The Bog Wife

by Kay Chronister

Holding aloft an antique globe with his index finger on the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, his voice reunifying the continents that time had torn asunder, he said, They are the same mountains. The same veins of water. We are natives to this land. And still the bog’s custodians. He said, Always the bog has belonged to us and we to it.

she would say, You are his son but my child, and he didn’t know what she meant by it,

There was something both comforting and unmooring to Wenna in the featurelessness of a Walmart: that she could be anywhere and it always appeared the same,

on the cusp of an argument that you could have only with someone who loved you.

Nothing was as wrenching as having reached for her mother and not grasped her; nothing was as gratifying as their mother emerging from her reclusion enough to come within reach.