She crawls out of the driver’s seat wearing the months on her face, hair thick as a forest. We said welcome and dusted off the red pickup truck. We brushed her hair and set the table and turned the clocks back to trick ourselves into thinking there was more time still. We ironed the old clothes and packed them in garbage bags to donate. Enough, she says. Enough care and home-cooked meals. I did not mean to welcome her with a full mouth. My sister says she raised chickens with her roommate in college. My sister also says that when it rained, they tied the chickens to the timber frame under the porch so they would not escape, but they still emerged with heavy wings. She did the same with the cat until it scratched black divots in the floor, but who am I to protest? Don’t think about it so seriously, she said. When she trades our pickup for a sedan this fall I’ll watch the other cars swim around her, that cracked license plate familiar as family. One year later, her voice will be a smudge in the rearview mirror. It is all so fast and unfair. When I say I want to be held I mean her touch resurfacing on my face. I mean her touch seeping through my hair like summer rain.
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Heather Qin is from New Jersey. A Best of the Net nominee, she has been recognized by The New York Times, Narrative, and The Adroit Journal, and her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Margins, Diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her chapbook, Nomad, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.