Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips

Author:Helen Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627793803
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHILDREN

How can I talk about them. The form they chose to take. The pinafore, the suspenders. The broad white collars and the big black buttons.

“You’re the one who dresses them that way,” Thomas would say irritably. “Those are the clothes you made. And you are their human mother. So enough, okay.”

Thomas doesn’t believe, and I don’t blame him. It isn’t easy to believe that when I was sewing those clothes there was something else guiding my fingers, something outside of me, something green and glowing.

I have two of them, a boy and a girl, and they’re always looking upward, or almost always, always pointing up, up, branches, birds, planes, moon, stars, planets, and there’s no way I can keep them inside now that the tornado is here. Their sticky feet rush them down the stairs, out the front door, across the porch, down the steps, across the yard.

I stand in the doorway screeching their names, the human names we gave them when they arrived half a decade ago—Bill! Lill!—but they’re already past the gate, bound for the road. They look back at me kindly (pityingly?) but continue onward, fast, their bare feet unstopped by the gravel, the lost nails. See, it’s just small hints, the toughness of their soft feet, miniature clues—but that’s how we know. Or rather, how I know, since Thomas doesn’t believe, nuzzling their damp heads on watermelon nights in August as though they’re children like any others. In the summertime they sweat and glow all night long, those two, and that’s another clue right there.

I step out, away from the doorway and onto the porch. The row of trees Thomas planted soon after they arrived is flattening in the wind, I mean flattening, and then a handful of tin cans shoots past the house like birds of the future, and my dress is alive with a will of its own, and I cling to the railing and scream for them, but they’ve already scooted under the barbed wire.

Thomas is yelling something, hanging on to the stone foundation, coming around from the backyard, where he was checking on things. I can’t hear him but I know he wants to know where the kids are.

I don’t answer him, I keep shrieking their names. They’re still within sight, but barely, dark figures on the far side of Field 1. The air is green and the wind is clever.

Thomas curses when he spots them. “You couldn’t keep them inside.”

He’s just stating it, he’s not accusing me. He knows better than anyone how they are, always talking to each other in a language we don’t understand, always putting jam on their hot dogs. They’ve never belonged to us, not even for a second.

Thomas lets go of the stonework and takes a wind-bashed step across the front yard toward the garage.

“The county said no motor vehicles on the roads,” I say, coming down the steps and across the yard behind him. My dress blows up into my face, smothering me.

Thomas yanks me into the cab of the truck.

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