The Axe Handle Remembers the Tree

BY EMILY HANCOCK

Michael is born seven minutes before me—crying, pink, heavy. The nurses wash him, quickly, calmly, and place him in our father’s arms. Reclined on the hospital bed, our mother pushes me outside of her. I am small, thin, quiet. Another boy. More nurses – untangling the umbilical cord from around my neck, massaging my sternum, patting my back. Then I cry, too.

Of all our childhood houses my favorite is the one outside Syracuse, where the backyard butts up against a cow pasture. Michael likes their eyelashes and their big, harmless mouths. I like the electric fence. I like daring him to jump it when the sky is dark and the cows sleep standing upright. I tell him to push, once and hard, against their sides, to let them tip and fall. A joke. I laugh—he doesn’t.

I’m not tall enough, the way he is, to vault over the fence, but I’m small enough, thin enough, to slip between the wires. The cattle don’t hear my footsteps on the grass over the sound of the wind and their heavy breathing; the heifer doesn’t run when I put my hands on her back. Even in the dark, the jut of her shoulder blades, the bones of her hips are sharp, delicate, painful. I push her—gently, barely. Her breath catches while she falls.

A cow with broken ribs is, to a farmer, useless. It’s a difficult, not to mention expensive, injury to heal. The farmer who owns the lot behind ours puts her down. He uses a bolt gun, which cannot be fired at a distance, but instead must be pressed, flat and still, against the skull. So he finds her in the dirt, and kneels in it, and holds the metal between her eyes, watches her pupils dilate—black and empty space.

No one suspects me of anything. I am small, thin. Scrawny, weak. Worse when standing next to my brother, who, even at twelve, is well over six feet tall. You know anything about this? Our father asks him in the kitchen.

No, he says. No sir.

No one suspects me of anything. Even in the backyard, where Michael and I play cowboys, trotting in circles on imaginary horses. He rides a Clydesdale, twenty hands high. I ride my Mustang, black as night, deadly. We dismount ten paces apart – standoff, quickdraw, fire. I am faster than him; he falls comically to his knees, grabbing at a place in his stomach. Then he slumps downwards, playing dead, flat on his back. I walk to him, slowly, stopping at his side to stand over his body. His face is relaxed, his eyes open, flickering back and forth.

Sit, he says.

So I sit. He points at the sky, pale grey in end of April, muddled with heavy clouds.

That one’s heaven, he says.

How do you know?

It’s the biggest one. Has to be the biggest one.

That one’s bigger, I say pointing to a cloud passing directly in front of the sun, its edges tinged silver, glowing.

So that’s heaven then, he says.

Maybe, I tell him. It’s going to rain.

Maybe, he says.

I work in construction. I like it. It is steady work, decently paid, interesting. I am good at it. I follow directions, I work without stopping or arguing. I build bridges, houses, office buildings. I point to them while driving on the freeway, showing them to my daughter while she sits in the back seat. She smiles, laughs, remembers. I watch her face through the rearview mirror. Sometimes I see her mother’s face, though mostly I see his.

I like woodworking too. Not because I am good at it but because it is mine. Mostly I carve miniatures—ducks. Their variety is satisfying, inexhaustible. There are subtle differences, for example, between canvas back and red-headed ducks – the slopes of their foreheads, the colors of their backs. I know them well; I memorized them as a child and never forgot. To get a waterfowl hunting license in the state of New York you have to know the differences instantaneously. You can’t kill what you don’t know by name.

I have a studio. It’s more of a garage. In fact, it is a garage, at least some of the time. In the winter, Annalise likes to keep the cars inside; she never cared for scraping ice off the windshield or picking leaves out from under the wipers. While it’s still warm, though, I keep my truck and her sedan parked outside in the gravel driveway, keep this room for myself. Though it’s November, now.

The studio smells a bit like concrete and gasoline, but mostly of sawdust. The walls are thin, uninsulated. There is one long window which faces the treeline. Outside, the land slopes sharply downward to the lake, navy and slowly freezing.

In the middle of the summer we are treading water at the deep end of the swimming corral in town, sharing a pair of goggles, competing to see who can dive the deepest, hold their breath the longest. He wins—handily, repeatedly. He dives gracefully down towards massive slabs of limestone covered in zebra mussels, through clouds of minnows, past catfish swimming with their bellies exposed to the bottom; he surfaces to tell me about their size, their number, the clarity of the water. I am reliably unimpressed. I want to scare him, so I tell him how they used to deliver mail by horse and buggy, and how, in the winter, it was faster, easier, more direct to ride across the frozen lake. How the ice would break, how the buggy would sink and drag the horse with it. How the water – 300 feet at the deepest – is too cold for the bodies to rot.

