GRACES, FATES by Gretchen Flesher Duggan
At home there’s always motion. Outdoors it comes from the waves in their constant rolling reflecting the sky. Even on calm days the light can’t stand still on the surface of the sound, but scatters and blinks in a flashing brightness that outdoes the planets. And the motion comes from the Douglas fir and the hemlock, sticking high up against the clouds, and the madrona and alder leaning low over the banks toward the beach, and from the bald eagles—dogged by crows—tipping their great wings like teeter-totters in the sky. But the motion inside came from great-grandmother, Gusty. The rest of us moved too; we were moving around her, or because of her, under the influence of her, in the delight of her. My mother may be the only one who could resist her power, and she wasn’t any better off for that.
On the green walls of the room where I’m staying—where they keep the spinning wheel—hang portraits of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Facing the wall, I can read my family history from left to right, starting with Great Gusty. She is poised on her elbow against the back of a wooden chair, her diploma rolled and tied with ribbon, a lace collar under her chin, the smooth and clear skin, seen only on the faces of fashion models and ancestors, yellowed with time. Great-grandmother Augusta, who’d refused to be called by a name far more dignified than she cared to be, was thankful for the deterioration of her complexion as the portrait aged. Nothing could misrepresent her more than her grand name and that prim photograph combined. She’d allowed her daughter—my Grandma Vee—to keep and display the picture, but she’d forbidden us to pass on her name.
She forbade me as soon as I could speak. Even in her oldest age, from her post in the kitchen, Great Gusty never failed to tell me her parents shouldn’t have given her so grand a name. “They should have called me Lulu or Gigi. I might have rebelled against that and become a lady.” She always paused, giving me opportunity for due reflection before concluding, “Augusta is an unmanageable name for a girl.” The force and certainty of all the decrees she would one day give to me—and anyone within hearing—are visible in Great Gusty’s portrait. Her eyes, lazily open, only imitate a genteel, subdued girl. Her chin and eyebrows dare the photographer, teasing him, warning him to speed up. There was only a matter of time before she might hitch up the ivory hem of her gown and stalk away to chop wood—a habit her mother disparaged—so, “hurry up damn it! Hurry up, Bud.”
This place, our wooden house above Vaughn Bay—a southern nook in the Puget Sound—is made of my family; even Gusty, who is now dead, is evidenced at every creaking and banging of the door (considerably less frequent since her departure), in the presence of the yellow-handled fly swatter hanging just under the kitchen counter which she used with special dexterity, in memories of her voice on the stairs, shouting down to the beach, and in the jars of her home-canned goods still crowding out the arrival of store-bought “tinny things.” They think I’ve come home for good now, so they’ve given me this room. “Stay in here, March. Without all our things,” says Grandma Vee—and besides the spinning wheel, and their three faces at my back, she’s right—there’s not much for dust to gather on. Growing up, I always shared a room with one of them, but Great Gusty said, “A grown woman needs a room to herself.” Dead or not, she rules under this roof, so Grandma Vee, forever obedient to her mother, brought me in here, and now she always knocks. If they intended to give me a place where I could have some independence, they surely underestimated the potency of these three photographs, hung in a row.
Before I came back to this house on the peninsula, reachable by bridge and highway, yet still set apart, I tried to describe my family to my roommate, but she said they all sounded “nice,” so I didn’t get it right. “Nice” doesn’t make sense as a word for real people. And nice doesn’t have the power to reel you away from the present, and possibly the future, the way this place throws a line and tugs me back.
Great Gusty’s husband, my Great-grandpa Arthur, said they forswore the sun for water when they left Minnesota on a train for a secluded peninsula in the South Puget Sound. He got off at a stop in Spokane and waved at Gusty from the platform. She pulled the window down so he could have the satisfaction of yelling, “This is our last chance!” He pulled his cap over his forehead, brought it all the way down to his heart. “Next stop: rainforests of gray, herds of rainfall, giant shadows of prehistoric trees.” Arthur smoothed the back of his head and tugged his cap down tight.
“I read the brochure,” Gusty said as she pushed the window up.
Great-grandmother Gusty said Great-grandpa Arthur hopped back on the train and repeated things like, “It’ll beat us,” the rest of the way over the dry grassy miles of eastern Washington and then when they came to the Cascades, those giant muscular stones, their glimmering patches of summer snow, the spindly, rugged blue trees jutting up taller than clouds, he got quiet and she always said he was sure to have been thanking God he had a wife with the sense to bring him there.
