Avocet

There is so much imagination in a child's mind. When the woman was young she and her brother built a wooden platform in the trees. She remembers it as if it was the two of them but her father or one of the neighbors must have helped. It was what they did on the platform that inhabits her more than how it got there. How big their eyes felt when they sat on its planks—up above anything that could hurt them. Some days they pretend it was a ship—the wind against the leaves was the sound of waves against the hull. Sometimes the woman went there by herself, it felt as if no one would ever find her. Like the time she packed her underwear and those little flowered tank tops she wore before a bra was needed. She’d decided to run away from her family—go it alone. When she got to the furthest house she knew she turned into the woods with her nap-sack full of clean under things and found her way back to that platform in the trees. There were wooden slats perpendicularly nailed into the upper trunk and she climbed them until she reached the highest branch that would hold her. She sat there, listening to her family wander the woods yelling her name. Her brother walked beneath the platform but never looked up, as if he knew she was there and didn’t want to be the one catch her. 

When the yelling stopped, and the sun sunk into the distant ground, she carefully climbed back to the platform and curled up into a ball to sleep. She believed she fell into dream for a little while but at some point she woke. The forest was alive—tree frogs, crickets, the pitter patter of little feet on leaves, the dripping of unknown water sources, the croak of a toad, the hooot of an owl. She remembered wondering if each creature understood the sound of the other. If they could differentiate between each other's movements and calls. The way she knew the distinctive differences between her fathers footsteps and her mothers when they walked the hallway towards her room. Her fathers creating a trepidation in her, her mothers creating need. Did the owls hoot create that same vibration of fear in the sleeping mice? Did the loud flap of a seemingly large wing mean it was time to run.? She was too young to think it through and so she hit that grand abyss of unknowns that makes being a child so delightful. She opened her eyes, as she listened to the songs, allowing them to adjust to the wildness of moonlight. She looked around the platform to make sure there was nothing crawling that she might be afraid of—there wasn’t. This reminded her that her sometimes boat was safe—that she was on a vessel surrounded by water and nothing could reach her. 

As she lay there her eyes honed in on a figure in the distance. It was hard to say what it was at first but as her sight tightened she saw it was a wolf. But this wolf wasn’t as it should be, it was walking on two feet and wearing what seemed to be some semblance of ragged clothing and a cap. This wolf was carrying a stick over one shoulder with a pouch of items that hung off the back end. The woman blinked multiple times as she watched thinking the picture would dissolve but it didn’t. She watched this walking wolf, its side profile something she could draw to this day, as it moved steadily down a path she had walked many times before. A path that was only about ten feet away from her platform. At one point the wolf stopped, it looked up in her direction and tipped its hat. She wanted to gasp but she didn’t dare. To gasp would mean that she was there and she knew she wasn’t supposed to be so she flattened her body and tried to dissolve herself into wood. Her panic lay on top of her like a weighted blanket—maybe a form had come out of the night sky to shield her—lay on top of her like an invisible cloak until the wolf was gone. She didn't know how long it had been but when she did open her eyes again it was light out and she reflected back on what she saw, the way the wolf walked past her and the forest went silent —she wondered if the other creatures tightened up like she did–hushed themselves. Rather than figuring it out she decided to go home. 

She snuck in through an unlocked door. The house was quiet and she tiptoed making sure the sound of her steps couldn’t be calculated. She went to the furthest room from the sleepers and curled up behind the couch—completely invisible to anyone who wandered down. When she woke for the second time that morning her mother and brother were rummaging through her backpack and laughing at the fact that she’d orchestrated a plan to run away and only thought to take undergarments. Once she realized she was there and they could see her she stood up and hugged her mother. No one asked her where she had been or what she had been thinking. They didn’t ask what it was like to be out there in the night—a little girl in a forest alone sleeping in the trees. They didn’t ask what she heard or saw. How she felt. This is when she began to accept silence. Not literal silence but the silence that comes with the separation of a mind. Her mind - the voices and stories she lived with every moment of everyday. When she grew up she cringed when people spoke about reality because she didn’t know how anyone could know hers, or she theirs, and therefore she didn’t know how anyone could know anything.

Transmissions Circa 2022 Shackelford, Virginia