See any horses? I ask him.

He dives back down again. His image blurs, darkens, disappears.

I have been working on a wood duck. His body sharpens in my hands—the long, flared ridges on the back of his neck. His beak, small and pointed. I am careful with him, gentle with the knife while I push it around his head.

A knock on the door—my daughter’s voice.

Dad, she calls me. It’s late. Mom says come inside.

She’s right. The sun sets early, now, and once it’s dark I forget to watch the time. When I focus hard enough, sometimes I forget to feel it pass.

Alright, I say. Then: Come here.

Her footsteps on the concrete, the small heat of her body behind mine. She watches my hands, the duck, the knife. Quick, dark, precise. She watches the sandpaper sliding over the wood, the sawdust billowing upwards, landing on the table like snow.

When I finish, I set the duck down. His legs are folded politely beneath his body, his head raised proudly upwards.

What kind of duck is that? I ask her.

She knows him by name.

She was born with her eyes open. Deep brown, like mine. I thought babies were meant to be pink and wrinkled and wailing; eyes shut tight. I had been waiting for it, counting on it. But she was born with her eyes open.

Secretly, I had hoped for a son.

In August our father takes us to a shooting range off the highway. It’s less of a shooting range, more of a vacant field. The trees are cleared for a hundred yards in any direction and the sun is direct and brutal. Far in the distance cicadas are singing, low and droning. At the other end of the range are a series of wooden blocks with photocopied images of ducks and deer tacked to the centers. Between the three of us and the targets, the hot air warps, ripples, rises.

Our father lays a dark, heavy shotgun on the ground, a small white blanket beneath it. Watch, he tells us. He touches it carefully, firmly, the tough skin of his fingertips checking a lever. He looks at the two of us. Safety. On. See?

He lifts the gun, twisting, sliding, breaking it apart. He lays it in pieces down on the ground, touching them once, saying their names. Stock. Barrel. He reaches into his back pocket, returns his hand flat, a dark cylinder resting on his palm. Bullet.

The gun comes back together as easily as it comes apart. Our father slips the bullet in, cocks it.

Watch.

For dinner Annalise reheats a duck I shot on the lake last weekend. The meat is tender. We eat quietly.

Annalise leans forward, presses her palm against her forehead, smooths back the hair that has pushed into her face.

I talked to my sister today, she says. She invited me to the city, to see her. For a few days.

I nod. She continues.

I’m going to go, I think. Just for a while.

Alright.

Just a few days.

Alright.

Alright.

My daughter sleeps in a room upstairs painted dark blue. Like water, she says, or the sky when it’s almost all dark. Her ceiling is covered in plastic stars that glow when the lights turn off. Her bed is made with cotton sheets, a heavy duvet. The house is old; the windows are drafty—though they’re shut and locked, the curtains (gauzy, pale pink) shift in the breeze. Icy tonight, the onset of frost.

Are you warm? I ask her.

She nods. Read something, she says.

Read what?

Anything. Pictures, please. Birds.

I dislike children’s books so instead I take one of the field guides I keep throughout the house with pictures of waterfowl on glossy, colored pages. I imagine she prefers them too, though I have never asked.

I point to the images, read the delicate print below them. She falls asleep quickly and doesn’t stir.

Sandhill crane. Antigone canadensis. Native to North America. Migration ranges from northern Canada to Mississippi, Florida, Cuba. High nest site fidelity. Both parents feed the offspring at first, though they quickly learn to feed themselves. Most populations are stable or increasing, though susceptible to habitat loss through urbanization. Legal to hunt in eleven states.

In our bedroom Annalise is already changed into soft pajamas, covered beneath blankets, reading some novel with bold yellow print on the cover. She looks up when I open the door but doesn’t speak. I lie down next to her, turn off the lamp on my nightstand so the only light left in the room comes from her side.

You’re going to the city? I ask her.

She sighs, lays the book down on her chest, looks at me.
Yes. Just for a little while. I’ll be back.

Should I come with you?

She turns off the light, lies down on her back.

No, she says. No. Stay.

