By Elisabeth Sheffield
Have ye no other kin ye can turn to?
What a question, coming from you, Madmaeve. Didn’t you write in your blog, just a month or so ago, before you left home, about the familial prison#? About how your sister, having left the arsehole husband and returned home to Mammy and Daddy, had no clue? About how she failed to recognize that family ‘tis the Long Kesh of heteronormative conformity? She needs to escape, you wrote, the barbed-wire embrace of kindred who can’t afford to be kind. Indeed, your mammy, rather than loaning your sister money for tuition for a primary school teacher training program, had signed her up instead for free marriage counseling at St. Mary’s church, which is nothing, you wrote, but the socio-theological combination lock for female self-incarceration. Duh. Finally it was just a matter, you sagely concluded, of being moved from one cellblock to another. Or as your mammy apparently put it, he’s your family now.
I’m guessing that, skimming through my messages (I don’t flatter myself that you’ve actually read them), you caught the glint of a ring. Though Kevin and I never exchanged them, and our marriage vows, spoken following a pre-nup weekend of upstate apple picking (me climbing and throwing the apples down to my one-legged beau) in front of a justice of the peace in Poughkeepsie, NY, just a week before our transatlantic flight out of JFK, were not traded in church. Still, the sheet of official foolscap was fetter enough for the folks back in Belfast. Especially with the added link of my new belly—still barely perceptible but in the eyes of Kevin’s family and friends, ‘twas a bond ‘til death did us part. Which is another reason I didn’t stick around.
But oh they welcomed me with open (not yet cocked and loaded) arms those Killeens did, the bleary-eyed Da (the Ma having died some years back after still-birthing the last Killeen. “A bad delivery,” the Da told me, as if it had been an ill-timed joke), the remaining kids (whose ages ranged from thirty-five to ten), the spry maternal Gran Da (technically not a Killeen, but I don’t recall a surname), and all the Killeen friends—welcomed me with open arms, heaps of sweets, and jelly jars of Killeen poteen. The celebration lasted all night, “like a good Irish Wake,” one of Kev’s old mates declared, “seein’ as how we’ve lost our old friend to this fine feek of a girl.” And after, the craic continued, with daily visits from Kev’s sisters, bearing sleeves of biscuits and trays of iced cakes, brewing pot after pot of tea as they giggled in Gaelic over my belly, and thrice weekly evening paramilitary parties, welcoming old friends back home from gaol or sending them off (say hello to Brendan for us; give Gerry our regards).
We lived off savings, mostly Kevin’s—the pile he’d amassed trading his brogue for tips at Paddy’s Midtown Manhattan Pub. The idea was that we’d each, with the low cost of living in a war zone, work on our “art.” And at first, Kevin would swing away on his crutches each morning for the Linen Library, to squeeze out a poem or two, before going to meet his pals for an afternoon pint. But soon enough he grew tired of the linguistic struggle, the bloodless scrabble for words. All the other lads were still out there risking their lives robbing banks, plundering post offices, pirating trains, planting bombs, and picking off Brits, or as he put it, proprietorially patting my abdomen, making a better world for our weyane. By the time I met Andy, he hadn’t written a poem in months.
Largely (and growing ever larger), I spent my days alone, in our three-room garret atop a seedy old villa near the university (away from the bombs if not the bombast, as the students in the flat below us loudly debated politics, both local and global—apartheid was a big topic—day and night). Initially, like Kevin, I dabbled, drawing cavorting human and animal figures in the emerging street-art style that had begun, in the months preceding our departure from New York, to appear on exposed brick, concrete, fiberglass and corrugated steel, and would soon be associated with names like Haring and Basquiat—using the seemingly crude as a shortcut to cool until one evening, home early and in a beery piss, Kevin said, flipping through my sketchbook, there’s a difference woman, between raw and half baked. Since the gaggle of Killeen sisters typically didn’t arrive until teatime, I had taken to visiting them, lumbering down in the mornings along the Malone Road, plodding through the Botanic Gardens to a neighborhood of nondescript brick and stucco terrace houses that nevertheless marked the tribal territory of the Killeens.
