She tells the detective that the bank robber in the black ski mask moved his hips the way her brother did. “Are you saying that he was your brother?”
“No Carl’s been dead thirty years.”
The other one smelled a little like her first boyfriend, someone she knew sixty years ago and died last month. She starts to pant, shallow breaths that don’t fill her lungs. She can’t control them, puts a hand to her chest.
“That doesn’t help us much.”
“I’m just answering your question.” She’s lightheaded, but she remembers the smell of her baby’s head. She remembers losing her grip on an apple and crying when it fell into the creek.
“Are you all right?”
She remembers being a little girl and running across a foggy field on Christmas morning hearing her friends singing “I’ll be Home for Christmas” even when she couldn’t see them.
John Brantingham is the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and his work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has eight books of poetry and fiction including The Green of Sunset from Moon Tide Press, and he teaches at Mt. San Antonio College.
very evocative
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