Girl Runner (sample)

[CHAPTER 1] Visitors

"Coming, Aggie?" Fanny sqeezes my fingers.

We walk the dusty lane, her hand around mine. Fannie is not like anyone else. She moves like water in a muddy creek. We stop to gather wildflowers, ripping their tough stems free, the delicate flowers expiring in our hands. Tall grasses vibrate with heat. We cut a path through the raspberry brambles and along the edge of the front field, planted with corn, the corn taller than my head, taller than Fannie’s too.

Fannie’s hair is falling out of her bun. Wisps halo her. I look up into her face, like the face of the moon, looking down into mine.

We are going to the graveyard. We are always going to the graveyard.

“Here we are,” Fannie says in a comfortable way. I climb the mossy split rails. Dark and grooved, the wood is cool and damp against my knees. Fannie enters at the gate.

“Hello, everyone,” she says. “Hello, boys. Good morning, Mother.”

I leap from the fence and drop the dying wildflowers. My job is to clear away the crabapples that fall from the overhanging trees. Fannie hitches her skirt, swings it out of the way, and kneels on a grave to pick it clean of weeds. That is her job.

I throw handfuls of crabapples, making noises like guns firing, like grenades exploding, like I imagine war to sound. Our brother Robbie is at war — my half-brother, Fannie’s full.

Fannie pats the grass to call me closer. I chew open a crabapple, spit it out.

“Born too early,” Fannie begins. I know her stories by heart. “Born too early,” she repeats, waiting for me, sitting now on her bottom, arms gathering her legs into her bosom. “Their skin was thinner than crepe, blue as baby birds.”

She’s got me. I kneel and brush the grass over the twins, buried together in a tiny square coffin. I can almost see its outlines under the ground, of thin dark wood pressed on all sides by the weight of the earth.

“Were they boys or girls?” I ask. Fannie is waiting for me to ask.

“Boys, of course.”

I already know, but her answer still gives me a shiver. This is a graveyard of dead children, all boys, my half-brothers. I am relieved to have been born a girl.

The twins: the first and second babies born to our father Robert Smart and his first wife, who was Fannie’s mother — not mine — and whose name I know was Tilda. The twins lived for a few minutes each, not even an hour, let alone a day.

Next born came Robbie, who is alive and well and fighting in the mud fields of France. His letters home are scant on details, but for the mud. He writes that his feet are always wet, and that the boys suffer from foot rot. Some of their toes turn black.

I would like to know more about this. I am thinking about it now.

“Do their toes fall off?” I ask Fannie.

“Whose toes?”

“The boys in the war, in the mud.”

“Robbie doesn’t say.”

“Can you write to him and ask?” (I don’t yet know how to write.)

“I think we have nicer things to say in our letters, don’t we? Robbie doesn’t want to think about his toes falling off.”

“Maybe they’ve already fallen off.”

“He would tell us.”

But I wonder: would he? I look forward to inspecting his feet, surreptitiously, when he’s home again, whenever that may be. The newspaper says our boys will be home by Christmas, but Christmas is a long way off.