Colleen Hollister
There is a girl having a picnic. There are bright deer by the side of the road, by the side of the train tracks. Other girls join. One girl wears a mask and a bloodstained t-shirt. She looks back at her mother carrying her small sister to the crosswalk, the sister wearing something teal blue with wings, something green with wings, and then she scurries to the blanket. The first girl hands this girl a teacup. More girls: crossed legs and empty feet and liftaway hair. They all sit, teacupped and sipping, and there is a dim breeze, and the kind of clouds you could climb on sitting in the sky.
There is a girl having a picnic. Things are all spread out on the blanket. Things list in the soft puddles made by blanket on grass: pot of glowing marmalade, strawberries so red you can see them in your heart. All the girls tuck their feet up under flower-print dresses. All the girls get up at once and run around high-pitch screaming, tearing at their hair, then all at once like letting loose a curtain they plop down and laugh. Feet kicking like exaggerated snails. The deer look embarrassed. The deer canter, the deer run into the path of the oncoming train. Time slows, for just a second, and then: it moves fast. Brakes are flashes of light and beautiful sparks and the scratched-up windows wonder what will happen.
There is a girl having a picnic. The picnic, the morning: it's all so beautiful and bright in its coloring: marigold, lilac. The girl is grumpy and strange. The things in the picnic basket seem incredible creatures, ready to smash, like a poodle wearing a rain slicker, like a childish baby yellow. An orange, a packet of chips next to the apple. It makes you catch your breath. An egg smashes and then the girl picks it up and suddenly it is raw goop, bright orange-yellow as it drifts through her hands. It didn't seem raw before, the girl thinks. The dying will be like this, the girl thinks. A radish. A single buttoned flower to place in a jar of water from a stream, or a bottle. She keeps pulling things out, the picnic basket never-ending. She wonders what snow will be like then, and what paperclips, after the dying. Anything she can think of. The energy of attention, where that will go.
There is a girl having a picnic by herself on the grass near the train tracks. Trains smear by with plastic scratched-up windows, all the faces like they are looked-at through a glassine packet. There are bright deer by the train tracks, standing in the light. A lawn with washing machines, doors wide open like eyeballs peeled out, like watch cases hanging, like hanging bits. Trees with losing limbs and the rough-barked limbs on the ground below the trees. The girl wonders how the trees feel to see a part of themselves down below, and with no hands to pick it up and cradle its sadness, the lost thing, the missing part.
There is a girl having a picnic. She sits on her jacket. She sits on a blanket stolen from her mother. She sits on her mother, the mother flat, long hair flat and wearing an old nightgown that nicely makes a kind of blanket. It anyway protects the girl's ankles from itch bites and from dirt. Inside her picnic basket are a crushed packet of chips and an old slice of pizza. A jar of peanut butter with nothing to put it on. All of this is just what was inside the kitchen. The girl doesn't remember when there was food there, not really, it's been so long and now the cupboards are empty things and only full of scratches from bug-shaped mice and mice-shaped bugs. Outside the bubble made by the girl and her mother, the trains slide past their vision, tall grass almost singes in that movement's heat. It's summer, July, early morning: tree shade and tall grass. The mother makes a mewing sound like a cat, but that's all. The sky is wide and blue like a teacup, and the girl rearranges the nightgown around her, as her ankles have started to soak in the damp.
There is a girl having a picnic. This is how the dying goes, the people who do it just falling off the earth, and the girl feels so heavy with it that she can't stay still. All she wants is to smash things on the pavement. When her mother dies, she thinks, the girl will be so alone you could turn her to the side and the flatness of her body would wink in the light and you'd have to strain your eyes to see her. She doesn't know what will happen to her then. There are bright deer, like forest creatures, but they are mangy, like each of them have caught a bit of the train. She would feed them, like they were forest creatures, like she was simply someone in a book sitting on a blanket, but she has nothing but peanut butter, and they walk back to the washing machines and nose around, licking salt off of metal, licking something.
There is a girl having a picnic. I want to talk about the way the sky seems to separate from the earth. I want to talk about the nightgown, I want to talk about the deer. On the train, people wearing suits crack newspapers in front of their faces. People's faces flash in the light. People flash by, fast as a train going slowly on the corner on the way in to the station, scratched up in the plastic glass, in the morning, can move. They don't see the girl on the blanket. The dying expected, oncoming; the summer passing like a train. The girl having a picnic rearranges teacups, smooths out a blanket damp in the grass, pulls out everything she can think of from a picnic basket, perhaps, yes, something only she can see and all she wants.