We Begin at the End

by Chris Whitaker

“There’s always a man. Whenever anything fucked up happens in the world, there’s always a man.”

Better and worse. Bad and good. None of us are any one thing. We’re just a collection of the best and worst things we’ve done.

She didn’t stop till she had to, till she took a knee and swallowed mouths of warm, heavy air. She cursed him out, kicked a thick oak and felt pain shoot back through her. She screamed at the trees, so loud birds lifted and speckled the clouds.

An old lady wandered over, smiled wide, liver spots and hanging skin, like the earth was calling the flesh to be buried but her brain was too stubborn to cede it.

Most of all she felt tired. Not from the work or the sleep, just from the wretched hatred that lived deep inside her.

“So when you point it out, all this beauty, all this that you see and you think I see too. You should know it pales beside what I saw before. This purple”—she waved a hand at the huckleberries beside—“makes me think of her ribs, beat dark like that. The blue water, that’s her eyes, clear enough to see there’s no soul behind them anymore. You breathe the air and you think it’s fresh, but I can’t even take a breath without feeling that stab.”

“I rise above the farmhouse and see slates and green, the gutter of leaves that remind me of fall and seasons that change no matter who dies. I am high in the sky and Montana is a footnote, patchwork fields stitched by tractors like ants, people that bob like they are drowning in ordinary. “The ocean is endless but I see its end. I see the earth, the curves are tomorrow but it won’t turn. I see clouds that hold sky, a sunset in the desert and a rise over metals. Before long I am darkness and stars and their moons. The world is a nothing, so small I raise a finger and hide it. I am the God I don’t believe in.

“After that night, after what he did, he knew none of us would find freedom again.”

“Maybe my father’s blood is so fucking weak it steals away the Radley. I’m not Star or Hal, Robin or Billy Blue. I am one night, one mistake, one reaction. I’m nothing more.”

“Tragedy has a way of making saints out of sinners.