Gusty was so big-bellied with Vee that her water broke on the Burro as the steamship entered Vaughn Bay late in the evening. Some men on deck called out they had a laboring woman onboard as their steamer approached the dock. Gusty and Arthur were helped into a wagon and driven to the house they’d sent word about buying. They had arrived on the peninsula they would call home and Gusty was ready, in the moonlight, to finish the job of bringing their baby into the world. Grandma Vee’s habit of pleasing everyone began with the way she entered this world. She waited until the journey was over, gave warning enough for Gusty and Arthur to get their wits about them, and pulled herself out in the ordinary way, with the first light, as the big moon went below the trees far across the water. Gusty stared at that moon through the windows all night while she pushed and clenched her teeth and told Arthur to hush, couldn’t he see she wasn’t worried? She sent him off to some lights they could see in a window half a mile or so away. He came back with help—in the form of a woman who was already on her way over and who had done this a time or two. She brought clean cotton and a sharp knife.
I hear that when I came, I came early, not prematurely, but before you could count nine months from a wedding day. Great Gusty whispered this to me on my thirteenth birthday. “March, you get to know things now,” she said. I was drying a deep pot she passed me from the sink and my mother had just walked out of the room. Grandma Vee looked up from my cake with her brows furrowed, but Great Gusty shrugged at her and handed me a dripping lid.
I’ve taken over the dish washing now she’s dead. It’s in the kitchen that I feel Great Gusty at my back, even more than in my bedroom where the portraits are. She’s always just out of my vision tugging a drawer and telling me to tell her what’s going on. “What’s going on at school?” she’d say to me. “What’s going on this weekend?” and later, “What’s going on with the boys?” If I gave her “Nothing, Gusty,” she’d just push on with, “How about Walter? How’s that boy?” I’d say I didn’t know. He was just a boy. “What about that Ryan? What’s going on with him?” If I was lucky, Grandma Vee would come in and say “Mom, will you come get the slider open for me?” The sliding door tended to stick and Great Gusty prided herself on being old and bony and tougher than the rest of us. She was our jar opener, spider catcher, door budger, raccoon chaser, suspect food taster, and she did it all with subdued zeal. She relished being good at things others couldn’t be bothered about, but she liked best to do it all casually, as if without thought. My father could have done it, but he knew his place.
If I wasn’t lucky, Great Gusty would extract what she wanted from me. She’d get me to tell her that what was going on with Ryan was he’d made the baseball team and was pretty busy after school with practice and on the weekends with games, and that I didn’t get excited enough about baseball. She’d get me to tell her that he could see I didn’t care about baseball. Eventually, she’d even know that Suzanne loved baseball, and probably Ryan loved Suzanne for all I knew. “Who cares about him anyway,” she’d say. “Walter’s the one.” I’d tell her I was only sixteen, that no one was the one. “I didn’t say he was the one for you. Just that he’s one of them who’s worth it.” Great Gusty got what she wanted, and I could fill all the pots and pans and sinks and buckets all over this house brimful with admiration just for that one quality.
She had a soft spot for Walter. “Not enough boys in this house,” she’d say, so Walter’s grandfather would bring him over whenever he came to visit Gusty and Vee. Walter and I would go outside and play “meet the boat” down on the beach. “Pretend there’s still the Mosquito Fleet,” he’d say, and we’d bring a hand to our brows and peer out over the water until one of us would say “That’s the Burro coming in,” or “There’s the Meta.” Walter liked to play that the peninsula was still as remote as when our families first came, when settlers and visitors and goods came by way of a fleet traveling the Puget Sound.
When we decided our boat arrived, we’d haul imaginary crates of huckleberries, pies, and eggs to our landing and we’d speculate about whether so and so would be aboard. Or, we’d pretend we were some of the folks on the Meta. “Let’s say we met aboard and we’re gonna get married,” Walter said once. I agreed, but I made sure my hands were full of imaginary parcels and suitcases so he wouldn’t be able to hold them. That day we walked the beach looking for a good place to settle and eventually we set up housekeeping at a beached log with oyster shell dinner plates, mussel and clamshell spoons, and cockleshell bowls. We declared it a good sound house and dug a sink in the rocks where we could wash up after meals. Then we yanked sword ferns out of the woods near the beach and laid them at the base of the log for a bed. We lay down on our sides, facing each other, and I was prepared to feign sleep for a few moments and hop up again. But when I opened my eyes Walter was looking at me, and we were young, both of us, but I’ve always thought I saw something there. I shouted “Breakfast!” and waded into the water for a handful of seaweed.
