Milkweed

by Rina Palumbo

Our house by the river wasn’t for you, my child of the woods that stretched out like a crescent moon beyond its walls. That forest held in its arms a meadow of wildflowers, milkweed, wild carrot and bluebonnets, with spiraling fingers of switch grass (spiked memories of those people before) growing tall and gleaming red. You would end up there, flowers shading your sleep, curled inward, your hair falling around you. It usually happened on days that the dark overwhelmed you; I can’t help it, you would scream as you hit and broke and overthrew anything you could, including yourself. And you would run off to the meadow, and I would find you and carry you home. Your father decided he liked to be alone and left so he could keep it that way. We two were alone now, and the dark continued; you said make it stop. And I took you to doctors, counselors, and therapists, and you took pills and had sessions, and the dark didn’t erupt for years until it did, and I found you in the meadow bleeding red on the wildflowers, milkweed veiling you. When all the scars on your wrists had healed, you, my child, had become so very quiet. In all the seasons of the year, you would go to your meadow and stand and watch, and I would come to you to bring you home. One dull autumn day, I found you in the meadow, still silent, your arms full of milkweed for the monarchs; you whispered, they need this to survive, and you scattered their seeds from the pods in large arcs, and then you walked home with me. And then you went every day, in the frost and in the snow and finally in the warming spring, looking to make sure that the plants were growing, willing them to erupt from the earth, and they did, and the butterflies came. You lay on the ground, watching their eggs, elongated pearls that grew darker and darker until they erupted into swarms of green caterpillars that molted and feasted, molted and feasted until they sunk into emerald cocoons. The river had risen during those years, so the earth was swampy in your meadow, dampness you didn’t seem to mind but which brought forth so many dark things that were not so tender with your sleeping children. And then, one dark night brought forth a morning where everything had succumbed to river water except for the red spears piercing everything.

***

Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two nonfiction long-form writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al.