That had been my intention, the morning Andy appeared, but the rain was not just coming down but sideways, lashing my bare ankles (there were no maternity pants to be found in that city, and I’d never been able to tolerate garter belts, despite their sadomasochistic utility), and finally I’d stumbled back to the flat. Having peeled away my wet clothes and hung them in the washroom to dry, I’d wrapped myself in my beige rayon maternity kimono (a precursor of the chicos and gift of the Killeen sisters, who claimed it made me look like a “radiant earth mother”) and was now sitting at the kitchen table, splattering black tea on a six-month-old copy of The Village Voice. Pushing damp strings of hair out my eyes, the underside of my belly brushing the tops of my thighs, I leaned forward, squinting at the photos and pondering. Was that me in my SAMO t-shirt at the Mudd Club? Maybe, maybe not—the image was too grainy to tell. If I wrote my Park Slope brother (the only one in my family with any spare cash) and asked him to send a money order for $500 so that I could buy a plane ticket home, would he? Alas, my recollection of his face the night he came downstairs and discovered me having an after-hours soirée in his garden apartment, far sharper than my recall of whomever I was having it with (was it Joan, or Jane, or John? Or perhaps all three?), was all too clear. When suddenly there came a heavy knock at the door, a kind of doggish sliding thump. I hoisted myself up, one hand on the back of the chair, the other pulling my kimono over my abdomen.
Again I squinted, this time through the security peephole, expecting to see the top of the landlady’s thinning coiffure, pink scalp speckled with dye: the rent was overdue. Instead I saw square commando-sweatered shoulders, which gave rise to a long white neck, laryngeal prominence five or six years past its choirboy peak, I guessed. Wet, dark strands of hair obscured the downcast face: brooding or hangdog, I couldn’t tell, but either way, there was a certain stray appeal. I slid the bolt and opened the door.
Pushing his wet hair behind his ear, he raised his eyes and almost met mine, his focus gliding up over my face—but then it kept on going, arrested only by the ceiling. It was the sexiest once-over I’d ever gotten, a kind of roll that bypassed all earthly foreplay and went straight for ecstasy. I slid my own gaze down the length of him, taking in the way his soaked clothing, the commando-style wool pullover and black jeans, molded the lean mongrel lines of him, casting the slight swell of his crotch (briefly, I wondered what his backside looked like), delineating the long bones of his thighs. Water slicked the linoleum surrounding his steel-toed boots.
“Is Kevin in?” he rasped over my head.
Who was asking?
“Andy.”
I told him that Kevin wasn’t home but that he could come in for some tea if he liked. He hesitated. So I said, but you can’t go out again all wet like that, and besides I’m expecting Kevin any minute, though at that point I would’ve bet a one-way ticket back to NYC, or at least the free-rider taxing my uterus, that he wouldn’t be home until the pubs closed. I stepped to the side motioning the guy in. Affecting to be the little wifey I was not, as he crossed the threshold I told him to take off the boots, and even to drape his socks over the kitchen radiator.
Which smelled like wet animals as they steamed in the heat, like outside things with bits of twig and crumbles of dirt and dung in their fur, brought in. Andy mumbled an apology for the “manky” odor. That was one of Kevin’s words, the one he used to describe me when I was menstruating, though that was an inside thing, seeping out. My manky smell had once turned Kevin on, by the way, which was one of the things I’d liked about him, back in New York. His enthusiasm for crossing erotic borders and boundaries. That was all gone in Belfast, where an invisible wall as insurmountable as a peace-line barricade separated my half of our shitty little four-poster bed (a Killeen family “heirloom”) from his. I had assumed the personal was a reflection of the political, now that Kevin was back in his sectarian element, where everything was parceled out into distinct apartheid pieces, and the fucking seemed to be largely linguistic, as in “fucking Prods.” Now, looking at mongrel Andy, slumped sideways in a chair, his gaze no longer directed toward the ceiling, but down at his own bare feet, I wondered. He was clearly uncomfortable with me—yet the smell of sex was on him, as pungent as his socks. I bustled around, filling the electric kettle with water for tea, putting out a plate of McVities, using my bulk as a kind of reassurance, as an evocation of everywoman (mother, sister, daughter, wife), an abstraction of feminine succor sanitized of all personal stink. Despite a capacity for raunch that was surely greater than his own and Kevin’s combined.
