Free The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

the journal down on the table as if this whole night is moving normally. How does anyone survive any relationship? How does anyone move through humans without killing them, or themselves?
    The two of them stare at the object.
    “Yeah. I don’t know,” the filmmaker says. “This is hers. I don’t know if there’s anything in there that matters. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”
    “Lemme see it.” The poet holds out her hand.
    The filmmaker opens the journal to the part he was reading before and hands it to the poet. He puts his head in his hands, for he feels as if it might sever from his neck at any moment. Partly he wishes it just would. The second the poet’s voice begins, the writer’s story rises up to them something like heat does, invisible and under the spell of physics. She reads the writer’s words aloud:
    One day the girl is reading a poem in the widow’s house. Next to the poem is a drawing of the poet: Walt Whitman. Next to the drawing the girl’s imagination retrieves something it has not touched for a long while. A father. The girl’s father before the blast was a poet. There. It is a thought, “father,” it is the thought, “poet,” and it does not kill her. The girl closes her eyes and fingers her tangles of blond hair and goes back, perhaps for the first time, to the memory of her father, her family before the blast.
    Her father was a poet, her mother a weaver. Her father could engineer and build anything with only his hands, her mother could sing and make medicines and calm a child into dream—everything they were, happened between their hands. Her father taught her poems, and how to build a tiny city from mud and straw and twigs. Her mother taught her songs and how to make a pattern with cloth and color. And there was a brother. She lets the word become an idea. Brother. She remembers the touch of his hands. The warmth they shared when their cheeks met. How he smelled next toher before they drifted into sleep at night. Her mother the weaver. Her father the poet. Her other: brother.
    She looks back at the image of Walt Whitman. She wonders, is a poet really a poet if his only songs are to his daughter, his wife, his son? If his extraordinary lyric merely puts children to sleep like moon whisper, or fills a house with star-shaped dreams? Is a poet a poet if there are no books that carry his words, his name, a drawing of his face?
    She is the not-dead daughter of her father the poet.
    In her memory she is four. She is on her father’s shoulders in the darkened woods, next to a frozen lake. They skirt the woods without completely entering; forest animals scrutinize their movements. She is laughing, and that’s how she remembers it: she is holding tight to her father’s ears, he is saying, “Not so tight, my tiny, not so tight, you will pull your father’s ears from his head!” Her laughter and his.
    Is it love to want to die there, inside that image?
    The not-dead daughter.
    Later, her father creates an oral history of that moment, tells and tells it around great fires after dinners, after work, after the tiny family—a wife, a son, a daughter—has settled and touched one another and drunk and moved between house smells and fire. For something else happened there besides her love for him. Her knees pressed against his cheeks. A story. A story about animals.
    “A caribou was walking against the forest next to a frozen lake with his family. The youngest fell lame and the mother,who was already weakened from childbirth, insisted on carrying her. The mother became weaker and weaker, and at some point was so delirious with fatigue that she let slip the tiny life, into the great flattened white of things. A human girl and her father came upon the tiny thing just as it was dying. The girl held its head and the father sang a very old song with his eyes closed. It was what to do. Then she died.”
    And her father narrates the ending in song, lyric. But the girl’s imagination