For a while she tried to convince me to move downstate. She had outgrown small towns, she said, did not care for the way everyone knew her name, how tall she had been in the fourth grade, the day she had gotten married, her daughter’s middle name. And anyways she had her friends in the city, and anyways I could be a contractor or a carpenter or whatever there, and anyways wouldn’t it be nice, she said (once, finally, exasperated), if no one knew, if no one suspected anything.

I dream of winter—the heavy, wet snow that covers the hills, glows blue in the moonlight. The lake—frozen, dark. I walk barefoot towards the center. The ice is thick and sturdy, until it isn’t. When I slip into the water, I make no noise. The water is cold and dark and I sink forever.

In August our father lets us hold the gin, lets us take it apart, clean and oil its pieces. My favorite is the engraving on the metal stock his father had had done—a stretch of horizon, shallow water with sparse cattails, three ducks flying in the shape of a V.

Disassembled on the kitchen table, it glistens while it dries.

At the range our father lets me shoot first. He hands me the gun, easily half my height, and shows me where to nestle the rifle butt against my shoulder, below the clavicle. He moves my hands so one palm cradles the barrel, the forefinger of the other hand resting against the trigger.

Breathe, he says. Aim. Pull.

When the gun fires it nearly bowls me over. The flat edge of the rifle tucked against my shoulder kicks back hard and fast and painful. It knocks the wind from my lungs and when it leaves me it leaves as a yell—the sharp, fragile cry of a dog with its tail caught underfoot.

The bullet flies erratically – upward and to the left, missing the target entirely. Our father purses his lips, breathes deeply and slowly. He places a hand over the barrel, his long fingers wrapping around and covering mine.

Alright, he says. Alright.

He hands the gun to Michael, who takes it easily, instinctively. He is bigger, taller, more capable of absorbing the shock of the kickback in the hollow of his shoulder. The first time he fires, the bullet flies wide of the target—the second and third time, too. But our father wraps himself around Michael, moving his hands under his own. He presses Michael’s cheek against the stock of the gun, tells him, Breathe. Michael pulls the trigger on empty lungs and the bullet flies true, burying itself deep in the wooden target.

There, he says. Feel that?

Annalise packs one suitcase while the morning is still dark and quiet. The sound of the zipper closing wakes me up; I watch her from behind, crouched on the hardwood floor, her back and shoulders curving forwards, her hair still wet from the shower. She kisses me once on the forehead, and then she’s gone.

We meet her at a distance, first. From several rows behind her in church we watch the back of her head, the smooth, straight red hair shining in the overhead lights. Like deep cherry wood—the grain, the varied color. She bows her head when kneeling, nods in time to the music, tilts her head backwards, upwards to sing. At the end of the service she turns in her seat to shake the hands of the family behind her. Her eyes are dark. They catch Michael’s, first, and then mine.

At the shooting range the targets change from wooden blocks into clay discs launched high into the air. There is a rhythm to it: the loud, harsh call from the shooter—Pull!—then a silence, brief and tense, then the gunshot, the clay disc shattering in midair. It takes only a few seconds, five at the most, repeating over and over again, regular as a heartbeat.

The next time we see her in church we’re in the row behind hers. We can hear her voice – soft and airy – when she sings, when she prays. The gentle rising of her shoulders with her breath. When she brushes her hair off her shoulders we smell her shampoo – lavender.

She turns around again to shake our hands. Peace be with you, she says, then smiles, says her name.

It takes a while but eventually the targets change again—our father takes us into the woods at the end of the lake, camouflaged against the underbrush, and points to a stretch of gray sky above the water where (he says) the ducks will come, Wait.

There is a rhythm to this, too. Our father plays his wooden duck call, brash and echoing off the water and the hillsides. Then the silence, punctuated, perforated by the sound of ducks moving in the water, lifting first their wings, then the heft of their torsos into the air. The sound of our father breathing in, then out, then firing; the small crash of a bird falling backwards, downwards, into the water.

She lives in a big house on Genesee Street. Her family is new in town, moved recently from Syracuse to get out of the city. Her father is a doctor; her mother stays at home. One sister, two years older. On weekdays, while her father is working and her mother is reading on the porch, we walk down by the house and ask—is she free to come outside?

He offers the gun to Michael first, who takes it easily. He settles down low on the ground, his stomach pressed into the mud. I take the duck call and play it—not just once, not just for volume, but in a stuttering, building song.

