Sandra Kourchenko

Skyward

Minutes full of day teach me a song, a book. I watch her, small, too small for her ten years. No one ever told me it was going to be like this. She comes and shows me her shoe, singing silently to herself. She sings. I record her songs in my mind, my memory. Her shoe is full of mud and I try to wipe it but I have nothing to wipe it with. She sits still, her leg extended, her foot pointed, crooked inward, strong. Her finger points at the mud, palm facing skyward, clipped nail staring at her leg. The rest of her fingers form a perfect O.

She continues to sing in her secret language, no eye contact with me, never eye contact with me, eye contact with her fingerprint that goes round and round like a music record, like a hypnosis device. She will fly if I don't clean the shoe.

A minute passes by, then a cloud, and the light changes. I can't move can't leave her with her shoe and the light and the minutes walking on my back piercing my flesh with nails of tension. I will flip. She calmly sings.

I rip off the page of the book I have just read and start wiping the shoe. I make up a story to tell her for her own book of songs and it escapes me, flies away with the purple butterfly that has just attempted to land on her head. The butterfly flies away and in its wings I can hear my daughter's song, her own birthday song that she has composed for herself as the others sang happy birthday to her in her party.

The cake was chocolate and cherry and my baby put cherries on her eyes and ran blindly around the table singing her song and the others laughed. They thought she was being funny on purpose.

My daughter's eyes are with the butterfly. They sing in unison. I grab her ankle for I fear she will go and I will stop learning. The light shifts. Another minute has passed.

I see children running, eating cake, laughing. I finish wiping the shoe. On the ripped paper, a verb, a noun, a smear. I see my baby with her leg extended and her foot pointed and her finger stretched and her eyes wide, skyward, and the butterfly is gone. She looks like a dancer posing except she sings a melody of foreign lands that holds no specific chord and every single one. She could be an opera diva except she has no malice. I let go of her and she stays and the light changes and the butterfly comes back and lands on her fingers that form an O.

The fingers stretch. The palm extends. The butterfly stays.