Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

What a peculiar girl, Dad thought, to be sitting in a cemetery chomping an apple with all that death beneath her.

If she and he were the same in anything, it was the way they walked the earth.

My father used to say that when a child is born, their very first breath is sent on the wind to become a plant or insect, a creature of feathers, fur, or scales. He would say that this human and this life are bound together as a reflection of one another.

Every tree I passed, I stopped long enough to write on its trunk with my finger. I thought if I wrote the trees something nice, they would be my map through the woods. Dear great big oak, your bark is like my father’s singing. Help me find my way. Dear beech, don’t tell the oak, but your leaves make the best bookmarks. Help me find my way. Dear maple, you smell like the best poem. Help me find my way.

I stared at the jar in his hand. He had painted small black stars on the outside of the glass. “Why you always paint stars on your moonshine jars?” I asked. “Because the stars belong with the moon,”

As the women sang, their voices seeped into the ground, nourishin’ the roots of the plants and makin’ ’em stronger.”

The pink and orange clouds performing, it seemed, just for us.

I wondered if I could ever speak to nature as deeply as he could.

“Cicadas,” I told her. “I want to be a princess with a dress made of cicada shells. I want wings, too. Wings made of violets and—”

Dad believed God was in the woods more than He was ever in a building.

I wondered if my mother and I had grown up together as two girls, each no older than the other, if we would’ve been friends.

“My gift is better,” Trustin said, holding up a squirrel skull that had a paintbrush sticking out of each eyehole.

someone take notes - this is what i want for christmas

“God hates us, Betty.” “The Carpenters?” I asked. “Women.”

“I started out life as nobody,” he said, “but because your momma made me a father, I have a real chance to end my time on this earth as somebody worth rememberin’.

I used to think—like the stories I encountered—that my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father.

“You’re pretty,” I said to a spider watching me.

‘Your life is what makes you rich,’ they insisted. ‘The people you love and the people who love you back.’

You’ve got to dance, because it’s what the women in our family have always done for the things in their life. It’s why the world never stopped, because no matter what change or pain came to them, the women danced.

Nailed to the cross of her own gender, a girl finds herself between the mother and the prehistoric rib, where there’s little space to be anything other than a daughter who lives alongside sons but is not equal to them.

“I could never leave the hills. The people I wouldn’t mind leavin’, but never nature herself.

“Don’t let it happen to you, Betty. Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. You don’t wanna live so long only to realize, you ain’t lived at all.”

Late summer in southern Ohio was a beautiful challenge passed from the sun to the child, Can you survive my heat and still love me?