Again, the rushing sound of wings flapping quickly, desperately upwards. Rushing, like they know they are being hunted, like they somehow have learned to expect it. Quickly, they rise into the open air, their bodies dark shadows against the grey sky. Quickly, Michael steadies the rifle against his shoulder, his cheek. Quickly, he picks a bird tracks its flight, aims, and fires.

In the backyard we ask her to describe her horse. She tells us about a white thoroughbred, its legs long and muscled, its mane silky and braided. She isn’t interested, the way we are, in pretending to be a gunslinger. Instead, she prances in circles, singing the folk songs we learned in music class.

On the occasions when I let Michael shoot me first, I lie flat on my back staring upwards at the sky, listening.

Gunfire, so close to the ear, is so loud it seems to hollow out all the air it touches. Like a scalpel, a trowel, a whittling knife—it is sharp and shattering, leaves behind a sucking silence, like water rushing downwards into negative space.

The duck falls from the colorless sky like a scene from a silent film. Faintly, we hear it crash against the water. And then, our father—Good shot!

When Michael tries to impress her, it’s obvious. I killed a duck, he tells her. Shot it right out of the air. From a hundred, two hundred yards away. Right through the heart.

When it’s my turn to shoot the gun, the ducks stop flying overhead. Learned their lesson, our father says. Come on. Slapping my shoulder, coaxing me off of my stomach, away from the rifle.

He leads us wading through the shallow water towards the birds we killed, pulls their limp bodies from the water by the skinny stalks of their ankles. He lays them out on the ground near the place we shot from. Watch, he says, and he presses the heels of his palms against the duck’s chest, presses his weight forward like he’s trying to bring it back to life. His hands slide sideways around the ribcage; the skin and muscle slide off the bone, moving loosely beneath his hands. He takes a long knife from his pocket, wraps his fist around the wooden handle, places the tip against the sternum, presses, pulls, cuts.

He looks at Michael, then the second duck. Your bird, he says. Come here.

Michael flinches—I notice, mostly because I have never seen him flinch before. I have barely seen him falter, but he does, and I notice. He steps forward, though, lets our father guide his hands so the heels of his palms press into the duck’s chest. He shudders, tries to pull away when he feels the gritty tear of skin and muscle.

Our father takes the knife out, holds it in front of Michael, who refuses. Flinches, shudders, refuses.

Her wide eyes; the way she touches the calluses on his palms, softly.

But you didn’t skin it, I say. You couldn’t do it.

Her wide eyes; the way she looks at me, instead.

I’ll do it, I tell our father. Let me do it. I’ll do it.

He passes me the knife. It is heavy, heavier than I would have expected, but balanced, easy to hold, even in my hand, so much smaller than my father’s. He shows me the place on the duck where the breastbone begins, shows me where and how and what angle to sot the knife. Then he sits back on his heels. Go ahead, he says. Cut.

The knife slides easily between the bone and muscle. I draw it down the midline of the chest, then sharply to the right—peel the pectoral muscle off the ribcage. Through the bones – thin, white, blood-stained – I see its heart. Small, fragile, still.

In the studio I sketch in pencil on a fine block of walnut wood. Marking two hind legs, the flat of the horse’s back. No rider. I take one of my larger knives from the drawer and begin to cut.

A good carving takes days. With each pass of shrinking, sharpening blades its features become more and more exact. Individual. This horse like no other horse. Image refined at knifepoint.

My daughter sits with me in the studio. She watches me carving the horse until she gets bored, then she wanders around the room. She opens drawers full of paints and brushes and scraps of wood—pieces cut too deeply or incorrectly and reduced to waste. What are these? she asks me. Pointing to the rifles mounted on the wall, out of her reach but close enough that she can see the engraving on the side of the stock.

Guns, I tell her. Rifles. Would you like to learn?

Carving is strange. It is concerned mostly with negative space. Nothing is made so much as slowly reduced, refined, destroyed. The trick is knowing when to stop.

In the backyard beneath the wooden deck, suspended upside down – the canoe is in disrepair. Our father prefers to do his duck hunting from the safety of a blind; he doesn’t like the way the boat rocks in the water each time the hunter steps, leans, fires. Over many years he has scraped its belly over rocks and logs, dented it, broken it, let water seep in through the cracks.