As we got older, we stopped playing like this, but to the annoyance of any boyfriend I might have at the time, Walter would still come around and say, “Let’s go see our house,” and we’d ramble over the beach rocks until we reached our driftwood playhouse. We’d sit on the log’s back, our legs dangling down the side, bumping our heels against it.
“You going to the dance with that baseball star?” he asked one spring.
“Ryan? Yes.”
Walter shook his head.
“What?”
“I just figure, you know, we’ve been married for years, so it’s a little scandalous.”
He leaned toward me and bumped his shoulder into mine before he hopped down. I stayed on the log until he called back, “You should really cut this cheating out.” Then I jumped down and caught up so I could punch his arm. But I didn’t say anything. Like my family, Walter had always been around. And the number of times we’d stepped from the planks of a steamship onto this shore prepared to build our new life together made what he said seem almost true.
Anyway, it’s Gusty that brings this to my mind. She’s back there behind me, every night after supper when my hands are in the sink. She’s just there, just out of sight saying “So, what’s going on, March? What’s going on tomorrow? What’s going on with Walter?” She never gave up on him. And Grandma Vee’s still the one who saves me. She comes in to brew the evening coffee. She doesn’t usually even speak, but it’s harder to hear Great Gusty when Grandma Vee’s at my elbow, borrowing the faucet to fill the coffee pot.
Next to Great Gusty’s portrait is a photograph of her only child, the one born their first night on the peninsula, my Grandma Vee. She was and could not help being the dutiful, meek, and steadfast girl Great Gusty never expected, the sort of girl she was entirely free not to be. In her portrait Grandma Vee is seated in our backyard, cross-legged in calico with a daisy chain on her lap which she is just beginning to lift toward Great Gusty—the photographer—as the picture is taken. It’s the summer before Grandma’s last year at Vaughn Union High School. There were no formal portraits for her, no long sessions requiring a fixed expression, though she would have borne them with grateful forbearance, with the utmost cooperation and stillness.
When I was very young, before Grandpa died, I saw her hold a fishing rod without twitching or shifting her feet while he went into the house for the bathroom, and then for a beer, and then to read something. She was steadfastly holding the rod and talking kindly to me when he remembered where he’d left her. She has a sixth sense guiding her in how not to be a bother.
In her portrait Grandma Vee’s bare foot peeks out from under her striped dress. Her hair is loose to her elbows. She is beaming at her mother. An orange cat, named Monkey, is stalking toward her. Looking at Grandma Vee’s photograph is like watching a short film. I see her sitting cross-legged, the camera snaps and clicks, then she springs up from the grass and crowns her mother with the daisy chain, and Great Gusty blushes and folds her arms to keep from pulling it off.
Aside from loyally guarding his fishing line, I never watched Grandma Vee love her husband. My grandpa died of a heart attack at 55, just four years after I was born. Although my Great-grandpa Arthur was with us for the first twelve years of my life, I was still too young to understand romance between old people. Looking back, I think I caught glimpses of something between Great Gusty and Great-grandpa Arthur. “She’s a young thing,” Great-grandpa Arthur had said as we sat on the back steps and looked at Great Gusty on a summer morning. She was picking huckleberries, tiny dark jewels that take hours to accumulate. The large bowl she carried was so full she must have been out since the sun came up. “She stands young,” Great-grandpa said. I watched Great Gusty standing straight and bending easily, but I didn’t appreciate it yet. She was ten years younger than Great-grandpa Arthur and married him straight out of school. She’d taken her exams and was ready to teach if she needed to, but she felt more like being in love and convincing a man to go off somewhere, which she did.
Grandma Vee had walked up beside us while we watched Great Gusty in the huckleberry bushes. “Mom looks younger than I do,” said Grandma Vee.
“Sweetie,” said Great-grandpa Arthur.
