In ragged blouses and shorts that sagged, we summer children scattered and caught what we could. The smallest girl always dragged her feet. Her hand in mine was wet with fear of dark, but I let go to race; you won as usual. I showed off my newest scar, where the briar caught my knee. You said you couldn’t see anything. In August, it was always too dark to play, not dark enough to sleep. Inside, the cot stretched long and white down the living room made warm by furniture, breath, and when it was cold, furnace heat. On holidays, family overflow nudged the younger out; we winter children ate and slept on the edges, kitchens, porches, roll-a-way beds, dim spaces lit by portable heaters. When the cot was mine, I couldn’t help but hear the older men in the same room talk softly of hunting grounds and ponds filled with bass and bream. I knew you would get up at dawn to go with them while I would pretend to sleep, warm and restless under a quilt. One uncle told a story about seeing a bear outside his house—as close as you are to me, he said—leading her half-grown cubs past the barn toward the trees. Every scrape or scratch of branch against screen made my nerves run that night. I wished I’d let the smallest girl hold my hand just that once. When I finally dreamed, a great mother bear came to the door and led me out among the stars where we stretched, suspended, our own constellation. My stride was suddenly ten feet long. I ran by myself into the universe and I wasn’t even afraid.
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Elinor Ann Walker holds a Ph.D. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and is an adjunct professor at University of Maryland Global Campus. Ann’s work appears or is forthcoming in perhappened mag, Mezzo Cammin, Better Than Starbucks, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and Black Bough Poetry, among others, and in several anthologies. She lives with her husband and three dogs, is the mother of two college-aged sons, and does her best writing outside.