What Could Be True Rummaging Through Acorns Thawing in Milk
By Kelli Allen
March exasperated them both. The ice blanketing the river was neither solid nor penetrable with boot heels pressed down firm. So when the muskrat ran across Cynth’s toes and Minfred said “mind yourself!” just as Cynth teetered her will against gravity, the winter held its best poker face against coming spring and that blue ice stayed full-sheeted.
When he reached the closest shore, the muskrat stood, took a deep bow, bid the couple a “fair to middlin, but maybe better” day, and dropped down into the unthawed mud. Cynth was grateful, all over again, that the Rodent Council concerned itself far more with corn harvests than with human affairs.
Cynth was pregnant for nineteen days and one brief morning. Her belly stretched round as the skin of an overinflated hog bladder and the child within squirmed and nestled inside walls that grew tighter with each moonrise. By noon on the twentieth day, when Minfred’s crabapple-topped penis was burrowing in and then out of Cynth as she lay lazy on her side under the new thatch roof, one tiny hand reached quick from Cynth’s cervix and grabbed-on to that ripe penis and held fast. Minfred shivered through his whole skin down to threads connecting muscle to bone, and pulled not just his deflating member from the cave, but brought forth an entire infant, clutching to his pole and squinting into the new light with its wide, clear yellow eyes.
There was a dance, a rift, an undulation from the mud to the topmost pear tree leaf in the wind, the instant the mewling creature sought Cynth’s breast. The muskrat arrived as close to immediately as any beast ruled by his tail might. Ratfolk have less center than most, being more nose than heart, but this rat-kind brought his approval, his blessings of story and purpose meant for the babe alone. The best benedictions appear where dust meets a plaza and the tents are already popped. In the periphery nod of a rodent, Minfred was an unrolling of burning wheels in both his joy and contemplation at fatherhood bestowed.
Of course, the temptation for this story’s listeners will be to sing “happiest birthday,” as is the manifestation of proper yearning for ourselves to be nestled into a womb once more, being that placenta balloons are festivity enough. But this is not a clarion to sweetness, which spells distrust out of hand, nor a drudging of Backward, but a regard for what lays betwixt. A child born, a mother freshly moored, a husband turned shelter; but even amidst the pleasing foliage and renewed reward from winter-salt, we who pay attention feel the nagging impermanence of some ever-receding revelatory Event.
But we wonder if we might rub a bit of the slippery slope between our fingers, like one reaching into the loam of the field or the sands of the dune, and make ourselves a peace with the interspace, to make sought these soft places that lie between the hard points of absolute outcomes. Cynth knows in her bones that we never reach but the shore of Happy, that the town of Enough will pack up in the night around us and let the uncertain mists overtake our sleep. Minfred might seem an endless sojourner, his a giving-in to being eddied about with only respites from the ravaging current. The babe, like us, two fingers fur thick with muskrat hide, feels a greater belonging in opening up to the transitory and this is the surety that gives way for ice to crack. Who passes for elf will replace all our socks with beetle-shells to indulge in such a child’s whim-glow.
Some births mean an un-striving, to shrug at misfortune, long-heralded culminations and novel invitations tossed to fire. Listeners, be you ever open to the heathery forking of meandering meadow-ways, the trials in a day whose hardship pays in prideful overcoming, and the hazy, fleecy slumber into a frost-rimed waking. Our herding desires are theirs, too, family of three, and our seats at the convening council are warming as far as we are willing to welcome the seeds.
THE END
Author Bio: Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and internationally. Allen is the co-founding editor of Book of Matches literary journal. Allen’s latest book is “Leaving the Skin on the Bear,” C&R Press, 2022. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. For more information, visit her at www.kelli-allen.com