I poured the hot water into the brown glazed crockery teapot, another Killeen family cast-off, then set it on the table with a second mug for Andy. He was still staring down at his feet, which were bone thin and motionless on the floorboards, like long, taxidermied paws. I lowered myself back into my chair, the seat creaking as I sat. Biting into a McVities, I lingered for a few more moments on the photo of the Mudd Club (according to La Dolce Musto in the column beneath, “all the village people” were there that night), then folded up the paper and pushed it away. When I looked again at Andy, I saw that his lips were moving, though the only sound in the room was the tick tick of the cheap windup clock on the shelf over the cast-iron sink. Noiselessly muttering, he lifted his hands in front of his face, wiggling his long fingers and waving his palms in what appeared to be some sort of evocation or strange prayer, even as his gaze remained on his feet. And then suddenly the ticking of the clock on the shelf behind me was subsumed by a thumping, vibrating the floor beneath the table. I craned in my seat and saw the balls of Andy’s feet doing a rapid slap slap against the floor, a flesh pedal pumping as if he was priming himself to bolt.
In any downtown bar or club, back in Alphabet City, I would’ve spelled it out immediately. But in Belfast, the late seventies seemed coincident with the late fifties in America, Happy Days reborn in the midst of the Troubles, complete with black leather jackets, cock-hugging jeans and beer with whiskey chasers. Minds here had not been altered, as far as I could tell, since the Plantation of Ulster—and alcohol was the common lubricant that preserved the narrow channels of both Taig and Prod. Since my arrival, I’d had nothing else (Kevin’s sisters proclaiming the benefits of stout in particular for the unborn bairn), and tired as I was of booze, it had begun to taste like the only choice. I’d forgotten that there were other drugs to do.
Abruptly the thumping of Andy’s feet ceased, as suddenly as it had begun. He raised his head and his hands floated away from his face, fingers still wiggling, drifting towards the brown crockery teapot. With hovering hands, he stared down at it, pupils dilated, lips parted in apparent wonder. Then he recited, “Why here is the girl’s head, like an exhumed gourd.”
Before I discuss the poetry, a few words about the pottery. The teapot, according to one of the Killeen sisters, had been presented by a visiting American relative as a hostess gift to their late mother: a round-cheeked smiling visage was stamped into its earthenware curvature. The face was identical to the faces on the pottery sun ornaments that presided over seventies patios in the United States (my Brooklyn brother and sister-in-law had one affixed to the garden wall behind their brownstone), perhaps manufactured in the same Mexican ceramics factory, only it had been glazed a subterranean brown rather than solar yellow, as if to cater to the non-heliophiles in the export market.
As for the line of poetry, you’ll perhaps recognize it, Madmaeve, as being from Northern Ireland’s poet laureate, specifically as a line from one of the “Bog Poems,” which had in part inspired Kevin’s return (though Belfast born and bred, the only quagmire he’d ever set his foot in was political). Later, Andy would tell me that it was Seamus Heaney who had brought them together: Kevin having tripped over him in the stacks of the Linen Library, sprawled asleep on the floor with a volume of North spread facedown over his chest. And I would also learn that Andy was not in fact the mongrel or stray that I’d initially perceived him as, but merely a runaway, most recently returned from rooming with a cousin in London, who when they’d lost the squat to a developer, had sent him back to Belfast with a care package of hallucinogens. Andy definitely had a home—a home where the “dirty Taig poet’s” works were forbidden by his English-ancestry touting mum (who’d nailed a small tin coat of arms to the battered security door of their Shankill Road walkup), and Wordsworth-and-Tennyson-spouting dad (who’d long ago purchased the collected Everyman’s Library works of each with the intention of pursuing a degree in English literature at Queens, only too many filthy fenians had already infiltrated the program).
