Half Wild by Robin MacArthur

to this day, whether that change in her was because she knew he was Abenaki, or because of the way he had crumpled, without resistance, into the wall of the barn, or because of that strange sound he made as he took the blow. All she knows is that she left, and went back to the table, and ate her mother’s meat loaf, quietly.
    Cora cannot breathe. She thinks of that peppered outline of the deer’s body against the wall, of Lawrence Pial’s mother’s beautiful, dark face, of the look in his eyes against the back wall of this barn, and cannot breathe. She feels ill: a reeking bitterness in the pit of her stomach. Coffee, pennies, Kevin: sad, bruised-arm boy or no. And this barn, this hillside, this view and mist rising up out of the valley, off the water: is it, was it ever, God’s country?
    The door swings open and there are footsteps. Cora swats the beam of her flashlight toward the door. Her heartpounds; she’s never been closer to believing in ghosts. But it’s Kevin. Just her grandson, Kevin, standing there in the doorway, wide-eyed.
    â€œGrandma? What are you doing here?” He walks toward her a few steps, and she’s amazed to think she would have been found, after all, if that door had knocked her down at 3 A.M. He would have picked her up, carried her inside. The early hours of his eighteenth birthday. Her dear grandson.
    â€œOh, I don’t know, Kevin. I couldn’t sleep. The door was swinging and I went out.”
    â€œRight,” he says, looking down at his hands, and she realizes he must come here often, in the middle of the night, to get away, to find a safe and quiet place.
    â€œSit down, Kevin. Sit down here near me. It’s so late. Or so early. It’s your birthday.” And so he does. He sits down and closes his eyes, his knee shaking, and the two of them are silent, his breath rancid with beer, or liquor, or both, watching the night’s blue sky through the open windows, and after a few moments she hears Kevin’s breath drift into the breath of sleep.
    Cora lets her weight settle into the moldy green-checkered chair, the chair where Kevin sat to throw darts and drink beer, and her body feels small, thin, old, brittle, and she thinks this is the way it will go; Kevin is the way it will go, like a giant sheet being removed, revealing some darker, broken, meaner heart, and she closes her eyes, and thinks of Lawrence Pial, of what she has alwayswished she had done that night, of what she has never let herself imagine: that she had gone to him, and taken his hand, and pulled him up. That they had slipped out of the barn together into that August darkness and heat—crickets, fireflies, stars—that she had lain down in that grass with him, and let him touch her, and touched him, let her imperfect heart explode with his, let there be born, in that night, in that field, the possibility of something different, something beautiful, something new. But she did not. No, she did not. Cora closes her eyes. The barn is all darkness. Just Kevin’s slow, uneven breath and the swallow’s tail, flickering. Oh God, she thinks. She is old. How long until morning?

7
BARRED OWL
    I choose the red dress, knee-high black leather cowboy boots, and aqua blue to dust my eyes. The camper is stinking hot and smells of Jimmy’s beer, of creek water, and of stained sheets, which I take to my great-aunt Hazel’s once a week to wash, but once a week is not enough in August. Not with Jimmy, not with the camper down near Silver Creek, where the sun doesn’t shine long enough to keep bread from turning blue, the corners of my books from curling up at the edges, the smells from sticking around. “That?” I said to Hazel four months ago when I came here asking for a place to stay and she pointed at the teal-colored tow-along camper that had been parked behind the barn for seventeen years.
    â€œThere’s always the chicken coop,” she said. She