Down the one hundred twenty-one stone steps, Darcy dashes. She doesn’t care if she falls and busts her head wide open, not after what that boy said, loud enough for the whole class to hear, him the stupidest idiot in sixth grade. Even Frieda, her best—no, only—friend looked like she’d believed it. Idiots, all of them.
She makes it to the bottom, then to the bridge, with the beaver dam on the left, creek to the right. Last time, she’d seen a doe, water to its knees, almost invisible—like what she’d been till this thing happened.
She places her hands on the old weathered wood rails, warmed by September sun that is fast fleeing westward up the bank beyond the bridge. She can almost feel the water below the old boards, lifting her up. She shivers, despite the heat, and stares hard at the dam. She’s never actually seen a beaver but knows they work at night with nobody to see them.
“Slut,” Tyler Rowan had hollered while Ms. Harper was talking in the hall. “I saw what you did with Randy Fletcher behind the bleachers.”
God, it wasn’t even a real kiss!
For a terrible few seconds, she is back in that suffocating classroom with all of them gaping. Then, turning, she sees, twenty yards upstream, something big standing in the creek, head slightly turned her way, as if listening. Great Blue Heron! She saw one in a book once, could hardly believe her eyes. It stands absolutely still, neither blue nor grey, the very color of invisibility. Reedy legs support a body no bigger than her mom’s quilted purse. It gazes back, then away, goes back to what it was doing.
She knows it fishes all day then flaps off, soaring over interstates, factories, suburbs and fields, doing what it has to do in a world of electric wires and drones, gun-drunk fools and other risks. Slut, they’d all said with their eyes and silence—just a word, like slug, another nearly invisible creature. Until somebody decided it was a nuisance and salted it to death.
Tears rose as she gripped the rail harder. Was she crying over a slug?! No. It was that she’d seen the heron when, really, she shouldn’t have. Invisibility didn’t save you.
She sees the light has moved further up the hillside, turning it popcorn butter gold. Glancing back, she sees the heron has disappeared. Had it been there at all or had she imagined it?
Doesn’t matter. The world won’t let girls or birds stay disappeared. It expects you to fly. Turning, she races back up the steps.
Ed Davis has immersed himself in writing and contemplative practices since retiring from college teaching. Time of the Light, a poetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His novel The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014) won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. Many of his stories, essays and poems have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Write Launch, The Plenitudes, Slippery Elm, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Bacopa Literary Review. He lives with his wife in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio.
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