There was no provision of background or exposition that morning, however, though the bog motif persisted. Andy touched the teapot, traced the curve of its smile with a black-rimmed fingernail: “Did the fen eat ye darlin,’ all but yer sweet head?” His finger dialed up and around, lightly circling the ceramic cheek, then swooped down the bridge of the ceramic nose, resting there tip to tip. I felt my nipples harden and my clitoris begin to throb.
“No,” I said, taking hold of his hand. “I’m still here.” And I put his hand on my breast, which with pregnancy had become an erogenous zone like never before. I slid his palm over the round swollen bub with its nipple spout, like a carnal teapot, and cupped it beneath, making him hold the fleshy weight. Then I guided it out of the groove between breast and abdomen, pulling it down and up over the curve of my belly, which had become an erogenous zone as well. Actually, my entire body had become one, every surface, every fold, every cavity. I pressed his hand to my belly, and he made no effort to remove it, though he had yet to look at me. I could smell his lanolin-steeped sweat seeping through the underarm knit of his pullover, but otherwise he was stone still—all the fidgeting, fluttering and thumping had ceased. When finally he whispered, “Och, ‘tis the Bog Queen herself.”
Whether he actually perceived me as such or was simply playing along, he never said. I’m guessing the veil of hallucinogens did their part, along with the cerement beige of the kimono and the swollen mass it covered—no doubt I looked like I’d been buried for five hundred years in a swamp, mud-leached, waterlogged and pulp-soft. But Bog Queen or bloated mammy-to-be, my power over him was now absolute. I hoisted myself up, told him to re-bolt the door (just in case the Killeen sisters came knocking, though they’d never arrived before four), and then pulled him to the back room and the four-poster bed, his head down like a dog on a leash, though he padded after me willingly enough.
I made him undress, and then I asked him to turn around so that I could see the backside of him. I was not disappointed. Unlike the majority of Belfast boyos I’d seen, including the males in the Killeen tribe, with the exception of Kevin himself, Andy actually had an ass, each cheek bringing yet another absorbing convexity to the table, or in this case, the bed. I didn’t look for long, however, at least not that day. I was so wet that I could feel the seepage runneling down over my perineum and soaking the coverlet beneath my thighs. So wet that as I glanced past Andy to the window behind him, the wash of rain over the panes seemed like a correlative of my flow.
At almost eight months, counting the days, the positions open to me were few. In fact, given my great and tender girth, there was only one, so that now I was the dog, forearms and shins firmly planted into the mattress, my rump in the air. Even now, decades later, I can remember that first thrust, that searing leap that sent seismic waves roiling in my groin, though such was the kid’s finesse (perfected, he later told me, during his stretch in London town), that I didn’t actually come until he began pumping his muck inside me, panting, “I’m sinkin’, I’m sinkin’, I’m sinkin’ … I’m sunk.”
Afterwards, he was still high, or low, as he lay on his back, his hands folded over his only half flaccid cock, his eyes blank as pools as he muttered about the “alluvial mud” and the “souterrain flow.” So I helped him dress and sent him off—in my advanced state of pregnancy I really didn’t have the stamina for another round, anyway. And I didn’t expect to see him again, after what I assumed had been a onetime drug-directed diversion. Not only was I grotesquely gravid, but I was not, I suspected, the sex he usually sought. I assumed he’d been hooking up with Kevin in the jakes at the back of the pub and would resume that activity. I didn’t realize that first day, having no eye for or interest in political niceties, that Andy came from a Unionist background, and was thus mortally unwelcome in Republican establishments, off-license or not. Indeed, Andy would later inform me, there’d been nothing going on, for lack of a suitable venue for getting it on. ‘twas his acid-addled brain and Kevin-piqued cock that had led him to our door the first time, he said, but it was “the slime kingdom” of my cunt that brought him back.
