Kite Running
- Jun 29, 2018
- 2 min read
by Gina Marie Bernard
You edge up the drive of my brother’s lake property, having dropped the girls off for the Fourth of July weekend; it is my first supervised visit since leaving the hospital.
Our daughters are much bigger than their voices on the phone, but still struggle to haul a shared suitcase across the lawn. As I step from the cabin, they freeze — two raccoons caught in a yard light. My sister-in-law joins us, and they rush to her hips, too shy to say hello. Your car disappears from view.
I launch myself off the deck, a breathless child chasing a flyaway kite: the sheen of grass between sere ruts is like a span of ripstop green; dust eddies from under your fender in a tailing spool of twine; aloft, a snowy-haired man turns away and drifts from my collapse. I catch up and reach through your window — for a closing moment our hands seem to steer together. But you no longer wear your ring, and an unfamiliar perfume whispers from the hollow of your neck. I stumble, lose my purchase, and watch as you pull away.
My shins are cool with morning dew — my tennis shoes festooned with grass clippings. I feign you’re just around the bend, conflicted, engine idling hot beneath the hood as you reconsider.
But our marriage lies ruined, abandoned along a ghostly route I exited to attend to the sining pattern of my own secret heartbeat, and you’ve been planning this move for the past eight years.
Anyway, someone has to take the luggage inside, and it’s clear I’m the only one still outside.
Gina Marie Bernard is a heavily tattooed transgender woman, roller derby vixen, and full-time English teacher. She has completed a 50-mile ultra marathon, followed Joan Jett across the US, taught creative writing at a medium-security prison, and purposely jumped through a hole cut in lake ice. She lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, own her heart. She has written one YA novel, Alpha Summer (2005), and one collection of short fiction, Vent (2013). Her work has recently appeared in r.kv.r.y. quarterly, Flypaper Magazine, and The Hunger Journal. She has creative nonfiction forthcoming in Waccamaw Journal and Jet Fuel Review; and poetry forthcoming in Coffin Bell Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and Lavender Review. Her chapbook — Naked, Gettin’ Nuder — is a 2018–2019 Glass Chapbook series finalist.
