On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

The river had lived long enough, it was not the first dead body to have been dumped in her waters. But as the old river stared into the eyes of the young woman, she couldn’t help but feel a restless sorrow at having known her and the way she had splashed her feet in the water when she was a little girl.

The first sin was believing we would never die. The second sin was believing we were alive in the first place.

It was Mamaw Milkweed who brought us markers to make sure we’d always have enough red to color the ladybug’s back, enough blue for the sky, enough green to bring the hills to life. We even drew our mother and father. We gave them smiles because it was a drawing, and in drawings you don’t have to tell the truth.

“You know,” her dad said, “your telescope is still in your room.” He cleared his throat. “If you came home, we could take it out to the backyard, finish following time across the universe. Find new moons and name them anything you want. What do you say?”

“Why is it when you get our crowns, Arc,” she said, her voice soft and low, “they’re never as shiny as I imagine they’ll be?”

Sage Nell pushed her wire-rimmed eyeglasses up on her nose as she said quietly, “We are shiny and ride among the stars.” “We are shiny and ride among the stars,” we all shouted together. The words had become our way of telling the world something different than it was telling us. “To our kingdom we go,” Sage Nell said as she draped her arm across me. “Our hearts full of mud.”

Twins, who in the womb decided on sixty seconds. It was as much as we would allow ourselves to be separated. Just enough for our mother to rest after the big push, but brief enough that we would not be long from each other in the new world outside the warm walls of her glistening body.

It was something we always did when walking through those woods because the first time we’d ever been there, Sage Nell had dropped her red lipstick. When she couldn’t find it on the ground, she said, “That’s okay. I’ll let the woods have it. Because she lives alone.” From then on, we spoke of the woods like she was a woman we were merely passing by.

After Thursday injected herself, she pulled air back up inside the needle and stuck it down into the ground. “A little for you, mother earth,” she said, her head spiraling down until her chin rested on her chest, “so you can forget you are not loved either.”

All the roads here are not graveled in rock, girls, but with the woman’s scars, because only a woman’s scars are strong enough to bear something driving over them, again and again.”

“A witch is not a pointy hat or a broom or warts. A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman. Don’t you want to be a woman like that? A woman with power?”

“Won’t they burn me, too?” Daffy asked, her cheeks still cupped by Mamaw’s hands. Mamaw lowered herself so she could be eye level. In a deep, dark tone, she said, “Not if you burn them first.”

“Power is not only physical. It’s not some muscleman lifting all the weights. It’s much more than that. It’s being smart. It means you endure.”

“My hands have the river in them,” she told us. “Because I held them in the water for the year I disappeared.” “You disappeared, Mamaw Milkweed?” I asked. “All women do, my dear, from time to time,” she said. “It’s not that we disappear, it’s how we find ourselves that matters.”

“The poor people, envious of the wealthy man’s lace, decided to make their own fancy things.”

“Then that is what is on the beautiful side.” Mamaw Milkweed smiled. “All the things that make you the happiest. All the things that are far from the fires of men.”

“Soft is the snake, but hard is the hiss,” Mamaw said. “We live on the savage side, girls. That’s why I’m telling ya this, so you can survive it.”

Should the river be with the swells of the gods, the body may be thrown so forcefully against the rocks that it lies there, unidentifiable. At these times, the river says, I remember you. Who you were. I will listen to what you have to say. I will return your name to you, even as you disappear.

Mamaw must have been flipping through the catalog when the car slammed into her, throwing her into the milkweed by the side of the road. I imagined she lay there on her back and watched the butterflies fluttering through the sunlight above her, landing from plant to plant as she closed her eyes. She died within minutes of impact.

For a second, the river tells the truth when she says, the woman is left alone.

This one got me...

The first autumn without Mamaw Milkweed, the leaves changed colors the way they always had. The temperatures dropped, as the autumns before, and the deep blue of the sky settled into a fine gray. Life had not stopped just because hers had.

He wouldn’t die, this man who came for our mother in ways all the men did. But the wound was deep enough for him to know I was there and I was ready.

Deep in her waters, the river will keep what pieces she can. As if someday, someone will come to take them home.

By this time, it is hard to imagine the remains had ever been a person. Ever been someone who laughed at her father’s jokes. Smiled at her mother’s touch. Danced barefoot with her lover across the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor.