The very next morning, in fact. And the morning after that. On the third day, Andy broke one of the headboard posts of the shitty four-poster, grabbing it for support as he shifted my hips for a better angle of entry, and on the sixth day, together we collapsed the bed entirely, yet every day for the next ten days he returned, including Sunday, after Kevin’s departure for mass, ever more brazen in his craze for my snatch. And every day that doggish sliding thump on the door triggered a gush between my legs so that on the tenth day, when my water broke, I assumed that it was the usual welcoming flow. Only when it became clear that my contractions were prohibiting further ingress, and that someone else had to come out before Andy could get in again, did I finally tell him to go. Since I had no phone in the flat, I asked him to stop by the cabstand on the Lisburn Road on his way home and send over a car.
Strangely, none of the neighbors noticed Andy’s comings and goings. Or maybe not so strangely—they were students after all, preoccupied with their own polemics, amorous as well as political (as evidenced by the early morning floor swaps I’d witnessed on my way down to empty the rubbish in the dustbin). Rather, it was one of the drivers at the cabstand, a crony of Kevin’s, who recognized the address, and wondered how the young snout had come to know it, too.
The evening after I returned home from the maternity ward, Kevin inquired about my “visitor.” Sprawled in the former four-poster turned three, my crotch sore with the needlework of the obstetrician, the baby to my side querulous with hunger in its bassinet beribboned by the Killeen sisters—I was a sampler portrait of feminine abjection, stitched in the stagnant hours of postpartum depression. I looked up at him, hanging on his crutches by my bedside, yet in no way hindered in his comings and goings, swinging out the door and back in again, whenever he goddamn pleased. It would’ve been so easy to say that Andy came looking for you, since after all he had, at least the first time, two weeks ago. Perhaps there’d even been an assignation planned, for the hours of my daily morning visit with Kevin’s sisters. And why not? Hadn’t we both once been Catholic in our tastes and sexual practices, and now that I was necessarily barred from broader pursuits by maternal convention, why shouldn’t Kevin carry on? It would’ve been so simple to add, with a knowing wink, I think he was hoping to find you home alone. But I did not. Instead, I said, yeah, the kid was coming over every day, fucking my brains out.
Back in New York, Kevin would have jumped my bones, right then and there, lunging, digging, dredging, and wresting, as if to rout the scent of Andy while it was still warm. But in Belfast he simply stood frozen by my bedside, face reddening, nostrils twitching. Of course, the baby might have had something to do with it, too—maybe my maternity had made me tainted quarry, too taboo to touch. Regardless, as he slowly crossed his arms over his chest, jaw tight and lips pursed, it was clear that he was no longer my kinky, stink-chasing Kev-boy, but an upstanding Daddy-man, preparing to issue his dictum. I stared back at him, raising an eyebrow: what would it be, “bitch,” “cunt,” or “whore” (or “whoor-uh,” as he used to say)?
It was number three, though it sounded more like “haur” this time, as if his throat was congested with rage.
“You haur,” he spat. “You filthy feckin’ cock hoppin’ haur that’s what you are. I made you my wife and brought you home to my family only to learn that you’re not a woman but an animal—you’ve no sense of human decency a’tall.” And then he left, slamming the security door behind him. As he trundled down the stairs, the baby began to wail.
