Free Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht

the tiny white coffeemaker. She filled the reservoir with water andturned it to brew. Coffee. She thought of Santi’s father. One moment you’re drinking coffee out of an ironic Hello Kitty mug with your son, shaking your head over the Rangers’ disappointing season, and the next you’re flying high over a river gorge. Life spilled out of you.
    There were so many moments when Alyce was outwardly affectionate toward her young sons but inwardly thinking how easy it would be to walk away. Not easy. But not as difficult as it should be.
    As the coffee brewed and gurgled, Alyce’s mind turned back to the image of Molly on the cliff, and she probed it again. Some sadness, yes, she’d discovered that already, but the sadness seemed almost perfunctory, like an old habit. Resentment, maybe, because this news would bring to the others a renewed, though tragic, appreciation of life, but not to Alyce. Finally, she realized what the feeling was: part of her, though she didn’t yet know how big a part, wanted Molly’s future. To have a disease that was real and physical, a comprehensible reason for the pain and an eventual end to it.
    Alyce was a mother, and Molly was not. But kids were resilient. They survived all kinds of tragedies, and Harry was a really good father. Surely she was dragging them down. Was it a terrible cliché to think they’d be better off without her? Her son’s voice echoed in her head, parroting her, I’m not up to it. I’m sorry. She knew she couldn’t make it as an engineer anymore, not realistically, not after all these years, and with her gone, at least there would be life insurance. Alyce would be better as a story told before bed, as a memory glossed over with time, than as a real-life, breathing, flawed mother. She thought of how Santiago took his small inheritance and bought his dream: an urban fire station. What could she leave her own sons so that they might be better off than before?
    In her studio, surrounded by blurry sketches that made her want to scream, all manner of small beasts toiling away outside the window, Alyce decided to throw away her William Morris drawings.This decision did not feel like a resolution exactly, but choosing to eat celery rather than rocks. No matter how exhausting it might be, if Alyce truly planned to bow out, she must make something beautiful to leave behind. Something for her sons to remember her by.
    She sighed, searching her reserves for a vestige of energy.
    Alyce tossed the dozens of filled pages into a far corner of the room. Slowly, splaying her fingers along the thick paper like making a bed, she spread out a new ream over the table, picked up a stub of charcoal with the other hand. She would draw whatever came to mind.
    And so she started.
    First: a long picnic table. Similar to the one just outside the ranch house where everyone at the party had sat earlier, waving beer bottles and skewers of dead animal. Next, she sketched heads. Ovals and eyes, the arch of a neck. Individual faces took shape and distinguished themselves.
    The words echoed in her head: Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick! As she drew, she wondered if she could imbue the paper and charcoal with stories from her past. Alyce did not remember what it felt like to be happy exactly—that was like trying to feel the high of a drug the morning after, on the comedown. But if not the precise feeling, she could remember the scenes, the settings, the people involved. She could leave her sons the outlines of what it meant to be happy and hope that they would fill them in. If she could weave a piece of cloth capable of encapsulating the few, small things that had been good about her life, she could give it to Jake and Ian. Then, she might be free to go.
    Could she make her sons understand how difficult her childhood had been? That, shy and awkward even in high school, she hadn’t felt at home until she’d arrived at Marsh College? Nestled in a historic