Our hometown once was mostly forest, a church nestled between oaks and elms, windmill factories rippling down the river. Now, it’s a suburb, caught in the orbit of Chicago, like a fixed-point moon, a glow-in-the-dark star pressed to the ceiling.
In the summers, we played soccer, tore up sprawling fields with our cleats, collected shoeprints on our shin guards, gasped in the damp, humid air. After practice, we shed our exoskeletons, waded in the nearby creek. We caught minnows, chased mayflies, and flipped over rocks to watch crayfish scurry. We told each other stories about the monster that lived under the bridge beyond the jut of the creek, how it nearly pulled under another friend’s sister. We dared each other to walk into that dark tunnel, called whoever refused a scaredy-cat, even though we would never meet the challenge ourselves.
During the school year at recesses, we dared each other to knock three times on the cement block that sat at the edge of the woods. A ghost appears, we told each other in huddled whispers, and it’ll pull out your hair. You’ll be bald until your hair grows back—if it does. We spoke with authority, with the world-weariness only third-graders can have, laughed at how ridiculous it was. Still, we eyed the concrete block in quiet moments, never dared to wander into its line of sight.
On weekends, we picked blackberries and currants, hid them in a hollow of bushes discovered summers before, and peeled bark from willowy-green branches to weave bracelets, wondering what it must have been like to live here before there was a city forty miles east. We played Oregon Trail on blocked computers, chewed our fingernails over the decision to ford, float, ferry.
Here, a prairie preserve burns rose-russet along a highway. Later, we drive on that highway, the moon rising above the flat land, taraxacum going to seed. We follow the train tracks as they clatter east to where the ground rises into buildings, stacking up to skyscrapers that line the lakeshore. There, the moon rises unseen, until it can peek between galaxies of the lit skyline, a whalebone-white lip. There, for us, was distant, too far removed, a challenge we couldn’t yet meet. There, we will find ourselves, waiting: women who trade soccer cleats for heeled boots, who know the dangers of river-crossing, but ford ahead anyway. Who stare down a challenge.
There are fewer galaxies here. The train’s breathless horn rolls across the river like an owl’s cry. Mayflies gather and tumble in groups, cling to clothing like chalky spring pollen. Here, we burned cattails, caught fireflies, played ghost-in-the-graveyard under the whey-light streetlamps. Some nights, we took turns kicking the streetlamps to snuff them and went running, giggling, into the darkness, didn’t dare glance over our shoulders at what was to come.
Emily Capettini is the author of Thistle, winner of Omnidawn’s Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Contest, and assistant editor with Sundress Publications. She received her PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is now Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State University.