from Life in a Field
In this story there is a girl and there is a donkey. The girl approaches the donkey because the girl has something to say. What is it?
*
At first, everything had the structure of a blessing. People kept giving the girl what she needed. At the bend in the path, a river with clear water. A beautiful education. An inn at sunset. A spectacular blueberry pie in a perfect circle with a crust so flaky that the last sunlight filled its layers, which had been gently separated by the fork delaying the conclusion of the slice.
*
The girl found the field earlier than other girls. She didn’t want to stay home. She didn’t want to stay home, but it wasn’t because of a discord there. Everything had been provided. A roof, an apron, a brother, a sister, a dress at Easter trimmed in eyelet with daisies on the false placket and a white satin sash tied into a loose bow that did not constrict. She grew up wanting nothing. What was there to want? She wanted the sweet rolls in December to have a cross of lemon frosting, and this was not allowed. But at least she grew up wanting nothing to change. She had one brother and one sister. That was enough, yes? To have another would be to repeat, and she already lived as a repetition of a sister.
*
The house got bigger because the economy got better. And then, she wanted things to be as they had been. She wanted to share a room with her sister again. When they watched the spider climb across the wall, it was a movie if they were together. When she watched it alone, she terrified herself considering its mind and intentions.
*
The donkey’s mother carried him for a year in her belly while she did the usual labors. What else she carried has not been recorded, but can be guessed— fabrics, milled flour, root vegetables, other vegetables in the right season. Always sugar carried back from the market. She forgot she had him with her most of the time. Sometimes she felt him adjusting the fold of his leg inside her, but she believed he was the movement of undigested straw. When this happened, she waited for him to move through her, like the crowds at the market waited, if she moved through them, since she might have something on her back they wanted to buy.
He was born in a good barn after a fine harvest and when he came out, the straw felt warm and smelled clean, though this second fact escaped him, enraptured, as he was by the smell of his mother.
There was no childhood for the donkey, but he was brought up. They brought him to his feet, on the first and the second day, and on the third day he stood by himself. He was made for labor. The people were just trying to help. They wanted him to be himself faster. No one thought of it as an education. It seemed more like a tough regime of nutrition, or a training for a human occupation like toll taker, an occupation where what you do might never change until you are made obsolete. But there must have been a first time he stood, in the straw, just for his mother, before the farmers got involved, before the hands got greedy for their time, before they took her away for the ten day interval of her ovulation and her opportunity to breed again.
*
Maybe it wasn’t a narrative after all. Maybe it was a sequence or a constellation. I think the storyline came after the fact. The lines were drawn through the facts after the facts happened. At the beginning of what is now England, in that dark part of history, humans learned certain abilities, for example, literacy, for example the ability to make pottery on the wheel, and lost them when violence between tribes overtook the skeleton of the Roman system. They used cups and bowls made on home soil for hundreds of years, not knowing how they had been made.
*
School, for the girl, made sense. One teacher told her about color, reflecting on the spectrum as if it were a series of sainted mortals. One teacher trained her hand to make its script legible, and also to know how to make what was illegible in the spirit understandable to itself, to write an angry letter, to compose a love letter. What the girl did on the page predicted a difficult freedom. One teacher helped her line up the numbers in columns that displayed their patterns of addition and subtraction. The next year the same teacher taught her division. Then multiplication came naturally, like a form of hunger. One teacher showed her Mesopotamia, and so she knew where language came from, and another showed her Africa, so she knew where the first human stood up. So what if they sometimes lost their tempers, so what if the one day that she was sick with hay fever was the day they showed a four hour long movie about Kilauea, the volcano, beautiful in destruction, the lava making the houses and villages surrender to new roads, first in liquid and then, hardened into shapes its original spew and fire could never have made.
*
The very best teacher left the classroom abruptly for the mountains after the year turned. They moved on from sentences to paragraphs. The next year, the girl got a postcard of that teacher and a donkey, packing their way through the Sango de Christos, and she asked her mother if they could go visit, even though she could tell it was warmer and more dry there than any place she’d ever been. Instead, her mother helped her send a letter, and let her choose the stamp with its hothouse flower.
*
The heat from the girl’s mouth, it’s milligram of moisture, a lip-administered mistral that comes after each word, lifts the white hairs on the donkey’s left ear, the only visible part of him traceable to a recessive gene. But what is she saying?
Katie Peterson teaches literature and creative writing at UC Davis. Her most recent book, Life in a Field, was published in April 2021 by Omnidawn, with whose permission this excerpt appears.