That was the last I saw of Kevin: one of the Killeen sisters identified the body, which was too battered by the beating to permit an open casket at the wake. Cloaked in my widowhood, Kevin’s kid clutched like a Kevlar shield to my breast, I did gather bits and pieces as I wandered the room, which allowed me to visualize his final movements, including his efforts to cover his own erotic tracks: ‘Twas at the pub that night that he told us … apparently she met the Prod pouf at the Linen Library … Gay as the day is long, I heard … An innocent enough beginning, though you have to wonder about her hoofin’ all the way down there in her condition … Just poetry it ‘twas … But ye don’t go readin’ poetry to another man’s wife, especially in his own home … Kev only meant to give the wee prick a warnin’ … Fair enough … If only he’d brought along a few mates, instead of ragin’ over to Shankill to confront the scut all on his own … They say our man never even caught up with the orangey fairy—’twas the street brigade that got him … Away in the head our Kev must’ve been for her … An insult to be sure, but ‘twas only poetry … She ain’t worth it, if you ask me … True. But surely she was a glorious ride, before Kev knocked her up.
I marveled at Kevin’s presence of mind in first disseminating a story so clearly in service of his cock; I was certain that the reason he’d gone seeking our randy Andy on his own was to give the boy’s ass a good private back-alley thrashing. And thanks to Kevin’s more or less persuasive performance of the aggrieved paterfamilias, I was more or less safe. All I had to do was to keep a low profile, crouching beneath my widow’s crape. Hide the ride that had never stopped revving, glorious or not. And in the meantime I would plan my getaway. This time when I wrote my Brooklyn brother, I sent a clipping from the Belfast Telegraph about “the deadly sectarian beating,” along with a few words about my concern for my own safety and the baby’s (though already I was planning on leaving it behind, as a parting gift to the Killeens), since Kevin’s murderers were still at large.
As I waited for my brother’s response, the days grew longer and the rain became less constant, the sky clearing for hours at a time, blessing Belfast with its blotless blue. One morning I awoke in the three-poster, to sun streaming through the window and the Killeen baby, which just hours earlier had been screeching and scrabbling at my breast, as I tried to plug the bottle in its mouth, lying on its back beside me, still as an egg but for the gentle lifting of its chest. I felt something stir inside me, a hankering for something beyond the walls of the flat where I’d been holed up for months. The phrase kick up your heels popped into my head, though I’d probably never used it in my life, and soon I found myself bouncing the big rubber-wheeled perambulator (another Killeen hand-me-down) down the Malone road. I’d even brought my sketchbook along, having tucked it into the nylon pocket behind the pram’s hood.
In the Botanic Park, I spotted an unoccupied bench in front of a row of hedges flowered with clusters of tiny white blossoms. Bits of bread littered the gravel in front of the bench, the remains of someone’s breakfast bun. As I parked the pram on the gravel in front of the bench, I caught a strong, fetid odor—and I realized that the smell was wafting over from the flowered hedges. I considered moving on to find another bench, but the Killeen baby, which had begun to stir as I’d entered the park, whimpering if not yet squalling, had suddenly gone quiet, its squirming form inert. So I sat down, closed my eyes, and tilted my face to the morning sun. The smell of the hedges was unsettling, simultaneously arousing and repellent. It was like sex and the end of sex, like a cunt full of jism and a spade full of dirt, and I wondered what the hedges were as well as what sort of flying thing the flowers attracted, if any. This was no smell for the birds and the bees. Would Kevin have known? Probably not. The botanical world had held no more interest for him than a convenience store, its products provoking incurious appreciation, at most. Sampling cider in a gift shop during our upstate apple-picking expedition, he’d been surprised to learn that it came from apples—not a tap at a bar. Christ, he’d complained, ye can’t even pull a buzz out of that plant piss. I missed Kevin, or at least the Kevin for whom nothing had existed but as a potential means to get off.