We discover it by accident, early in the fall, running in circles through the yard. Michael runs his hand along its side, slips his fingers through the gashes. How hard would it be, he asks, to fix?

My daughter learns quickly, which surprises me. She is young and a girl, thin. Not weak, but not strong, either. But the kickback of the rifle doesn’t bother her, doesn’t seem to hurt. She aims, fires, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t yell, doesn’t break.

Annalise comes home on a Sunday night. She sees the rifle on the kitchen table, drying, before she sees me or our daughter. When I see her, the sun has gone down and the kitchen is dimly lit. She sits at the table, her hands folded.

Later, in our bed, she tells me a secret.

I have been looking for an apartment, she says. My sister has been helping me. I found one. I’ll leave at the end of the month.

Michael and I take the boat out from under the deck, prop it upside down on a workbench in the yard. Michael smothers the open places in fiberglass, a pale paste before drying. Give it an hour, he says. Let it set.

We sit with our backs against the oak tree in the backyard, facing out towards the cow pasture.

I’m going to marry her, he says.

I laugh at him.

Sure you are, I say.

I’m serious.

Sure.

She let me kiss her.

I look at him then. He’s watching me, his jaw tight, resolute, certain.

Liar.

No. She let me.

He isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s watching the dairy cows beyond the fence. Their big heads lowering to the grass, then lifting while they chew. They are silhouetted against the setting sun. It’s getting dark early again. We are quiet. The sky is purple and orange. How strange to be two things at once.

My wooden Clydesdale stands on two hind legs. His head is raised and elegant, his eyes bulging. Beginning to emerge are the fine points of his musculature—his neck, his stomach, round and solid like the trunk of a tree. The ripple of tendons in his shoulders, his forelegs raised like fists. He freezes, midair, his momentum concealed so he might be tipping uncontrollably backwards, or returning furiously, violently to earth. He is giant, terrified, beautiful. Outside it begins to snow.

The south end of the lake is so shallow that when you stand in the water it comes only to your shins. And the water is so clear you can see everything – the little rocks, the blades of grass, the schools of small fish rippling in the current. If you stand still, the parts of your legs submerged in the water are hardly distorted, the light only barely warped and twisted. Never perfect—but close.

We slip the canoe in the water while the sun rises above the hills to the east. It is quiet like I did not know it could be quiet. No breeze. The lake is flat and glassy. Nothing moves.

In bed, I ask her, beg her: stay.

She tells me: Daniel. I cannot. I’ve tried, I promise. I’m—

She stops for a moment. I am holding her, tightly, desperately, embarrassingly.

She asks me, begs me: Please. Let me go.

We’re pushing towards the lake’s end, where hemlock trees loom sternly over the water, cattails crowding around their roots. There’s a break in the vegetation at about the center of the shore, where water winds down to a creek. We follow it. Here, the water is only a few inches deep, barely above the ankles. It’s tricky business navigating a canoe in the shallows but we are practiced. Michael points to the left with his oar at a small alcove of reeds which we slot the boat inside. The oars come to rest, and it’s quiet again. Nothing moves.

She leaves slowly. She takes little things, first: her toothbrush, her favorite shoes, her shirts and her sweaters and several pairs of jeans. Then silverware, and the good dinner plates, and the champagne flutes from her father’s house.

She leaves behind several hair ties and dried out tubes of mascara, a few orphaned socks.

Gradually, they find their way into trash cans, and they do not come back.

He is sitting in the front of the canoe. His shoulders broad and leanly muscled beneath his sweatshirt. We forgot life vests. Has he noticed? We are unprepared, unsupervised. He’s leaning forward, elbows to his knees. Across his thighs his rifle – our father’s gun – is resting, loaded. It’s strange to see him armed. I recall the way he flinched, shuddered, refused.

The first animal my daughter shoots is a deer. She aims for the heart like I told her to but she hits the stomach instead. The bullet breaks apart against the ribcage, scatters in small pieces throughout the abdomen. The deer wails, crumples to the ground. It dies, not from the gunshot, but my father’s hunting knife. My hand wraps around hers, guides it to the jugular, enters, twists.

Michael kills one, two, three ducks. They fall quickly from their flocks; we paddle towards them, collecting the bodies, laying them carefully in the belly of the canoe, necks straight. The way our father taught us. But I am growing frustrated; my shots fly wide and sloppy. I take them fast, then faster. Aiming on instinct, missing, missing.

