Can’t shift this sticky Hoosier summer. No walks off the front porch anymore. My hair won’t behave and it floats like a cloud. My hangnails are drying up and my armpits are wet and the sky is a chalkboard of plane exhaust streaks. Ants nip at my dirty feet and crawl up my dirty jeans and the wind tickles the base-fuzz of my spine. I shaved my toes and still stepped on bees. The house chimes an idle litany. My dead dog’s dishes are asleep in the backyard. I scrambled barefoot over the prickle-grass, trying to find some remnant of her dried shit, but I missed the spring and the softening and now the bluebells by the stoop have turned beige. The basketball on the driveway bakes inside its mud shell. The cars hum down Carlisle. The monarch butterfly I’ve been trying to catch since first grade jitters in the peripheral. I don’t turn to face it. The wind dies. A fly pisses on my arm. A branch cracks by the road. A squirrel sneezes at me and I bark back. He scurries into the tree crown as my hair haloes.
Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. Author of Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022) and recipient of a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, Kristine’s work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and 2019 and is published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Speculative Nonfiction, among others. She is the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.
Lost Balloon 