20
The Resurrected
Mariya Deykute
The four of us bit into the field like a ravenous comb, tangling our trails. The point was not to find you, Persephone, but to find the places you weren't. To report back: "Not in the south field. Not in Elk Grove. Not by the old bridge." So that it's safe to fish off the bank, cut class, let kids on the playground. We wanted to be considerate. You never know what finding a corpse can do to a kid. If we had found you, it would have been alright. You were our sister. We ate each other’s boogers. We shared blood. We were sure you were dead by then. Why else would the teachers look at us with a headache in their third eye, seeing flashes of you in eyebrow after nose after mouth. Ma shouldn't have named you Persephone. What did she expect?
Tease you with pomegranates, don't we, say a big dark man will come with a six foot beard and skeleton crew to take you into the mines. You wet your bed the first time we tell you about it, flashlight faces. Ma whips us, thin birch whistling, no figuring out who did what. You are crying, that is enough. You wet your bed until you are eight. You want to show everyone you are still a baby, sleeping with Lacy the bunny, sucking your thumb. Too little to be abducted, to leave home, go across the bridge into the dark forest. "Pussy-phony", we called you. We hear the river call your name now, hear, here, here.
Two nights ago we saw Ma pressing your piss-soaked sheet to her face. The last memory she has: chasing you