“No one will ask me,” she said, “but I know why that rock is gone. It’s gone because the Grand Canyon is a woman who was once a little girl who was hurt. And she took the record of all that hurt and she buried it. Made it disappear. As if it never even happened in the first place.”

Who do you tell about the demons when the demons are the ones who you tell?

Do not be frightened of disturbed edges, girls. Instead, let them remind you that you inherit the power to braid your life with the earth.”

“You’re strange with death, Arc,” she said. “You rake it inside you, like a pile of leaves in the autumn. You rake it all up into this giant heap. Make it something you can carry.

I wanted to tell him they weren’t broken lines. They were a collection of all the things a woman is and can be. That the spaces were not something coming apart but something coming together, but then he stepped closer to Daffy, and I felt as though they were broken lines after all.

“I got thirty-five dollars for it,” he said. “I got to keep the case. If I don’t open it, I can imagine the violin is still inside.” “Thirty-five dollars?” I asked. “For you to swim.”

“For our birthdays,” I said, “Daffy and me ate cake that wasn’t there. For all the noise in our house, we would lay our ears against the floor and hear music that wasn’t there.” I threw the dream of the violin into the wall. “Don’t tell me what is and is not here.” I bent down and picked up the imaginary pieces, putting them back together again. “I create things out of nothing every damn day. You can, too.”

I looked back on history, trying to find the elusive bed of roses. All I saw were women under the heel.

I stared at the five bucks. She was gripping it so tight, all I could do was tell her it was enough for what she’d done. It had to be, because if not, the sky would have cracked open and the goddess would have fallen to the cold, hard ground.

“Some kind of art piece?” she asked. “That or some kind of madness,” I said. “Sometimes they’re the same thing, Arc.”

“Sometimes I only believe in hell. But I suppose if it exists, there has to be a heaven, too.” “Tell me what it’ll be like,” she said. “Your philosophers have already described it in a million sparkling ways, haven’t they?” “I want to know what you think it’ll be, Arc.” “I don’t know.” I sighed. “I guess it’ll be drifting clouds and bright wonders and the moment like a wheel, turning and turning until we know what it was all for. Or maybe it’ll just be horses galloping by so fast, they make us dizzy.”

“Where would we be if no one had ever said the word God? Had never said the word heaven? Hell? All those things which deepen the shade of the ripe fruit. Where would we be without a creation story? Without the say of sin? Where would we be if we could just live without the fear that the life we’ve had has not been good enough to spend eternity with the harps?

‘We are more than evolution. We are morals and ethics and creation. We are the feel, the made, the what that has come from the hip bones of a God above.’

“Wound a flower, make her bleed. In the pain, the flower cries and you risk becoming something else.”

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

It takes strength to hold your breath. To let yourself drift into the elemental. To allow yourself to say nothing.

I touched the water with my bare hands, and the river touched me back with hers. I wanted to leave my old life behind as easy as leaving a cup on the counter and walking off. I asked the river if this was possible. And she said everything but the word yes and the word no. Instead, she was a friend, a sister, an other who then became myself. I knew then that the migration of us was tied to the migration of the ripples.

I don’t wanna live with the window only half open, Arc. Only half of the sun. Only half of the moonlight. Only half of the breeze. I want the whole thing. I want a whole life.”

“Did you know our telescopes are strong enough to see sorrow from space, Arc?”

“That wasn’t static, Thursday.” “Then what was it?” she asked. “It was the sound of the river.”

I thought he’d be an easy john. Then I saw the cross necklace he was wearing and knew he’d want to spank me or worse.

Men might think they’re the big dog archaeologists. But only women know how to dig because we make sure to go deep enough. Problem with that is, we risk the sides falling in on us and burying who we thought we’d be.

‘You can only soar so much and no more. The power of a flower is that she can tower.’

“Someday I might ask you for a favor,” she said. “To hold me, while I vanish.

“Oh, Arc, I envy the woman who is not tired. If such a woman exists.”

“Harlow. Her eyes were the color of her mother’s.” I turned to face him, my breathing matching my racing heart. “Harlow. She loved birds. Was going to fly with them to someplace warm. Harlow. She was found naked, only wearing one wet sock. Harlow. There were bruises all over her body and cuts and slashes that you claimed were from the river. Leaves stuffed down her throat. Her earrings ripped out of her fucking ears. Harlow. Harlow. Harlow! Maybe that will help you remember her name.”