Inheritance
- Sep 20, 2024
- 2 min read
by Holly Pelesky
I watched them fall: the keys and all my keychains from the overpass. Car stalled on 520, couldn’t get home but didn’t want to either. Nothing worth saving but my stamp collection
full of 25 cent stamps, so many birds — one outside my window who built a nest, pulled worms
from our lawn covered in dew — it was so wet where I grew up, like a spooky movie: foggy and damp with no clearing.
We tied rags to our feet when we jumped on the trampoline after the rain. I memorized how a sidewalk dries: from the center outward, our sun gray like the underpass when I finally went searching for those keychains all those years later, old enough now to drive, to get the hell out of this Dodge Dart, Noah’s Ark. God promised not to flood the earth again but he forgot about the place I live, here where we are all drowning and some parents don’t make a better life for their kids, they make it worse.
I want to crawl back twenty-eight years before I was born and become my mother instead, hoe strawberry fields, sew McCall patterns on a Singer machine, win blue ribbons, wave daintily on the back of a convertible in a parade. She can be me only I won’t despise her or humiliate her. There are horses and if she isn’t afraid, she can ride them. Engrave her own pink saddle. Hold a parasol to be ironic. We will laugh at all this silliness and say here, now — this is how we can be. We can be anything. We are not the rain. Not inevitable.
We can sprout into tulips or daffodils or ferns or a damn huckleberry bush for all it matters. Bake a pie. Don’t get stung. Slide down sand dunes and don’t worry that it destroys your shorts. They’re hand-me-downs anyway. There are new clothes where we are going, and it isn’t a motel, no coin laundry. There’s a carousel. I know you like horses. And my favorite part? No one needs a key.
Holly Pelesky writes essays, fiction and poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Nebraska. Her prose can be found in CutBank, HAD, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, other places. Her collection of letters to her daughter, Cleave, was published by Autofocus Books. She works as a librarian and a writing center consultant while raising boys and an indoor/outdoor cat in Omaha.
