By Mikayla Johnson
Midday. Dog bark, tree bark. We ditch Grandma’s party, we three, darting through the Hollow, leaves glowing jade and saron around us, ducking beneath branches, dodging dogged thistles. You and I know this trail like we know the winding currents in the palms of each other’s hands, but the third, she’s a stranger here. Soon, though, she will know it as we know it and love it as we love it. Won’t she?
We leave tracks in the mud, my boot print the largest, your boot print just smaller than mine, her boot print so small it fits inside ours. She keeps saying, “wait up!” She keeps saying, “what about the cupcakes?” But her belly forgets as we huddle beside the creek, whispering like fugitives in Sherwood, painting our faces with mud like lost boys, placing toys into trees like Christopher Robin. Her, with your green eyes, and her, with my wiry hair, it’s some kind of poetry, isn’t it? Our childhood exhausted here, here in this copse of cottonwoods, and her childhood just beginning. Do we tell her, “we first kissed here?” Do I tell her, “I proposed here?” (We’d never tell her she was made here.)
No, don’t color this place. We wander away, ringed hands intertwined. Behind us, our daughter plays with rocks and sticks, whooping a song into the afternoon sky. We will not look back, run back, climb the branches, carve our names.
