Swallowed
- Jun 28, 2024
- 2 min read
by Laura A. Ring
When we lived in the Piccadilly with its boarded up theater and ballroom, I worried about you wandering the back stairway alone, the stairway that led to the once-grand lobby, and the loading dock, and the boarded up floors of rooms once sold by the hour, so I told you there were rat monsters that skulked around the garbage bins, and if we lingered on the stairs they would come for us, you, me, your older brother, and sure enough, whenever we skipped the elevator and took those lonely stairs, you raced ahead, never tarried, and so it went, for years it seemed, until one day, you fell behind, and I called to you with a warning, but your pace never quickened, and your brother and I waited while you climbed those big stairs, painted red, the light scant and tinged with red, until you joined us at the landing, where I asked you, What about the rat monsters, and you said, with your hands on your hips, Mama,
I know there are no bad things in the world and what I can’t forget is your brother, his gaze turning to find mine, something sad and resigned in his eyes, and I wanted to know, when did he eat from the tree of knowledge, that redly fruiting tree with invisible worms, that can’t be tricked or outrun, but only swallowed.
Laura A. Ring is the author of Field Notes Recovered from the Expedition to Devil’s Peak, winner of the 2020 Foster-Stahl chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, RHINO, and Stirring, among other places. Laura grew up in Vermont, in the shade of Mount Hunger; now she lives somewhere between skyscraper and shoreline on the South Side of Chicago.
