13thWR

IOWA / by Stephanie Dickinson

Farm girls undress, they swim in the pond like nymphs, float on the brown shimmering water where cows drink. Diving into the muck, they imagine themselves the huntress Artemis, or Aphrodite, born of castrated genitals and the froth of the sea, though they've never seen an ocean or mountain. They've been dropped from the thigh of Zeus, these two with chore buckets , pulling their overalls back on, girls hoping to bloom in one sultry corn weather afternoon. I remember my best friend. Wild, never praised, brazen, Linda had a father who worked her like a son, and even after our swims, she smelled of the hog wallows. We walked barefoot into the sweetness of dusk that had been forever coming. Bangs hanging in our eyes, we were three miles south of anywhere, daubing our farmer-tanned wrists with Ben Hur. No escape from the hayfields ripening on every side, from the orange trumpets of ditch lilies following us. My cousin, bespectacled and freckled, trotted his pony alongside. I could never love you, she said, shooing him. She wanted red Mustangs, Harley Davidsons, anything fast to take her away. Crickets whirled as we cut into the cemetery. We wandered over the graves, talked to the blue-eyed upper classman, Jack Holub, killed in a tractor accident. We sat on my father's cracked headstone. I wish we could trade, she'd say, already breasty, milkiness pushing out the bib of her coveralls. No town boy would find us though we were goddesses. Splitting a can of warm Falstaff, we were frantic for forbidden fruit. But this was Iowa, black soil country, and dangerousness came slower than the glaciers. Her father, wearing waders and hard looks, was quicker. Already looking for us.