Borrowing the Sky-- a Short Memoir Fiction Story

Here I am driving down this road, looking all the world down the emptiness of sky and miles and miles of the wheat lands of my father and his father before him and his father's father, thinking that perhaps my father and I are more alike than I think.

Is it possible to not clearly know oneself? To feel only the vlub, vlub, vlub of the tires breaking over the road and the heat pounding on head until I can't breathe, and feeling like I will puke and not able to drink and there you are, Dad, tall as ever but standing on the same shaky legs as me.

But I don't want the land of my youth but we're driving there anyway. Your brown hands grab the wheel and I'm so young again I can hide from the wide sky in the pages of a book.

We pull in past the fence into the graveled area amid the barns and the chicken coop and are ushered inside. I know there is nothing to do but listen to the jokes that pass back and forth from my dad to my aunt, and laugh and laugh. It's so quiet out here except the cattle mawing sometimes or the rattle of my uncle's truck bringing him home to dinner there is silence.

We dutifully chase after the baby pig with the ketchup cap nose and all his dozens of brothers and sisters in around and underneath into the shade and phew of mama sow's large, heavily breasted, expanse. I can see why she doesn't move, doesn't want to move. The heat is like a rope tying you down. Her smell is like my dad's promised kick in the butt.

We flee into the barn looking for kittens, the one my dad said he'd pick up and toss then fire, kaboom, because there's no stopping their multiplying ways once they begin to breed. We scratch our knees and legs on straw, not even thinking about being tumbled on anything so harsh. We watch our Aunt toss out the corn to the chickens. Nothing fun there. Out back we don't wander because of the bulls. And the wire fences. And where would you go anyway?

On my uncle's motorbike, laying down to the side on curves and clinging to his ribs? Out back where the boys hide away from us smoking a reefer and coughing and laughing too much? They don't want us. Maybe out in their car riding through the fields hitting dirt clumps and brush scraping underneath and being knocked out of our seat when the tire hits a rock?

That's it. Just follow with a mouth open sort of gawking that says the boys are taller and older and know more. And sure now that mom and dad and my aunt and uncle are gone the boys will come out. And joke and laugh looking at us like we're a bigger joke to be had. Their whispers and giggles go into bedrooms. The mutters hide in the kitchen. The dark is getting darker. And finally it's a deal.

We go single file into the dark night following the eldest boy. One or two of us have flashlights, mine doesn't work. We go a few steps and stop. We hear creepy sounds. I bump into my sister and my younger sister into me. We carry pillow sacks. Our feet scrape through tough grasses. Every now and then a mosquito buzzes my ear and I swat. Light flashes off side to side and up into the air. There's nothing for the light to reflect back. We try to ask questions.

Shush, we're told. Shush again.

We go maybe a hundred feet into the dark behind the house.

We're told stay here. Hold your sacks out. Call "snipe, snipe snipe". There's giggles. So we stop there and hold our sacks.

It's the grass that betrays the boys as they try to sneak away.

"Where you going?" we all ask.

"Stay there" they say, "until you catch one".

Uh-uh, my mind flashes. It's scary out here. Terror zaps through me. Same I guess for my sisters. Pretty soon this herd of human feet are going thump thump thump and then we start to giggle and can't stop and then the whole crowd of us breaks into the too bright kitchen laughing as hard as we can.

"I knew it wouldn't work" one of my cousins say.

When we all quiet down, my uncle says "ever tried whiskey?"

Nope not us girls.

My cousin who is nearly the same age as my uncle offers up the fact he can find some. He starts opening cupboards and pulling out glasses. We're all thinking we're going to have fun now the adults are gone.

And just as he almost has everything set up, lights flash across the walls. "Uh-oh. Mom and dad's home" everyone yells and starts shoving things away and we go sit in the living room, innocent little girls just minding our manners and young men just leaning on the walls. And we didn't even get a sip of whiskey.

"What you all doing, " my aunt asks looking in disbelief that we're all alert and quiet.

"They took us snipe hunting," us girls offer up.

My dad turns to his kid brother with a big shit-eating grin on his face. "You didn't?

My uncles says, "well, yeah but we didn't find any. We're gonna try next year when they're older. They got scared." His tone as he says it says nahayahhyah.

That starts the giggles again. Pretty soon my aunt and dad are swapping jokes again and every once in a while someone offers one too, and all of us girls are just waiting to get to leave but the adults all decide to play cards and it gets later and later and pretty soon I grab my elder sister and say let's go out and look at the stars because the guys have all disappeared since they're no longer in charge of babysitting us dumb girls.

Outside we spread our coats over the heavy grasses.

The night is velvety black, no horizon lights from the city except maybe a blush in the distance. No streetlights.

We lay back and hold our breath.

The night is speckled with lights, so many many stars you can't even make out the constellations almost. My eyes are getting heavy.

My sister says, "there's a shooting star" and "another one."

I sit straight up. "Where? Where?"

She points but I don't see any.

There's a grasshopper buzz in the air every now and then. Inside the house there's laughter and slammed fists as they make meld. Dampness coats my face. Finally cool.

We try to count meteorite's but then there's this huge bright blaze falling toward earth, big as your hand, big as your head, flaming hot and we're sitting stark upright with our mouths wide open cause the whole sky is bright as if there were a giant spotlight and we can see the fields like in sunlight and then it hits ground far over the hillside.

My parents are coming out as we jump up. "Did you see that? Dad, Dad, it lit up the whole sky." They'd seen it too.

I was no longer asleep but watching, zithers of awake jumping me up and down, scanning, searching the sky for more and more even as we all tumble into the car, talking about wishes and meteorites and stars and asking who won.

And I count meteorites crashing toward earth as we drive home along that long empty road and there's only the excitement of the huge open skies on my mind.

Until we come upon fire trucks and a crowd. Smoke is thick in the air. The fields are burning hot fingers like it would take off into sky, but the firemen have it surrounded and the soon the day that has stolen into the dark of night to cause trouble here on Earth slowly fades away.

And maybe that's when I learn that I want the biggest sheet of imagination spread before me at all times and don't ever want the stink of Earth. And yet, here you are, the biggest men in my life having tumbled into dust and I'm like you, going to inherit it, because no one can believe that I can want to wrap you into that dream of the big things in life in the same velvet robe of night, because its there and I claim it even if I hate the heat and the same sameness of every day and the mosquitoes and flies and sickness from heat. I am pressed time and again back into the wheat land's of my grandfather's father and grandfather and father until here today, once more I am riding back into today.

And you're gone. And we're very much the same about the flat lands holding the stars. So much so you wonder why I'm angry. And I wonder why, when all you know me as is that girl.

It's because I'm left holding the bag, looking for the snipe that will never climb inside and wishing to offer up to you all those stars.