HEATHER DERR-SMITH Sacrifice

HEATHER DERR-SMITH

Sacrifice

Her mother gave her a brocade music box. Father said he would go out to the woodpile and swing his ax, imagining her face. She was cold like the Lucerne falls, the hard wet rock and the caves where the Anabaptists, hunted and chased, hid. There’s two sides to every story, is an old trope and lazy. Book of lies is more like it. She opened its secret, gold gears and pivots turning. Mother said it was a traumatic birth, a hematoma in her side inhaled and exhaled its blood-swollen sac, like a jelly fish bobbing in waves of pain, tentacles dangling between her legs. Or like a ballerina in crimson tulle, a cascade of red satin ribbons.

They had to cut me out of her blue belly, rip me free. I said thank you with such thirst, lips like two orphans, begging. My father loved her into a kind of death that women are experts at, the clasped hands of wonder, squeal of delight or terror. Whose violence was it, his ax or her, something she was born with and handed down to me, chiming its song, inheritance, like the color of hair.

I thanked her again and again for being so beautiful. I thanked her for loving me so much. I begged her for mercy.