Charlotte Hughes

Terrible Haibun

After Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Summer Haibun”

Under the Broad River rapids, I open my mouth in an O to let minnows swim through my brackish teeth. After our first fight, you bought me a plastic bag of pet minnows to say sorry. I flushed them down my toilet. I like to believe the minnows swam down the drain and back to some stream overflowing with cantaloupe fish eggs & cicada wings. Or back here.

The day so hot, low clouds of heat form and re-form over the rapids. The waters so high, they hunger for the concrete of the interstate bridge, the cut-up picnic table, the little neat homes of cicadas done up with red clay and insect spit. I have no analogy for you. Or when you left. I sit on one end of the table, across from your empty weight, and cut into three melons, flecked with pollen like gold. Every last one holds deep disappointment instead of pale fruit, a rock of blue mold in the center instead of seeds.

Blond sparrows whistle overhead—a bare story—and each tree on the shore is thick with those pale birds, as if the trees grew wings instead of leaves. What I am trying to say is: someday I want to translate the flight of the sparrows without saying your name once. For now, I sting my lips with rat snakes and gild my eyes with pine bark. All blood and sharp edges. I want to make myself a monstrosity. What I am trying to say is: a girl. With every step out of the water, I feel my tongue bitter at the edges, congeal, wax. I didn’t even speak to you that much, it was more the movements of everything else.

I scream a swarm of
cicadas. My own storm, horrible
and dazzling and gone.

Charlotte Hughes is from Columbia, South Carolina. Her writing can be found or forthcoming in West Branch, Best Microfiction 2021, CutBank, Waxwing, Meridian, PANK, and Fugue. She was the recipient of the 2020 Meridian Short Prose Prize and was a 2020 Foyle Commended Young Poet.