This Other Eden

by Paul Harding

ESTHER GLEANED THE last nit from her grandson’s hair and the bottom of the lowering sun punctured on the pine treetops and its light splintered across the yard. She rinsed her hands in a bucket of seawater and took her pipe back from Eha and struck a match and kindled it alight and dropped the match into the can of kerosene-soaked nits and a flame whupped from the can’s mouth then burned wobbly and dim like a brazier at an improvised altar in a nomads’ camp. Ethan went down to the shore and walked into the water up to his thighs and bent and bathed his hair. The salt water burned his scalp even worse but it felt clean and efficacious and he thought, So at least I know I’m still my grandma’s grandson and my father’s child.

She expected looking at the portrait would be like looking into the mirror, but she came around the easel and saw the painted girl and it was like a mallet striking her heart and like her heart was a bronze gong inside her ribs and its sounding somehow unstrung and remade her.