Free Snakeskin Road by James Braziel

and when they awkwardly dropped, wobbly and spinning, he shouted, “Touchdown! Boom,” then slapped his hands together until the mother said, “Quit. Leave those birds where they are. They might have disease.”
    He gravitated toward her slightly, his shoulders and head shifting—the only hair he had was a helmet of peach fuzz—then back, leaning the other way, a more sure foot into the crowd. Too much chaos for rules to hold, the power they had a few days ago, no matter how strong and familiar the voice. There was too much chaos not to be independent if you wanted.
    So he set off and Jennifer lost the boy. His mother called after him, went after him as other children pressed in close to the tree. Jennifer held their movements in ribbons of light and dust for only a second as they stroked the dead birds,drew their feathers open like paper fans then petted the wings back. Sometimes the children held one bird, as many hands as it took until they swallowed it fully inside their grip.
    “Where did birdie go? Where did he go?” some of them began to chant.
    “I don’t know, I don’t know,” the others answered back.
    “In my hand. In my hand,” the first ones said.
    Then “Let him fly, let him fly,” the others said.
    Then “One, two, three,” they jerked their hands away and spun.
    “There he goes.” They looked up. East, west, north—their bodies forming the points of a compass. “There he goes,” they echoed one another until someone picked the bird out of the dirt and knee-roots.
    One girl sat a bird on top of her head and nested it there, balanced, on her stringy hair, and one girl tried to feed a bluebird dirt, and another traced the cracked beak of a bird to its eyes, pinpoints of wooden glass. Then off they went just like the boy with the peach fuzz head who had arced the birds like footballs, legs knifing between refugees, a yell to get back here, that’s too far. This time the voice had enough sway; the legs and feet stomped back to the tree and Jennifer’s eyes drifted, shut down. Time had started to slip around her.
    She could no longer depend on its continuity, that the world unfolding would do so in unbroken threads. Time had slipped outside of her fingers where it jerked and fluttered and spiraled beneath her, so deep, she could only breathe silt and loam, choking, her body shaking, her blouse ringed with salt, caked and dry under her chafed breasts and arms. She kept staring at her arms for the purple spots to appear, to bubble up under the skin, her mouth to run dry in a milkish foam. Then she would surely pass like her two fathers. She would follow them out of this world.
    There were flickers of Mathew, the trailer in Fatama, the desert, Mama. Something in Jennifer said,
This isn’t the
right world. You’re not in the right world, Sweetie. Sweetie
, like her mama called her on good nights.
    She jerked awake. But it didn’t last, and she fell again into time’s misflow, its dark eddies swirling around the children’s legs and crossing up their chants, muddled.
    “Come on,” Mathew called, and waved her down to where her breathing plunged. He was already at the foot of the bank, the water turning fast and making her thirsty.
    “I’m so tired,” she said. “And I can’t go in that water, not now.”
    “What do you mean, you can’t go? It’ll be fun, Jen.” He kept prodding her and knocked the side of his boots against a metal shaft, an old piece of the dam, until clay rolled off like sloughed wood. He kneeled and started to unlace his boot as she sat next to him.
    “Because I’m pregnant.”
    “Pregnant?” He looked up. “When did this happen?”
    She hit him in the shoulder. “I don’t like that question. It happened with
you.”
    “I didn’t mean it like that. I just—I didn’t know.”
    “You don’t want children, remember? So I didn’t tell you.” But why hadn’t she told him before leaving? Maybe he would’ve come to Chicago. But she had asked him to come