2 September 2002 | Vol. 2, No. 3

Like Lightning

by ELIZABETH ROUTEN

Ellie, barefooted, has just stepped on a wasp. She doesn't feel it at first—not for the quick pangs of summer heat radiating off the gravel drive—but soon an ache travels up her leg and she lets out a shriek: "God damn it. I told you not to leave your garden tools… " Ellie looks down and sees the body of the insect, scoffs, leaves it there to bake. The translucent wings shudder silently.

"Of all days," she mutters, hobbling on her heel across the broad wooden porch that wraps around their farmhouse. She lets the screen door bang behind her.

"Mary, little bee got me in the foot. See if you can get the stinger out, there." Ellie props her leg on a stool and slouches back in the old captain's chair at the dinner table. "I always say, if something can go wrong… "

"It's you that walked outside." The younger woman, experienced, has given up arguing and says her peace with no emotion. She brushes her wet hands on her apron as if drying porcelain plates and then gets the meat tenderizer from a scarred cabinet. Mary kneels in front of her sister, doesn't look her in the eye, wipes dirt from the wound like an overworked doctor cauterizing an amputation.

"I always say."

"There's nothing here, Ellie."

"Why sure there is. I can feel it." She takes off her broad-rimmed straw hat and puts it on the table, loosens her graying hair, darker now with sweat.

Mary swipes at the foot with a dirty dishtowel and shakes tenderizer into her hand. "Hold still."

Ellie can see dust in the part of Mary's clinging hair, little bits gathered here and there as though she has been left in an attic too long.

"That's okay, then," Ellie snaps.

"I don't want you in a mood for tonight. It's special."

"I'm never in a mood." She crosses her arms like a stubborn child, like that thing she will one day be again. "I'm indifferent."

—

In Nebraska the corn is as tall as a man and twice as strong—for doesn't it come back every year? No matter the weather and the locusts and the lonely prairie—doesn't it come back?

When Mary was twenty-five she married a young man from Long Island who had spent the summers of his youth on his grandfather's farm. His legs grew bowed with the years; his mind grew bowed. He went to Wyoming as a guide in the fall. Shoshone kept his thoughts free and his wife and child became wistful things to tell vacationers from California.

They grew used to the silence. Who could blame this mother and child for the resentment when he came home and expected his clothes ironed and his dinner cooked and his dog to mind after those long, lazy months? It wasn't the same with him there, brooding and dark and insistent.

One year he took his ATV and his horse trailer, waved goodbye and didn't return. Ellie moved in and scrubbed the walls from top to bottom to rid the house of his scent.

"God damn men," she said, stroking her sister's hair. She didn't mean it but wished she could. Though the siblings didn't share a likeness in thought or appearance or even in age, they rushed together like the wind and the grain, leaving a void behind.

Ellie and Mary rock in handmade chairs on long August evenings. Val Jr. runs before them, a little farther each year, a little stronger.

Mary half-rises out of her chair to call his name when he gets out of sight. Fear rushes to her throat. As a child she had wandered into the endless evening only to find that clouds covered the stars and she was lost. She saw a light in the distance and ran through wheat that was almost as tall as she, through a night heavy with the calls of coyotes and nightmares reborn. Then she stopped and stared for a moment before the tears started. Even now, she ca