Awayland

by Ramona Ausubel

They were alive and together and God, whichever god was theirs, had shaken this day out like a crisp sheet for them to lie down on.

Then the woman was pregnant with twin girls, a pair of anchors that would sink into the sand of their adopted city.

“I’m from the same place as you,” the father had said. “But you are not the place itself. You are not my home.”

“What? It’s so loud here.” The girl whispered, “I can hardly hear you either, in all this quiet.”

The girl took the girdle off and held it to her cheek, her mother’s sweat and skin part of the fibers now, pressed together like praying hands.

The girl was completely visible, but that was not the same thing as being whole. Inside the girl, there were fractures, fault lines.

“You can love as many and as much as you want. I thought I had to save my love up, that I would run out. It turns out it’s the exact opposite.”

The girl could already feel the empty space forming around her mother, and its gravity. She knew she would circle it for the rest of her life, orbiting that absence.

The concentrate that she had spent her whole life brewing, the thick syrup of this place that she had lived on, had been watered down.

No fence, no boundary. There was no separation between human and animal. All any of them were was skin and fur, muscle and oxygen, the ability to eat, to run, to raise their young.

We washed each other’s backs and got out and in the morning we began to search for two new lives.

Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrasses.