CREATIVE NONFICTION
HANNAH CHRISTOPHER
HANNAH CHRISTOPHER
OHIO IN THE GOLDEN HOUR
Light opens up like the bright lip of an oyster over Gorge Boulevard, where the center-lane snow has just melted enough to resemble the oil that used to run from the highway down into the dammed-up water below us. I’m putting it all behind me now. The Gorge itself, the fire’s scars on our landscape and our native’s earthworks everywhere puckered up and widening. You can only see them from a biplane, they say, but those people haven’t lived here long enough to recognize them etched in the marionette lines of every boomer’s face. I’m reminded of my neighbor’s car last night—stolen and burned. When I pull into the shallow track of our shared driveway, the conspicuous absence gleams, a room-shaped dry patch where the sedan used to live. The lids of our trash cans still lay against the line of my fence, discarded frisbees in a boy’s game of pretend. The arsonist tried to get in my house, too, but I lock my doors. Marsha, the neighbor, doesn’t, and has the additional disadvantage of being deaf. She nicks chunks of salt-pebbled ice from the stairs up to her porch now, as if nothing’s happened, wearing her safety-orange muff so only her eyes and mouth are visible, pink and pearly with sweat. She’s putting it all behind her now. Sedan or no, someone must keep putting on their muff, gloves, trousers, someone must wield the snow shovel left in the mudroom against the washer, and someone must nick the ice.
This is where we nod at one another. I am also a thief. She doesn’t know how I used to lift produce from the local grocery—bright globes of freshly-misted watermelon, handfuls of grapes like eggs from the body of a beautiful woman, my pockets bulging conspicuously with treasure combed from the trash in the warehouse, employee’s-only, red-faced and fleecy. She knows I broke into my own house just last week, knew it was me because she didn’t call the cops. Not when I beat my fists against the windows and doors, or scaled the fence, or ate shit on the driveway. I went backward easy on the ice, my body was a ship pitched the wrong way in the water, my head and hair making a slip of blood underneath me, just a little dark claw I rubbed away with my hand. So we nod at one another. I prepare my keys in my stiff fingers, making a show of unlocking and entering civilly through the side door.
We’re all going to burn this city to the ground one of these days. I’m not thinking exclusively of the arsonist, though we may as well throw him in the lot. I imagine him in Marsha’s sedan, shooting down Dodge Ave, a gathered ball of umber light. He’s a runner or comet who knows exactly how fast he’ll be. He’s putting it all behind him now. He sees the final stretch playing behind the film of his skull. I know he must not have gone away with any one thing he didn’t need.
Light opens up like the bright lip of an oyster over Gorge Boulevard, where the center-lane snow has just melted enough to resemble the oil that used to run from the highway down into the dammed-up water below us. I’m putting it all behind me now. The Gorge itself, the fire’s scars on our landscape and our native’s earthworks everywhere puckered up and widening. You can only see them from a biplane, they say, but those people haven’t lived here long enough to recognize them etched in the marionette lines of every boomer’s face. I’m reminded of my neighbor’s car last night—stolen and burned. When I pull into the shallow track of our shared driveway, the conspicuous absence gleams, a room-shaped dry patch where the sedan used to live. The lids of our trash cans still lay against the line of my fence, discarded frisbees in a boy’s game of pretend. The arsonist tried to get in my house, too, but I lock my doors. Marsha, the neighbor, doesn’t, and has the additional disadvantage of being deaf. She nicks chunks of salt-pebbled ice from the stairs up to her porch now, as if nothing’s happened, wearing her safety-orange muff so only her eyes and mouth are visible, pink and pearly with sweat. She’s putting it all behind her now. Sedan or no, someone must keep putting on their muff, gloves, trousers, someone must wield the snow shovel left in the mudroom against the washer, and someone must nick the ice.
This is where we nod at one another. I am also a thief. She doesn’t know how I used to lift produce from the local grocery—bright globes of freshly-misted watermelon, handfuls of grapes like eggs from the body of a beautiful woman, my pockets bulging conspicuously with treasure combed from the trash in the warehouse, employee’s-only, red-faced and fleecy. She knows I broke into my own house just last week, knew it was me because she didn’t call the cops. Not when I beat my fists against the windows and doors, or scaled the fence, or ate shit on the driveway. I went backward easy on the ice, my body was a ship pitched the wrong way in the water, my head and hair making a slip of blood underneath me, just a little dark claw I rubbed away with my hand. So we nod at one another. I prepare my keys in my stiff fingers, making a show of unlocking and entering civilly through the side door.
We’re all going to burn this city to the ground one of these days. I’m not thinking exclusively of the arsonist, though we may as well throw him in the lot. I imagine him in Marsha’s sedan, shooting down Dodge Ave, a gathered ball of umber light. He’s a runner or comet who knows exactly how fast he’ll be. He’s putting it all behind him now. He sees the final stretch playing behind the film of his skull. I know he must not have gone away with any one thing he didn’t need.
Hannah Christopher is a writer from Akron, Ohio. Her works have been published in the Threepenny Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Gordon Square Review, among others.
