Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Page B

stolen back by life and thwarted by artful practice: that is what makes the entire performance succeed. That is what gives it depth and meaning.
    Why else would anyone care?
    The appearance of perfection does not interest me. It is the illumination of near-disaster beside which we all teeter, at all times, that interests me. It is laughing in the face of what might have been, and what is not.

8
Cracks
    THERE, WE ’ RE PAST the bare yard, the grey house, and I can breathe again. Already I feel better, though the car is slowing, and I can see the weeds in the ditch waving slowly, taller than whatever’s in the field beyond. We’ve only come a short distance from one property to the next. Do I know where I am? Don’t I?
    “I can’t see the lane,” the girl says. “Where is it?”
    “It’s overgrown—past that bunch of crab apple trees.”
    With a sharp turn, the car bumps over the ruts and into the lane. I see the front field has been planted with winter wheat, rising faintly green and fresh from deep wet furrows, and I see the row of pines that hides the house from view. I always come back here. In my mind, I’m never really away.
    The maples are dying, great wide spaces in between like a mouth emptied of rotten teeth. The raspberry brambles look like tumbleweed. I think I see the path we trampled, Fannie and I. See? There.
    Stop! I want to see the graves.
    They’ve heard me.
    She’s stopped the car.
    They’ve loaded me like so much freight into the chair without dropping me, which is the best I can hope for, with the pair of them.
    Max directs: “I’m going to film this from a wide angle. Bring her over to me, and then into the graveyard.”
    “Are you ready, Mrs. Smart?” The girl stuffs the blanket up under my armpits. The white plugs dangle around her neck, emitting a distant beat, quicker than the heart, and the wad of bubble gum she snaps between her teeth pops in front of my nose.
    How old is she? She looks like a child.
    “Everything’s good, I think,” she says. But she hasn’t fastened the belt.
    You haven’t fastened the belt!
    Max waves her onward: “This is going to be a fabulous shot!” I feel removed from the scene, as if this is a long dream. I come here all the time in my mind. To be here, breathing the cool air and the wet soil, seems less real than a dream would be.
    I can’t worry over the details.
    The girl knocks us through brambles, and we shudder into mud where the wheels sink, and she wrestles and curses under her breath until we progress. Max is backing up one step at a time, leading us closer to where the split rail fence used to be (gone now, a blackened post and another standing out of the ground to remind us of how we stake our claim). We’re really rolling, into the little yard, or whereabouts it used to be, hitting a clear grassy patch as the girl turns the chair toward the flat stones and we sink again.
    Underground, the wheel strikes an unseen root, violently.
    This is how I fall: flatly, in a state that recalls relaxation, into the dank spring earth, alive with thin green promises and the sweet rot of last year’s roots and weeds.
    I register nothing of their commotion.
    I have fallen among the stones, but have struck none. One is quite near my head, the perfect distance for my eyes to focus on it with clarity. The stone looks soft, cushioned by moss, its edges crumbling and shot with rust-coloured veins, and it is sinking into the dirt, or being swallowed, pulled under.
    A person might step on it and not see it for what it is; it is Fannie’s stone, I’m certain.
    THE WAR ENDS, November 11, 1918, like that. I am ten years old. George is a boy soldier marching around the ruins of the Halifax Harbour, dreaming of going to sea. He is not quite seventeen.
    I wait for him to come home.
    Olive and Cora and I walk through the woods to town, carrying our lunches in pails. The low, brick one-room schoolhouse stands on the edge of town, and we enter through the door