There was a woman from Kansas who once imagined her life to be so ordinary, she couldn’t fathom anything outside the ordinary happening to her. Her life was a string of pearls, interrupted only rarely by a surprise, some experience she had not yet lived, perhaps an adventure.
While indoors one day, contemplating the fantastic banality of her life, she watched her daughter play out back with the boy next door—her daughter wearing that jacket with tiny red and pink and blue hearts her grandmother had given her a few months before for her sixth birthday. She was that old. The boy was wielding something the girl’s mother imagined was a toy, something pretend, as that is how children play, and her daughter ran alongside him, screaming in that delighted, shrill way children do when they are having fun, and the boy raised the pretend thing, pop like a balloon, and the blonde girl’s hair began spattering blood.
The woman stood then, jack in the box, the cuff of her pants catching on her chair as she leaped for the door, raced toward the other woman also running toward the boy, standing wide-eyed, circumspect, a girl stretched beside him haloed in blood, eyes still blinking in automatic response to what had transpired only seconds ago.
The boy’s mother plucks up the discarded gun with two fingers and starts running with it around the yard, and the woman whose daughter lies still falls to her knees, looking up as if at something, although there is nothing she can see. She can hear the name of the deceased, rising up from the ground between her knees, escaping from her mouth, disappearing somewhere beyond the stripped tips of trees.
......
Arya F. Jenkins is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in journals such as Agave Magazine, Brilliant Corners, Cleaver Magazine, and The Feminist Wire. Her poetry recently received a Pushcart nomination, and her poetry and essays have been included in three anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, JEWEL FIRE, was published by AllBook Books. She writes short stories for Jerry Jazz Musician, which commissioned her to write jazz fiction. Creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Provincetown Arts Magazine; and poetry, in Blue Heron.