We wait. He holds the duck call between his lips, then blows. The ducks come from his direction, stirring the water as they leave it. I swing our father’s gun around, that ancient, inherited rifle, and while he watches the wings flapping, the bodies rising, his back turned to me, I fire.

His hair the same color as mine. Dark brown, but red in sunlight.

The bullet passes through his skull and he crumples, flat on his back.

I sink to him on my knees, pull his body onto my lap. His face is turned upwards, paling and still. I press my hands against his cheeks. There is blood and it seeps through my pantlegs and it stains his skin and mine too. There’s an aid kit somewhere and a vague memory from boy scouts of a lesson about pressure and open wounds but wound is a word that fails me. This is not a wound. This is a skull carved open. Negative space. My brother, dying.

His eyes are rapid and dark, terrified, fixing on one cloud, then the next, and when they stop, I pray it’s on heaven.

I remember his coffin—the maple wood, the shining varnish. I remember the crucifix hanging over the pulpit. I remember Jesus’ crown of thorns. And I remember my father—how he would not break open. Annalise sat next to me, her thigh against mine. She touched my hand, gently.

November passes. Quiet and cold. I spend my time mostly in the studio, whittling and sanding, whittling and sanding. Ducks appear in their many shapes and sizes. I stain them, then leave them on shelves to dry. The Clydesdale remains on a corner of the worktable, surrounded by a thick layer of sawdust. His image is sharp and realized but unpainted. I imagine he has a small wooden soul, that he watches me.

The snow comes in fits, beginning to stick. I need firewood, daily. Between flurries and carving I cut logs outside in the garage. The wind is brutal; the hillside offers no protection. Instead the wind blows unobstructed over the water, through the valley. It whistles through barren tree branches, forcing them to sway. They groan at the movement—a deep, aching sound. I swing the axe down, wrench it from the stump, and it groans, too.

I show my daughter how to clean the deer. In the garage, near the worktable with the unpainted horse, she helps me hand the deer from the ceiling, upside down, so its head swings low to the ground. We place a bucket beneath it and she watches, fascinated, as it fills.

We cook it in small batches, setting the rest aside to be frozen for deeper in the winter. There are roasts, steaks, and stews. The kitchen is warm in the afternoons. She stands at my side while I work at the stove, her eyes level to the fire, her shoulders leaning into my legs.

At the dinner table she says grace. Bless us, oh Lord, she says. And these, thy gifts. She lifts her knife—cuts, chews, swallows.

How does it taste? I ask her.

Sweet, she tells me. Almost.

Hunting season comes quickly to its end and she is antsy. She asks to go back—to the range, to the blind, to the boat. And I have never been good at refusing her so we go again to the end of the lake where the soft mud is beginning to harden and freeze. We lie next to each other in the dirt and I let her take the gun first, let her aim out along the horizon. Looking for geese, I tell her. Wait.

Sometimes I can’t tell if she hears me, if she listens. Maybe it is by accident, maybe it is on purpose. The bird she kills, after all, is still mostly grey. It’s the one she knows by heart, the one she says (and I agree) is her favorite. When she shoots the crane she gets its head—the bright red skull splitting open. And if it weren’t for the way its massive body cracks against the water and its burgeoning shell of ice, I’d be impressed at her accuracy at this distance, at this age.

When it dies, it doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry. It drops like a stone, and when it’s returned to earth, nothing moves. Not the wind, not the water, not me.

And when she asks me – Are you proud of me? – I lie.

Yes I tell her Yes I am Yes.

I can see him through the window. That wooden horse. He watches me.

I’ve decided I cannot paint him. Instead, I carry him down to the water. There is a canoe in the boat slip, one oar. I paddle out with no life vest, stop somewhere near the center. Here, the lake is at its deepest, so cold that no dead thing at the bottom can rot. I lean over the side of the boat, enough that I can see my face in the water’s surface, and I remember him, his nose which twists to the left, his eyes, his hair, like mine. Three inches taller, seven minutes older. I let my Clydesdale sink. For a moment it is superimposed on my reflection, then slowly, it darkens, fades, falls away. In the space around my image on the water the sky appears. The giant clouds—this one and the next, and the next, heaven.

Emily Hancock is a recent graduate of Northwestern University where she studied creative writing and religious studies. Her work has previously been published in Helicon and Sixfold Magazine. She currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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