When he said that it made Grandma Vee look so young herself I felt we’d sunk back into some time before me. That tended to happen. Most of all of their lives had nothing to do with me. I looked up into Grandma Vee’s face and grabbed her hand, afraid her hair would turn all the way back to blonde, afraid her breasts would rise up, afraid her skin would ease into smoothness leaving me somewhere out of life entirely. Grandma Vee, noticing an eager shock in my face, and perhaps even guessing why, pulled me away into the kitchen and told me again about my grandpa. She said how excited he was when I came out with red hair. “He picked you up and said, ‘She looks just like her mother.’ Made him feel old and young at the same time.” While Grandma Vee spoke I felt myself becoming real again and knew where time stood.
The portrait of my own mother, Meera, is larger than the other two. She’s in a rowboat floating in Vaughn Bay. Somewhere behind the photographer, out of the picture, is our house, the house Grandma Vee was born in, the house Great-grandpa Arthur expanded and changed as the years went by. Over my mom’s shoulders are just water and cloud and a line of Douglas fir in the fuzzy distance. In the moment of her portrait, Mom is a little older than Grandma and Great Gusty in theirs. She’s twenty-one. Her chin is lifted like she’s smelling the air. Her lips are closed. She’s smiling at her fiancé who is taking her picture. It’s a black and white, so it takes the contrast of her red hair away. Everything in the frame is a shade of gray. The world really does turn gray often enough on the Puget Sound; we have day after day of low clouds that make the slow-moving waves into a smoky mirror of dark sky. We have those gleams of light too that the water doubles and magnifies, but my mother seems more at home under cloud cover. Grandma Vee tells me you could see Mom’s hair out in the bay even before you could see the boat she sat in. She hasn’t been in a boat since the summer her portrait was taken, since a particular day of that summer, and all that’s according to Great Gusty. Mom doesn’t say a word about it. But my grandmothers have each told me, in their own way, that Mom loves the photo because of who took it. “Where did he come from?” I asked. Ever since I learned the story, I almost expect to see him, the unknown man, in the frame, but of course he isn’t. “He’s from here. They’d always known each other,” said Gusty, and on my face, unbidden, Walter was written, and Gusty could read it.
My mom’s fiancé, who took the photograph, and who is not my father, developed it as an engagement present. Later they say Mom wished she’d worn her pale silk blouse, but her fiancé said it was better as it was, with Mom in a cabled sweater of Grandma Vee’s she’d taken from a peg on the wall on their way out to the beach. I don’t look at this photo of Mom as much as I look at the two others. It has enough power without me looking. Outside of her photograph I’ve never seen that expression on my mom’s face, where she knows she belongs as much as the seals and the trees, like she’s only happy and nothing else at the same time. I understand and know I can’t remedy the fact that my dad and I together don’t equal the sum of the man who took Mom’s picture that day. We aren’t the first ones not to measure up. Even Great Gusty and Grandma Vee couldn’t scale and mount her sorrow. So that’s how it is.
Grandma Vee is the one who holds a steady umbrella of care over us all. What I know doesn’t amount to much beside the heap of sense and purpose and clarity built up by Great Gusty and laid at my feet since before I could stand on them. In my small room, with the sun low, I sometimes see that I’m a dwindled evolution of woman with greatness, goodness, and tragedy preceding, but not enlarging me.
My own mother, Meera, was fed from the greatness and the goodness and they made her beautiful. But I know from most stories that beauty is dangerous. It invites tragedy, depth of meaning beyond what we ever wanted to understand. She dove for that man, for the one who took her picture. She dove for him herself, not only the first time when there was hope of saving him, but after, over and over when it was no longer a rescue but a recovery, when what she dove for was a body, and she couldn’t even suck her ragged breath halfway down her chest. Mom did find him. She closed her hand around his wrist, must have felt the button at the cuff, and heaved him to the surface gripping under his arms. She tugged him to shore, his body face-up, his spine along her side as she kicked jaggedly to the shallows. On her knees in the barnacles she vomited and then she dragged him above the tide line, his feet just crossing the crusty wave of seaweed and crab shells and she closed his eyes. She arranged his hair. She drove alone to his family’s house in Dutcher’s Cove, brought his parents to him, and ran heaving and toppling for home before the hurtling darkness deeper than that she’d fetched him from caught up to her and she began to split apart. Great Gusty and Grandma Vee found her lying aslant on the beach below our house, clothes and hair stiff and dusty with salt. She had bloody knees and eyes keen with terror. She was rigid, but living. Helplessly alive, Great Gusty said, and admitted that she’d wondered fleetingly if they ought to finish her, but Grandma Vee ran to her, fell over her and cried so hard that her tears mixed with the salt that had crystallized on my mother’s face, and washed it down into the crease between her chin and neck, and it pooled there, warm like blood.
