NEW MEXICO — LESLIE WALKER TRAHAN
/We’re at a stoplight when I spot the bird nesting on top of a street sign, it’s made its home out of sticks and leaves but also straws and scraps of paper, and I wonder if they have birds like this in the desert, I want to ask you, but you’re still talking about your uncle in New Mexico, saying he was the only one who had ever stood up to your dad before you did yesterday, and you know he’ll help you get a job, and I can finish school and get a job, too, when I’m ready, when the baby’s ready, then you smile at me and say, “We’ll work it out once we get to New Mexico,” and I remember what you said yesterday on the street outside my house, Dad and Gayle’s window already gone dark—“Maybe it won’t be perfect, maybe we won’t get it right at all”—and that feeling starts up again, like someone turned the knob on the faucet too far and the whole thing broke off, and I think of Gayle at the kitchen table last week, tapping her red fingernails on a coffee cup, saying, “I guess you’re more like your mother than we thought,” with Dad looking out the window like the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were all three in the backyard waving a sign with his name on it, then the light changes, and I point to the bird’s nest and say, “look,” but the bird is gone now, and without the bird, the nest doesn't look like anything, just a bunch of trash on top of a street sign, then the car jerks forward, and you’re on about your uncle again, talking like our future is sealed up in a little package with a bow on it, already in the mail on its way to New Mexico, so I lean my head back and close my eyes, and I listen to the sound of your voice, and I listen to the sound of the wind rushing against the car, and I think of the desert, and I think of New Mexico, I’ve never been but I’ve seen pictures, I think of mountains punching upward, I think of earth whittled out of rock, I think of long curtains of sky, sand as white as spilled milk.
Leslie Walker Trahan’s stories have been featured in New Delta Review, The Forge, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her online at lesliewtrahan.com and on Twitter @lesliewtrahan.
