On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

“You don’t tap death on the shoulder when he’s looking in the other direction,” my aunt said. “Arc’s done tapped his shoulder now. Best put lipstick on them both so at least they’ll be pretty when death comes.”

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.

“The one who broke it must not have known,” I said. “Known what?” Daffy asked. “That a woman with a broken jaw can still speak.”

“I never held her broken promises against her,” I said, “because I figured she cared enough about us to make the promise in the first place.

“I’m serious, Arc. Sometimes I think the earth has a slant for us, and we’re all headed downhill. We’re like the women before us, Arc. We carry great terrors on our backs. We take them to bed with us and get up with the same demons.”

Her dad bought a can of paint in the color of blue that he felt best represented Thursday’s description to him. “Something like the color of the sky,” she had told him. “But also the color of the mountain mist. A shade that is both young and old. One that remembers. One that discovers.” The color he came back with was a blue she smiled at.

“I didn’t wanna hear you say you were leaving,” I said. “I wish you would stay.” “If I stay,” she said, “Chillicothe plus me multiplied by the Blue Hour, minus good sense divided by the devil, times a million and one needles, equals just another addict. Why don’t you come with me, Arc? It’s hard to start over in a place you’ve already finished last in. You know?”

Sometimes I thought the whole of Chillicothe on a map would be but a bruised mark, like it’d come into contact with a difficult thing.

“To be a woman is to be from the beginning of time,” Mamaw Milkweed would say as she stared at herself in the mirror. “It is God’s greatest challenge posed to us. If we fail, we’ll be promised nothing but an eternity of that failure, lost in the mist at the edge of the county. If we find our way out, thank the women before who left the light on against the dark.”