All of that happened before me. I wasn’t here to hinder any of it, to lift my animal-eyed mother from the beach rocks, or even to stoke the fire when they brought her inside. I recognize my mother in the portrait only from stories before my time. I don’t know that woman. My Meera, the one at the breakfast table, the one who says goodnight and follows my father to bed, is someone else. I’ve watched my father coaxing pleasantness into my mother’s life. I’ve seen him rise earlier to brew the coffee. I’ve helped him plant crocuses, not just in the flower beds, but in unexpected corners, even along roadsides, places we know she’ll walk. I’ve learned that love from man to woman is an inching, whispering pursuit, a constant minute adjusting. Mom sometimes grants Dad’s wish for her smile, kisses the top of his head in the morning. I’ve learned that love from a woman to a man is an allowance.
I haven’t learned to allow it. I sidle around the edge of a touch and sit across the table. I examine Walter’s face for signs of change. I don’t think either of us expected it when Walter came to visit me on my first trip home from college—on Christmas Eve night— and said without preamble, “Do you want to be with me?” We were standing out by the huckleberry bushes overlooking the bay. The water was dark as slate under the evening sky. He’d come to wish Gusty and Vee a “Merry Christmas” in honor of his grandfather and to see me for the first time since I’d left. Great Gusty had insisted I not come home until the holidays.
“Yes. Come on. We can take a walk,” I said.
“I mean, do you want to be with me like you used to be, back when we slept in the same bed and did the dishes together, when we came in on the same boat?”
“That was play, and even then I didn’t let you hold my hand.”
Walter looked down at my hands then and I put them in my coat pockets.
“But it isn’t play,” he said.
“I don’t even live here right now, Walter.”
“I know,” he said, and he was looking out to the mouth of the bay as if waiting for the moment to declare there was a boat coming in, the moment when enough anticipation was built and we could move on to arranging the drama, which of us was on deck, how we would greet each other, whether one of us would have to be won over, whether the meeting was planned or just a serendipitous coincidence.
“Walter?” I said, and I didn’t know how to go on, how to ask did you always love me? So I just stood beside him and I looked out too, and neither of us spotted a steamship coming into port. Somehow we made it back to the house, managed to remark on the dark or the cold, and turn and walk away from the place and what we had said and not said. That Walter might want me, and that maybe he had since childhood, left me worried. I only needed to look as far as my mom to see how much there was to lose.
The last time I saw Walter was the day of Great Gusty’s memorial service. I think he tried to tell me he loved me again, which was odd, but he has a way of making things right when you don’t think they would be. He has such a way, in fact, that Great Gusty suffered him to address her as Great Augusta, a miracle in itself. Walter found me, not in a romantic downpour out by the huckleberry bushes, but dashing from the bathroom to the pantry—the only two places I could find to be alone. Our neighbor Sonja started knocking on the door of the former, and Walter trailed me to the latter. We faced each other in that cramped space, both of us backed against shelves of home-canned apples, pears, and plums, great cylinders of oatmeal, and packages of spaghetti.
He asked me how I was doing. I didn’t know how I was doing yet, so I said I was fine.
“Are you going to stay?” he said.
“No.”
“Are you coming back?”
“I will.”
He reached down and lifted some of my hair. He bit it, like he used to do when we were kids, when it made me mad. He’s always protested my claim that he did it to rile me up, saying he just did it because he liked to. The first time he thought it would taste like something because it’s red.
Someone bumped against the pantry door, then leaned back on it and settled in for a good visit with Grandma Vee whose voice I could hear, low and steady.
“Sorry we’re stuck in here,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s nice to see you.”
I took a jar of pickles from the shelf, unscrewed the metal ring, and pried the lid off.
“Gusty made these.”
“Shouldn’t you save them?”
They were whole pickles. Their fragrance, garlic and brine, made my mouth water. “No,” I told him and handed him one.
“Did Gusty ever tell you?” he asked.
“Did she tell me what?”
He shook his head. “Then she didn’t.”
It was quiet out in the kitchen, so he opened the door and snuck out. “I want you to come home,” he said as he shut me back in.
I ate a pickle. I ate another one. I realized that the food that issued from Great Gusty was now finite.
