshing with tea, the eagle soared me back to the playground and dropped me at the slide roasting in the sun. And since I’d been high up past the canyon, further than the burn scars even, and my belly was fuller than it’d been in days, it was easy enough to ignore the sour look on the teacher’s face when I swaggered back to class. I rode a golden eagle, which means I’ve been touched by precious metal, by heaven. So I didn’t even make a face when Conrad shoved me hard, when the other kids laughed, or when the teacher gave me a look to let me know I’m no better than the plug of chewing gum stuck to her shoe.
I still didn’t mind when I got back to the sun-hot barn to brush the horses the way I’d brush my mama’s hair later that night, before I tucked her in to bed to tell her a bedtime story. Not a story like this, but a good one, with a real happy ending, about a girl who plays nice and sits in her seat. A story full of heart and very little truth.