In the overgrown field, I am lying in the wildflowers, cradled in Queen Anne’s Lace and honeysuckle, and asters and cornflowers, and looking up to the sky with the white fast clouds, and I feel the earth dance in a wild spin, and it makes me dizzy, and I see the black wrecks of charcoal, from the fires burning beneath the tall red brick smokestack, a murmuration released into the air and caught in the winds, and they are patterning with us, but the best part is the ripe sweet whole smell of yeast, the whiskey factory cooking rye mash in those hot furnaces and it is so heady and light and full of warm joy that I know the paper sparrows and the high clouds and the wildflowers and the earth and me are all spinning away.
When I close my eyes, all the spinning things stop, and the warm smell drowns me like dish water in the faded red plastic tub. I want to stay buried under that thick blanket, but I’m getting cold. I open my eyes to a darkness that has no stars and no moon, and there is no blanket. I run home to the street light, but the house isn’t where I left it.
Under that pale white cone, the only things spinning are the night insects, the only alive things, flying in circles, that weak light illuminates everything gone, only a concrete slab, cracked and uneven and I see where my father wasn’t, he had been there with the spills and the smells and the sadness and the empty bottles and other things and I see where my mother wasn’t, always trying to clean and sort all the things, always trying to fight back on anything out of place and overgrown, always against all the things too heavy to fly away.
And me, feeling no warmth under the buzzing incandescent halo, I lay down on the broken slab where people and things used to be and looked into the unlit sky, into the night of that day. I felt everything spinning me down except the wildflowers rising, all the alive things moving away fast and light, all drowning in the whiskey mash.
Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two long-form nonfiction projects, alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, Bending Genres, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al. https://rinapalumbowriter.com.