I inhaled, taking in the smell of the white-flowered hedges that was like sex and like the end of sex, like the smell that had wafted up from Kevin’s grave at the Belfast City Cemetery. I missed Kevin and regretted his death, but that didn’t mean that I would never have sex with anyone, ever again. In fact I could probably have it with Andy another time or two, if wanted, before I left. Just a few nights ago I’d seen him through the window, standing in the yellow glow of the streetlamp, staring fixedly up at the flat. Staring as if readying to propel himself up and through the panes in a shower of shattering glass. But for me, the frenzy, the frantic urge, the short-circuiting of all foresight and inhibition—that was gone. At least for now. I’d pulled the shade and gone to bed, saving myself for less risky lovers (safe sex practitioners or no), back home.
And then I heard a small choked breathing, a narrow snorting and chuffing noise, a little mouth gasping and panting. I opened my eyes and peered into the pram, but the Killeen baby was still peacefully sleeping, its features shadowed by the hood. And anyway, the noise was coming from the other side of the bench, though now it was more of a scrambling and scuffling, the source of which exploded into view, a twisting, shifting flurry of russet pelted limbs and torsos, long black-tipped ears and bobbed white tails, which a second or two later resolved into two rabbits, the largest and leanest I’d ever seen, bigger than the Killeen baby, and way more active, as they reared up and began jabbing at each other with stiff prong-like forearms, mouths closed, faces expressionless, like furry gimp masks with holes cut for the unblinking golden eyes.
The fight or whatever it was didn’t last long: a magpie swooped down, after a bit of nearby bread, and both rabbits bolted, in opposite directions. One disappeared entirely into a clump of pink flowering shrubs that looked like rhododendrons, further along the path, while the other remained in sight. It stood on its hind legs and sniffed, and after a moment or two loped in the direction of the rhododendrons or whatever they were, vanishing after its fellow into the foliage. I turned and pulled my sketchbook out of the pocket of the pram, intending to sketch the boxing rabbits from memory.
When I looked up again, I saw that they were back. And now both were stationed about fifteen feet away from where I sat, in a circle of mown grass on the other side of the path, one atop the other, still but for the upper’s hips, juddering like an engine. For less than thirty seconds they stayed like that, and then they broke apart, each halting a few yards away from the spot of their tryst, nibbling at the grass as if nothing had transpired between them at all. But a little while later, they were at it again, even as the mounted rabbit continued to pluck at the grass, seemingly oblivious to the frenetic pumping of the other. Like before, the coital connection lasted less than half a minute and both rabbits fell to grazing until, as if responding to some internal cue or timer, the one hopped back to the other and resumed its rapid-fire rutting. This continued six times more, and though I didn’t have a watch, it seemed to me that I could anticipate the length of the intervals between the matings as well as the length of the matings themselves, as if the whole process was entirely mechanical and automatic, a claymation animal sexscapade, like some obscene battery commercial, played over and over again. Though these rabbits, unlike any I had ever seen back home, were no bunnies.
Hares, I suddenly realized. They were hares. But in the end, just one remained on the green, the other having gone off again into the flowering shrubs, which probably weren’t rhododendrons because the flowers were too small, just as the Killeen baby woke up and began to cry. A single, solitary hare. I don’t know which one it was, the male or the female, the top or the bottom, it could’ve been either—I couldn’t tell. The hare went on nibbling at the grass as the Killeen baby cried, louder and louder, its keen wracking the soft spring air.
Elisabeth Sheffield is the author of three novels, all published by FC2: Helen Keller Really Lived (2014), Fort Da: A Report (2009), and Gone (2003). Additionally, her work has appeared in venues such as Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, Pretext, 13th Moon, Gulf Coast, and Gargoyle. A National Endowment of the Arts Award for Literature Fellow in 2012, Elisabeth Sheffield has also been awarded two Fulbrights, northern Germany and in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and a Fiction Meets Science Writing Residency at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Bremen, Germany (2016-2017). Director of the creative writing program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she lives in Boulder and upstate New York with novelist Jeffrey DeShell, their two sons and a shiba inu.
