As a Girl

Prologue

As a girl, outside the house where I’d always lived, I watched the geese fly over the corn fields in their rows.  This was before the test, when I could escape the snapping screen door myself. On my lonesome, my father used to say.  Run after them over the plowed fields, corn like lumpy pillows under my feet; find my own pretend South for the winter.  After the test, they seemed to fly faster, so you’d have to run the length of the house, scanning the windows, just to glimpse them for seconds.  Seconds less each year.  Year upon year. 

Whenever they finally stopped - I mean disappeared completely - we weren’t there to see them bless our tawny blankets of land.  We were high up, climate controlled, maid-serviced; we didn’t need to go outside and when I was allowed I could only go when escorted – by my father and two men from the Institute.  In the last year you could see them through the thick slabs of glass; then there were only three.  So small in the sky now, silver, not black, against the heavy sleety sky.  It was only twelve days before I began.  The last time I could see them in this time.

If anyone said to me now, if I had a choice, would I have started when asked?  Asked? I’d reply (I would tell anyone who’d listen), I was never asked.  But I did it for the birds.  I did it, again and again, so they might come back, phoenix-like, rising from ashes we’d made and heaped upon them.  So I might be able to see them, and the fields, and the scratches in the door, marking out heights and scuffles, wayward elbows.  So I could go home, and that by doing so, they could too.  This death-loop we find ourselves in, it lends me a simple relief; I see them over and over, crossing continents, but never where we first crossed paths.  We all want to get back there.