Flight of the Sparrow

by Amy Belding Brown

bones scraping across broken rocks,

She is plainly demented with love.

sliding up her back like a cold snake.

door. It sounds to Mary like the Devil’s own knuckles,

The only thing left to feel is a war club crushing her skull, or a musket ball shredding her lungs before she crumples into a slick of her own blood.

She hears women screaming and the fire snarling behind her like a great beast.

Pinwheels of blood stream from his hand onto the snow.

The skull splits open and the snow blossoms suddenly with blood.

arms twisted in impossible positions.

as if the tears clotted there are barbed.

even devils have to sleep.

Unearthly, piercing cries swirl through the darkness, lifting the small hairs on her neck.

writhe before them in grotesque postures. Like creatures from hell,

hot ember scalding her bowels.

An icy despair fills her. Life itself no longer matters. She has lost her soul.

Words are like charms, she realizes. If said often enough, they will make it so.

Slowly, Mary discovers in idleness a strange expansion of time and a growing awareness of the natural world. She begins to watch the flight of sparrows through the winter air and the dance of red squirrels in the trees. She notes the changes in clouds, the slant of sunlight as it falls on snow, the tight red buds of winter trees. All these things she has seen before, but only as background to her life’s duties. Now she begins to understand that trees and birds and clouds and animals have a significance of their own that is independent of human activity.

“There is much about Indians that will surprise you—if you but open your eyes.”

Mary cups Ann’s face between her hands. Her fingers make jagged streaks in the grime.

She has become a beast of burden, an object to be used and discarded at the whim of her mistress.

Some trials are monstrous. Sometimes God asks too much.

bubble of nausea

that love belongs first to God, that mortal love is a poor imitation of divine love.

Love goes where it will, and the attempt to redirect it actually corrupts it.

We know things have no meaning if they are severed from their purposes.”

she says, the words like cold stones in her mouth.

like water in a disturbed pond.

that her heart had been hollowed out, scraped raw, an empty husk.

Flames snap loudly

She had acted the part of the captive, though she was neither shackled nor restrained.

She punished her children with the dutiful regularity of all Puritan mothers, yet she now regrets every harsh word. What she once believed necessary now seems to her needlessly cruel. She often sees Indian mothers laugh with their children and indulge their childish antics. She knows she ought to righteously condemn them, but the truth is she longs only to imitate them. What harm could come if the English treat their children with kindness and mercy?

She falls asleep to the sound of the rain beating all around her like a hundred drums.

throb of the drums.

“We all face redemption of one sort or another in these sad times.”

a dark smear on the hill.

feels her heart scrambling in her chest as if trying to find its frantic way out.

She is as one dead, being carried through a foreign land.

Sunlight glints off his skin and makes his face look sallow and pasty.

Joseph’s eyebrows vault upward.

Confused feelings tumble within her.

She becomes more certain that God has allowed these terrible trials to fall on New England because they have embraced slavery. Instead of examining themselves, the English falsely and foolishly believe that whatever they do is approved by God.

her limbs grow heavy and her brain swirls with strange images.

Night after night she is awakened by dreams so terrifying and vile her heart thrashes like a dying bird. She lies gasping in bed, as if drowning, bathed in her own tears.

Still, she resists. She says she is not sufficiently skilled in shaping sentences. She insists that there is too much she cannot remember. She says that much of what happened is too painful to recount.

“Have I not suffered enough but now I must be accused of disloyalty—by my own husband!?” She wants to throw something heavy across the room.

Not for the first time, she is struck by the thought that Joseph believes there is no difference between God’s will and his own.

sending a shower of sparks across the hearth.

For one vivid moment, she actually hates him.

She bows her head, all her anger and doubts crumbling away.

It jars her so violently that for a moment she sees nothing but a blank oval where the minister’s face should be.