(CONTEMPORARY) WOODS-WESTERN-MOUNTAIN-APPALACHIAN
MAY 2018
PINWHEELS
EMILY MATHIS
PINWHEELS
EMILY MATHIS
“I thought Sampson ran away from me the other night, Lily. I couldn’t find him all night. He’s never run off before like that. I don’t know what got into him,” Crow told her early one morning in February. She hadn’t seen him in a week. It was the longest time they’d been apart since this ritual had started. She knew her ’97 Camry couldn’t make it up the dirt road in the snow, but she worried constantly that week that he thought she had abandoned him. She was right, though he’d never say it. The absence of her, the cold, the morning waits for no one, Sampson running off – all of it had taken his mind into a tunnel he couldn’t find his way out of alone.
“Sometimes things just have to wander I suppose,” she told him, walking up to the make-shift wooden shack and blue tarp he lived in. Sampson was a 12-year-old potbelly pig that had been Crow’s loyal companion all these years, but he was still a wild thing at his core, prone to wanderings. Lily thought Crow should understand that.
“Yeah, but I was so sad. And then I started thinking about what if I die? Sampson’s the only one that would know until you came up here with these gravy biscuits.”
“Well, I’m here every morning so it’s not like you’d be rotting away for a month, waiting for hyenas to eat you.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right, but then it just got me thinkin’ and I couldn’t stop. I mean what am I going to put on my tombstone? Who’s even going to pay for it? And if I do have one, I don’t know whether I’m supposed to put Floyd or Crow on it.”
“I’d say you’re probably the last person it should matter to. I mean, once you’re already dead and gone it won’t matter much to you whether you’re called Floyd or you’re called Crow. I guess who it matters to is the people that are going to make the effort to come out to it on your birthday, put azaleas on it. So I guess it depends on: who thinks of you as Floyd and who thinks of you as Crow and which one is more likely to be the one there on your birthday?” Lily asked him.
“I suppose it’s just my mama that thinks of me as Floyd nowadays. Everyone else has thought of me as Crow for the past 30 years. So I suppose, well, to be honest, I can’t think of anyone that’s going to stop and put azaleas at my grave on my birthday. Merky gave me the name Crow and she’s dead and gone, and none of them other Cherokees are going to drive down here and place them just on account of my birthday, and my mama, well, she ain’t left Sparta since the blizzard of ’94, says she’s got everything she needs up there, and anything she can’t get up there she don’t need. So that leaves, well, who’s that leave?”
“It leaves me, if you told me your birthday,” Lily told him, opening up the Bojangles container and letting the heat of biscuits waft in the air.
“I don’t want you burdened with that obligation. You’re gonna go away someday soon and I don’t want you worryin’ about comin’ back up here just on account of my tombstone. I think I’ll just be cremated. I’ll avoid the embarrassment and all of not havin’ anyone sittin’ at it. I don’t really mind, mind you, whether I’m neglected or whether my tombstone is neglected, but suppose the plot of land and my tombstone, I mean, suppose the dirt under my tombstone and the granite that makes it, suppose it don’t feel the same as me, suppose it’s some type of social plot of land and it wants to be walked on. Well, I don’t want it to have to be neglected just on account of me, ya know what I mean?”
“I suppose you’ll have to be cremated then,” she told him, forcing a biscuit towards him with her gloved hand.
“I suppose I will. But Lily, will you make sure I get thrown over Heaven?” he asked, reaching his palm open.
Their conversation stayed on Lily’s mind the rest of the day. Him in the cold, him thinking about dying, thinking no one was going to visit his own tombstone, it all magnetized her back up there that night. She had never been up the Brushys at night. She didn’t know if she’d find him. He wasn’t camped at the fork in the road with the Taxidermist sign like he normally was. Losing hope, she pushed further, a little farther past Lithia Springs until she caught his hunched finger, his greasy, long dark hair, walking into the woods, headed towards Heaven.
“Crow!” she yelled out into the dark night sky, her breath foaming.
He turned around slowly and unsteadily like he wasn’t sure the voices were real or not.
“Lily?” he asked peering into the dark.
“Yeah, it’s me, Crow. Where are you going up here?” she asked him, shifting her car into park at the edge of the road and woods. She got out of the car and tentatively moved towards him.
His hands felt cold.
“Crow, why don’t you let me take you down the mountain? You can stay at my dad’s. It’s nothing.”
“No, I can’t, Lily.”
“Why not? People want you to. They want you to come back down.”
“I’ll miss them if I leave.”
“Miss who? Who is them? Sampson’ll be alright, or he can come too for the night.”
“The stars were pinwheeling last night, Lily. They were pinwheeling the most beautiful colors, ya know, like the sky at dusk the night before it snows, all those dreamy blues, pinks, reds, and purples twirling in the sky? Just like that.”
He wasn’t making sense, but she didn’t want him to wander off.
“No, I can’t say I do.”
“It means they’re loose. They’re loose on their hinges and they’re about to come undone from the sky, just about to fall right off like a loose door handle.”
“And then what? They fall out of the sky?” she asked, trying not to sound condescending.
“Yeah, Lily, that’s why I have to stay up here. Tonight they’ll fall and they’ll land on heaven’s ridge just like everyone says. You know it, right, Lily? I’ll tell you, anyways. They say when the stars fall they fall as grey balls of fur or feather with tiny terrapin heads. They stay curled up during the day, never talking, curled up inside themselves, but at night, oh at night, Lily, they stretch out their arms and legs and sparkles from heaven spray from the tips of their fur and feathers. It’s more beautiful than anything you could imagine.” He stared up at the sky, and although Lily didn’t believe about stars with terrapin heads, she found herself worrying those bird stars were summoning him back, telling him to lose his human skin.
“Crow, but do they stay forever? Do you have to be here tonight or, if they fall, can’t you just come back when it’s warmer and find them?” she asked, squeezing his hands, trying to remind him of his body.
“Oh, no, Lily! Someone has to be here to greet them or they’ll just float back. Besides, I only have seven nights with them either way. On the seventh night they’ll just spread their arms open and fly away. So I need to take advantage of every moment.”
“Crow…”
“You don’t believe me, do you? Merky and I used to see them. We used to find them too. And just before she died she told me she’d drop one day for me, when it’s time. She’d stop as one of those creatures on her flight through the sky. And I’m gonna be here when she does.”
“But she’s just gonna leave again.” The words were already out of her mouth by the time she realized how cruel it sounded.
“Well, they’re all gonna leave sooner or later. Everyone is. Deep down, you know it and I know it and everyone else knows it. But at least you got the time you got with them and when they go, yeah, it’s gonna hurt, it’s gonna hurt real bad, it always does, but it’s feelin’ somethin’. It’s a human somethin’. Some feelin’ I may not feel again so I want to feel all of it right now, because feelin’ somethin’s always better than feelin’ nothin’.”
About this story, Emily said: I wrote this from my own fascination and love for people and characters with wild imaginations and unfiltered understandings of the world. I think some of the most magical understandings can go overlooked, so I hope to be able to breathe some extended life into those experiences.
Emily Mathis grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in western North Carolina. She received her Bachelor's in Journalism and a minor in Creative Writing at New York University and Master's in Educational and Applied Psychology at Columbia University. She currently lives in Hawaii.
Emily Mathis grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in western North Carolina. She received her Bachelor's in Journalism and a minor in Creative Writing at New York University and Master's in Educational and Applied Psychology at Columbia University. She currently lives in Hawaii.