Joan

For weeks you looked forward to the Puppy Picnic. In the car on the way there you tap your sneakers against the back of the passenger seat, and your mother says Stop getting your muddy shoes all over the leather. You bolt out of the car when you arrive: towards a pack of dogs off-leash, their damp snouts herding you as you shriek. Later there is lunch arranged in large aluminum tins, and you are called from your shepherding games to the oily smells of fried meat and macaroni and cheese. You take secret pleasure in buffet-style meals where you can make mountains of your plate— you love eating outside, the wind roughing your hair— improper pleasures you are only allowed at rare events. You peel the skin off your piece of fried chicken and place the crackling film flat onto your tongue. Stabbing a wing with your plastic fork, you pull apart sections of meat which you throw sneakily to the ground, where a group of dogs converge on them like beggars. I am like a god, you think. Sectioning pieces of flesh, throwing them to hordes of hungry mouths. And then there is a sound which interrupts your game: a sound that causes the dogs to break apart and rush towards it: a wail, or a yelp, of animal-origin: and when you turn towards the sound, to a table behind you, there is a woman lying face-up on the grass and a man on his knees beside her, his hands pressed together atop her breastbone, and a crowd forms: a crowd like beggars, with mouths hinged open, hungry for something: and you leave your severed meat on the plate and stand, to get a better look at the scene, which by now is startling, as the woman’s face slowly deepens the color of a bruise and there are more yells, more abandoned plates, more animal sounds, coming from everywhere but her mouth, which is parted slightly, but unmoving: and your mother rushes to you and strokes your hair, forehead, cheeks, your mother hungry for you in that moment: and electrical wires are brought out from some unseen case and the woman on the ground convulses, her skin now a pocked blackberry, it is the most hideous and horrifying color you’ve ever seen: and someone says Chicken bone and someone else says Choke or maybe Stroke, and your mother leads you away, towards the dogs which are now back in the fields, herding invisible sheep, she tells you to play your shepherding game, she wants to play with you this time: so you run with your mother and the dogs until a firetruck blazes crimson into the picnic area and three men roll a black-bag stretcher quickly into the crowd and then slowly out of it: as they do this work of gods you are in the fields, the dogs are jabbing your belly, their damp raspberry snouts on your jeans: and your mother is not smiling, or maybe she is smiling the largest smile of her life: you are still hungry, but for days after you won’t eat chicken, anything with bones, until your mother cooks your favorite curried fish and you chew each bite ravenously, by now having suppressed your brief and disturbing encounter— you are a girl, you are practiced in the art of burying your afflictions—your whole adolescence you will practice this act, hiding your nervousness inside smoke-filled cars, entombing yourself in basement closets with dark-mouthed boys whose fingers smell of fish, suppressing what strange urgency wets itself between your legs, masking your bitterness towards the bottles and pills you watch your friends swallow with alarming hunger—for you too are hungry for this, a beggar for the skeletons of adulthood, for just one shocking moment that tears a nameless you from the named you’s skin, for all that which splinters your well-guarded mind, but you are told no no no, you tell yourself no, you are like a bone afraid of breaking, revealing its delicate marrow—

You liken yourself a woman now, a grown-up twenty-four. You read Kant and Zadie and Paz and you sometimes wear red lipstick, smeared across your mouth like the blood of something long-eaten. You don’t take your mother’s shit, you pay your one-bedroom rent, you skipped the funeral of your childhood crush. You accepted an offer to graduate school, and for a while now, you haven’t paid your taxes, you no longer pretend-responsible. Your dog is long-dead: the day it happened, your mother called you sobbing and you took the train home from school to see what was left of him, sprawled on the rug in that strange ungodly shape. You smoke more cigarettes than you’ll admit; and yes, on that one particularly betraying night you drank and drove; you occasionally—though you don’t tell your psychiatrist this— flirt with a boy from high school to score free bags of coke, which you cut into bones on top of your hardcover Dubliners or The Paris Review. Your cells no longer on fire with fear of your own dying, you think about returning to that shade-filled forest, and you remember the woman who you’ve secretly named Joan as though she was someone you vaguely knew and were fond of. Yes— in the moments you are most alive— emerging, glistening, from a steamed shower, throwing back your fourth tequila with lime, sweating your salt out in bed, you think of Joan. You don’t know why, but you think of her face, that other-worldly blue, and you feel something. Believe me when I say it is almost grief, it is almost joy.

Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and a current MA+MFA candidate at the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Her poetry and prose has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Poetry Magazine, Orion Magazine, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Brevity, and others, along with several anthologies, including The Golden Shovel Anthology.