By Janaya Young
The ones that grow on the bushes lining the fence at your grandparents’ house in Wyoming that you arrive at after an eight-hour journey taken each summer through tumbleweeds and roaming cell service. The ones littering the backyard grass, getting squished and splashed as too many feet for this once-big-but-now-small space tumble and rumble across them. The ones that look thick and juicy and redder than the blood from when cousin number 38 banged his head on the basement ceiling or number 16 scraped the skin off her back on the treadmill, redder even than your cheeks when your older cousins talk kissing boys and growing breasts. The ones you aren’t sure why you can’t eat; you just know when you picked some and brought them inside, your aunts shrieked and pulled them from your hand and dropped them down the sink and your uncles howled and slapped their thighs.
One summer while you are sleeping in the basement of that now-too-small house in Wyoming with all your girl cousins piled on top of one another in sleeping bags, talking about boys and kissing and makeup until the younger girls run off crying, you think, I’m going to eat the raspberries. At least one, I’m going to taste them. And when the giggles turn into steady breathing you slip upstairs and open the back door, the one by the laundry machine because it doesn’t squeak as bad, and you peek out to make sure the boys are all asleep in their tents but instead you find the backyard is overrun with wild things, marking their territory across your grandparent’s raspberry fence and howling at the terrible full moon.
Janaya Young has an MFA in Creative Writing from BYU and has previously been published in Matchbook Literary Magazine. She currently writes from Boston, though her writing has yet to leave her rocky desert home in the Intermountain West.
