Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

The water is a furious road and the only words we can say to one another are simple: witness me.

I am my own best medicine.

I like thinking that she is impressed on my forehead even now—that the stories in her body are written on mine.

My voice, my body, my life—every piece of me is a bundle of medicine that gives and burns and smudges.

When a nurse eventually came into the room and discovered that my kokum had passed, she asked me if I was okay. By then the tears had already crusted in the corner of my eyes. “Of course,” I replied. I didn’t tell her that I thought something inside me was dead too; didn’t tell her that something inside me had been broken for years, if not centuries.

Sometimes I don’t like how life goes on. And sometimes I don’t think it should.

“I told you when you left that we hardened ourselves to the world back then, that old Grandmother Earth gifted us a shell by wrapping around the braid that maintains us. We both born from a wound.”

How much more time do we really have? And by whose measure? Like she said, maybe there aren’t that many more moments to come. But at least there was this one.

It’s overwhelming to think about all the stories that we’ve made, helped to tell, helped to create—our bodies are a library, and our stories are written like braille on the skin.