Lonely Hunter

(After Carson McCullers)

There is a girl who droops on the back step of a Georgia farmhouse hunched on the sagging stoop chickweed straining toward sunlight through wooden slats

She picks the scabs off her knees sweat tickling the nape of her neck swatting at gnats that wander from the manure pile watching the bland, brown cow flick horseflies with her tail in the field by the barn Having snagged one of her father’s cigarettes she balances it between slim fingers breathing the smoke in deeply her lips buzzing, sunken chest ignited Her eyes already hollow caverns a bulbous nose protrudes from childish cheeks hair colorless as rainwater in a ditch skin a sickly grey hue

In this house there was once wealth, but now shutters slouch, doors slant on hinges white paint flakes off wooden window frames dormer slicked with mold foundation sinks into damp soil There’s no money to pay the nanny so the girl avoids her mother— hanging laundry on the backyard line— who she knows will soon ask her to mind her little sister Her older brother’s white collared shirt clings to her gangly arms once starched stiff, but now the linen limp and worn

She could walk the flat, dusty lanes swarmed with June’s green lushness under the harsh gaze of the matronly sun past sharecropper shacks and cottonfields to the town with its boarded-up storefronts idle old men lingering on porches large-bosomed, perspiring ladies with their feathered hats and opinions harassing her about her bruised shins, boyish hair her unladylike sneakers But what’s the point in this forgotten town, this town the world abandoned long ago crumbling with brokenness and boredom

Every night, in her attic bed beneath the slow circling fan she scrapes her mind with a spoon If only she could talk to someone about how the liquid notes of the Franck piano prelude— overheard on the radio— drip into her heart, dig into her flesh pool like raindrops streaming down the windowpane in the breezeless afternoon mixing with red clay dust and make her want to sob About how the piano’s swollen keystrokes, and the words emerging from the typewriter—

the one hidden on the back porch, her only place of solitude— intertwine in her heart, get caught in her throat that clenches with longing The same longing as when she glimpses the elegant woman the one she spies sometimes in the store but does not know by name the woman with the slender waist hair pulled tightly in a black bun who passes so close she can smell the talcum powder and lavender soap on her skin How love and music and words carve up her body hollow out her limbs stretch her with beauty and silvered sorrow with wet loneliness weave her with nylon strings of melody crisscrossed like blades of switchgrass The thrill she gets from seeing her mind spilled on the page words of passion and pain coalescing from her head to her fingertips in a way that could never come out right from her mouth

Too young to know she has stories buried within her that one day she will pull up her bootstraps of bravery will journey far from this place make a new life inhabit cities across the sea

But this tired town, this grieving house the black-haired woman who makes her ache will return to her in dream, and in ink, on page after page She doesn’t know she will spend her life loving— loving women, loving men yet unnamed and that love decays like a humid Georgia farmhouse and that sorrow won’t let her be will haunt her pursue her through decades like a song

She needs to talk

but there is no one to speak with

about these things

so she sits alone in her dusty sneakers

on the back stoop

the smoke billowing

from her girlish, frowning lips