Excerpt: Untitled

In her sleep Madi found memories, scattering like feathers that had been dropped from a great height. They were all bright and dusty, stained with the red-orange clay of home, the shocking aqua-blue of the house with its yellow trim. Built like a good cake, her grandmother used to tell her, frosted all over with colors so you cannot ever forget which one is yours. The battered wooden fence, the boards splitting, hoary and grey from many seasons of rainfall. The clothesline that stretched from the fence to the single tree in the yard, a piece of dirty cotton rope that held their white underclothes, washed and bleached until they nearly glowed in the sun. The tree itself was a deep wine-red most of the spring and summer and blazed a brilliant scarlet later in the year, a pretty thing, but she far preferred the enormous Texas oak in the town square, sprawling three or four trunks and sporting round whitened rings like pox scars where branches had been sawed off due to disease or inconvenience. That tree shadowed the fountain, a tableau that she loved, the twisting scarred bark bent over the adobe-bricked fountain with its pretty voice, the soft babble that made the dusty streets seem less so, especially in the summertime when there were children climbing in its low branches, chattering like monkeys.

They had been permitted to splash harmlessly in the fountain (but you must never go in completely, their mother had said, a piece of advice they patently ignored when they thought they could get away with it), but they had never been permitted to play in the river. During rainy season they had been barred from it completely. She had sneaked down to it once, alone, just after a heavy microburst had subdued all the earth in the streets, churning it into unrecognizable mud. She remembered that even the oak tree looked like a stranger in the square, secret and dark, waterlogged, with a branch snapped off and hanging only by its bark, the wood inside stark white and vulnerable, splintered apart. Everything looked as if it had been brought up from a shipwreck, the shapes the same but the essence changed, soaked through and bloated.

The dissatisfied, hungry roar of the river had nearly deafened her before she was close enough to see it. It was the only thing in her small world, she thought, that became ravenous the more it was fed, like the tales of the wendigo her brother Jaime had told her late at night after reading it in a book he brought from the bookmobile that came through town, the shiny green bus that reminded her of an alligator laying in the dust. The wendigo was a creature that humans became, a cannibal who grew by how much it ate, never sated, always skeletal and hungry. The river, in sharp contrast, was fat and rushing, swollen with the rainfall, churning as it raced through the gorge. She could feel it rumbling beneath her feet. The rickety board bridge was gone, sheared away by the rising water, and the river seemed so much wider now than it ever had, a solid roiling mass; the soft clay it had eaten away turned it orange and thick, the consistency of cocoa, not transparent at all. It seemed a different animal than the fountain in the square; if that quiet babbling thing were a sheep, this river was a lion, a shark, a crocodile, lightning-fast with many teeth and primal instincts. Eat. Fight. Rush through. Don't stop. It would devour the ground from beneath her feet if she stood there long enough.