That night, after being in the pantry with Walter, I dreamed he was underwater. At first I could see him, as if my face was submerged and I was looking down, but as he sank the water darkened. He was dressed like Great-grandpa Arthur, a buttoned vest over a collared shirt, dressed as the make-believe husband of our playtime. He drifted down where the sun shone, then into the blackness while I watched.
For a while I thought of asking Grandma Vee if she knew what Walter told Great Gusty, but I don’t really think Gusty would have told, and I suppose I know anyway. Walter would have said, “Augusta,” and she would have picked up the yellow-handled fly swatter, just to have it in her hand, just to show him. He’d have the same expression on his face as when he bites my hair. Then he’d say, “I want to know if March loves me.”
Great Gusty would tell him squarely, “She does.”
“Does she want to?”
“That part’s your job, son.”
It would have been something like that.
Until last year we always had Gusty to fill in with words, or at least with her stomping and creaking around the house, all the spaces where sadness might settle. She made more noise than you’d imagine a brittle, paper-skinned old lady could make, banging closet doors, jangling silverware in drawers, thumping bags of flour on the table. Great Gusty’s way was to keep going like she’d always gone. If every last one of us were heaving and wheezing with sorrow she’d have held up this house by its corners, with dry eyes. She’d have sprouted two new arms to do it. I can hear her spouting in my mom’s direction, “Meera, I can’t imagine why you gave your daughter an order for a name.” She wasn’t as adamant about my name, March, as her own, but she still had her say. She’d stand at the sink over dishes huffing a string of alternate orders under her breath starting with “march” and ending in “halt.” Mom needed my name, I’m almost sure, as a reminder. The order “forward march” seems written across her face some mornings. It’s all right with me if my name keeps her going. I just hope I’ve given her something else too. If all she wanted was something to name she could have gotten a dog, I tell myself.
Since Great Gusty died it’s easy to find a quiet spot, but I still keep coming to this green room they gave me. It’s part of the one main room that was once the whole house, where Grandma Vee was born, and the windows are old. The only thing in here besides the spinning wheel, my twin bed, and a tall narrow dresser, is a straight-backed chair with a cushion tied to the spokes. Grandma Vee embroidered it with a ring of lilacs and forget-me-nots. The two small-paned, wood-framed windows let elongated rectangles of light onto the hardwood floor. I spend a lot of time on the rocks at the beach or at the kitchen table during the day, but I come in here and sit by the spinning wheel in the evenings. When the sun is low in the west this room is brimful with light. The honey thickness of it glows into the hallway and tips upward at the base of the wall as if there’s a dwarf in there, spinning straw into gold. That’s when I come in, when the sun fills the rectangular window panes, and the light travels across my lap.
Then I do what I know is peculiar, and might be worthless, too. I let the light slip and cool from the room. I close my eyes and conjure the expression of belonging I’ve never seen on my mother’s face outside her portrait. Then I breathe for her and dive to the bottom where the water’s coldest. I grip that man for her. I find him the first time, the time when there’s still breath and blood moving in him. I slide my hand along his wrist to the button at his cuff, and find a pulse there. I heave him skyward. I clutch him to my side and drag my arms and legs through the water until I can haul him out. Then I kneel soaked and chilled on the barnacled rocks where I warm his hands, and breathe into his mouth, and make him alive. I give him back to her every day.
Today Grandmother Vee caught me at it. She must have knocked, but I didn’t hear. “I came all the way in here and you don’t see me,” she said. Then Grandma traced my sharp, freckled collarbone with her finger and called it delicate. She stood in front of me and with both hands held the sides of my head, her fingers woven through my hair. “It’s time we put your photo up,” she said as if she didn’t know that I’m not here, as if she couldn’t see that I’d given myself back.
If Gusty were here, maybe I’d muster. Maybe she’d tell me what Walter told her. Maybe she’d brush away my martyrdom without ceremony, as if it were a raccoon to be shooed from the bird feeder, a caterpillar to be plucked off the tender spring lettuces. To be honest, I know exactly what she’d do. She’d say “March, go outside.” She’d find the camera herself and she’d put me over by the huckleberry bushes, where there’s a mountain ash, and a madrona behind. She’d leave a corner of our house in the frame. She’d see to it that I was captured, although she’d be the last one to leave me that way.
Gretchen Flesher Duggan has published short stories in Nimrod International, Portland Magazine, The Wordstock Ten Anthology, Bellingham Review, and Drash: Northwest Mosaic.