Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this moment of collective grief, I’ve been thinking about how individual griefs are heightened by our current circumstances. Any personal loss is magnified as we all mourn the hundreds of thousands lost to the coronavirus, and a way of life that is at least temporarily on hold, if not altered going forward. When I first read Jeneé Skinner’s story, I saw that grief embodied: a girl mourning the loss of her mother in her physical being, in relationship with nature. As we look for things to “armor” ourselves, like the narrator does, stories like this one help.
To hear Jeneé read the story, click below:
River Body, Body Woman
I walk into the river as a girl, not knowing my flesh is flesh. Summer is hot and the water is cold. I no longer have a mother to call me home, because of an embolism, a bubble that traveled to her brain. And now I barely have a father. I walk until I can no longer smell grief and whiskey in his beard. I walk until I’m in the middle of a mockingbird song and freshwater.
The water creeps up to my chest, showing me how kid and pudgy my body is. Sun creeps into the ripples and chases shiners and rat snakes, but they keep enough distance to remind me I don’t have any friends. The river is armored with rocks, and I wonder if I should put some of them in my pockets to armor myself.
Beneath the wet hum two tadpoles the size of lentils nibble at my navel. I pick them up and watch them circle each other like yin and yang and kiss me where my mother used to. I don’t want to let her go, so I swallow them, tadpoles and river, like pills, and wait to feel better. But as I feel them swim down my throat, I taste the same loss, each mineral and salt particle.
So I let the river hide my tears and screams because there’s nothing the rest of the world can do. As bubbles fly around my face and I wonder if one will float into my brain, I feel the water hug me. There are hands and arms and breasts in this hug against my back, and when I leave them, I’m forced to grow up a little. I grow every time I come to the river even though the edges of it shrink over the years. I come out, become a woman, love a woman in the river even though it continues to taste like loss.
Jeneé Skinner‘s work has appeared in the Linden Avenue Literary Journal and is forthcoming in Passages North. She attended a residency at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop and Kimbilio Writers’ Retreat.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
