Free The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch Page A

. . . travels.
    In her head, the girl continued her own story beyond the ending of the father and daughter who came upon the dying animal. In her story, the girl wonders, What was the last thing the youngest caribou saw? Was it the image of her animal father and her animal mother disappearing into blur and ice? Or perhaps by chance she saw her, her and her father, before she passed. If it was the strong back of her animal father and the tender rhythm of her animal mother’s legs she saw, maybe her leaving took a home with it forever. And if it was the human father and daughter she saw last, perhaps the difference in their species melted as snow in a great thaw, the word she and the word her becoming each other, daughter and caribou, perhaps their beating of hearts simply became the earth’s cadence, perhaps bodies returned to their animal past—hand and hoof releasing to the energy of matter.
    She loves the story, this story her father told and told before her family was blown to bits—their bodies exploding back to molecules and light and energy. Fatherless, beautiful story poem.
    It becomes a story she loves to death.
    The not-dead daughter.
    It is the story of children.
    The poet puts the last of the joint out in the palm of her hand. “How long has she been writing this?”
    The filmmaker answers, “About seven years.”
    But then the front door cracks open and the playwright flutters in like an enormous unstoppable moth. “Listen,” he yell-breathes.
    The filmmaker stands up.
    “They said they . . . ,” he sputters.
    The filmmaker walks to the playwright and wordlessly grabs him by his arms, briefly lifting him slightly off the ground.
    “They said they don’t know if she will make it through the night. They’re trying to determine if she took something. They won’t know until morning. They said come back when the sun comes up. They said this should be over by then. One way or another.” His words dissolve into breathing.
    We have to do something.
    The filmmaker lets go of the playwright and heads back out the front door, grabbing his car keys from a table. The front door swings behind him, open as a mouth.
    The playwright stares at the poet, and at the broken glass, as they listen to the sound of a husband peeling out of his own driveway and neighborhood.
    The poet cradles the writer’s journal like a child.
    The playwright holds his own arms. “What should we do?”
    The poet stares past him into the night. Then she turns her gaze to the living room wall, there in the writer and filmmaker’s house, the house where they’ve all come to know one another, the wall with the photo they’ve all seen.
    She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.
    The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.
    The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world
    “I know what’s happened,” the poet says.

Expression
    When the girl paints a red face, with orange streaks shooting from the eyes and mouth, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you angry?”
    When the girl paints an indigo face, with aqua eyes and a green mouth, with hair like sea grass, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you swimming?”
    When the girl paints a bright yellow face, with bright blue eyes and gold hair splaying out like the rays of the sun, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you happy?”
    And when the girl paints a black face with a crimson gash interrupting the eye, the nose, the mouth, nearly dissecting the image, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Is that your fear?”
    It is only when the girl paints a face that looks like a girl’s, expressionless, flat, calm, just a girl looking out, not a smile but not the negation of one either, that the widow stops asking thegirl about the faces. The