Free Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo

died. Thirty-one and a grandmother? Two generations of blatant teenaged sex going on in that family.
    Most of the graves in this row are pretty standard. Older people. Eighty, ninety, Our Dear Mother, Grandmother, Wife of William, Husband of Ethelyn, Moose Lodge President, Father, Grandfather, pictures of trees, angels, a dove and a pony, Daughter, Granddaughter … a dove and a pony a dove and a pony a dove— wait —Wait. Wait. Wait.
    Wait.
    My stomach is ice.
    A dove and a pony. The name carved in granite. The dove and the pony. I stare so long, my open mouth is dry. I choke on the cold air rushing down my throat. Who put this here? I do not understand what is happening. The dove and the pony. All this time, right here with me. Am I awake?
    Shag Haircut sobs and wails.

    “Don’t go,” Emily pleaded beneath the table tent last summer. “I won’t survive without you.”
    “What will I do without you ?” I sighed. “I beg them every day; they’re making us go.”
    Wade and Meredith would not give in. No summer with Emily, just a Greyhound bus ride with Kai over the river and through the woods.
    Gramma and Grandpa live three hours away in Pixley, a tiny hamlet even farther inland than Hangtown and hotter, which consists of a few homes dotting the sagebrush-covered high-desert countryside and a downtown made up of a mini-mart, a post office, and a bakery.
    “Gramma and Grandpa love you!” Meredith insisted. “They’re thrilled to have a whole summer with you!”
    If she exchanged the words a whole summer with for free labor from, she’d be right on target, because what we actually spent the summer doing was cutting wood. Cutting and stacking wood. Sunrise to sunset. In Pixley it snows a ton every winter and most of the houses don’t have central air, so to keep from freezing to death, fires must be built and stoked to burn pretty much twenty-four hours a day, all winter long. The minute Kai and I arrived, the wood gathering began in earnest.
    We piled into the cab of Grandpa’s blue Cherokee truck, crammed tight together on the fake leather bench seat. Grandpa drove. Gramma sat next to the passenger door clutching the handle white-knuckled and checking the lock every five seconds. She never learned to drive, and the mystery of it all just horrified her. She craned forward, tense, making sure Grandpa stayed on his side of the road and calling out helpful tips every now and then: “Jesus Christ, do you have to go so fast, Wallace?” and urging him to “Put on your blinker!” even though the turn we needed to take was at least a mile ahead. She pulled a tissue from her bra and mopped her damp brow as Grandpa gunned it to forty-five in the sixty-five miles-per-hour slow lane.
    I was forced to straddle the gearshift, a long stick with a ball on top. Gramma warned me every single time we got in the truck, “Don’t touch that! If you touch that, we’ll crash. Don’t even look at it; that’s not for you. If you touch it, the engine will break and we’ll die!” And so I sat, knees apart, feet off the floor. I imagined my skin barely brushing the thing and the truck falling apart around us, sending us all scraped and bloody across the highway.
    Amplifying the general mayhem of the trip were the antics of Rene, Gramma’s tiny, yipping, stinky French poodle. He ran all over our laps, freaking out and licking us, Fu Manchu snout stained brown from a diet of cooked liver, beef bouillon, and Oreo cookies. I held my knees up, turned my face again and again from his liver lips, and by the time we reached the forest my legs were burning with muscle spasms. The moment the engine stopped (“Wait till Grandpa takes the key out; there’s electricity in the motor, and the car will explode if you open the door while it’s running. Just wait !”), I climbed over Kai and Gramma and fell out into—
    Deafening silence. The noise of the road gone, only still air now, and deep black forest soil. Trees. Hazy rays of