Hawks
Driving alone across Blue Mountains, you pass hawks perched on power poles, in yellow larches, in the black crowns of fire-scarred pines. Outside Pendelton, a red-tailed hawk claims a billboard that threatens salvation through Jesus Christ. A kestrel gusts above the highway, flashing its speckled barring. It’s a moment you’d share. But you’re driving alone across Blue Mountains. Before Hermiston, a Swainson’s hawk atop an irrigation rig scans dead heath for rats and voles. The day looks long from there. Your stomach grows. In the rearview, the Swainson’s screams into the wind.
Your hands on the wheel feel the wind. The passenger window sticks a quarter-inch from closed. You’ve watched how-to videos but haven’t fixed it. Nobody’s reminding you again to fix it anymore. There’s only the rattle of glass and small things she left behind in the center console—a Tiger Balm tin, a pocketknife, a nickel.
On the other side of Blue Mountains, your parents assure you: it’s alright to come home. The room that was your room isn’t your room anymore. In the guest bed, in the guest sheets, in the dreamless guest sleep, you twist in blankets nobody’s stealing back in the night that’s too still, too cool, and too deep. You’re still waking on your side bed. Before: by the time you used to wake up she’d be gone. Her side of the sheets redolent with lingering Tiger Balm—menthol and camphor—twisted around pain that never went away, that shapeshifted beneath skin, between muscles, through bones. On the nightstand next to the open window, she’d leave her teacup, sometimes a half-gone cigarette. But here, in your parents’ house, in the room that isn’t your room, there’s nothing left to find, not even smoke.
After a few weeks, your parents ask, what will you do now? They don’t ask, what is it to dream from a never-ending afterward? You’ve dreamed of flying above your entwined shadows gliding over fields yellow as prairie rocket. You’ve dreamed as if wind and light and shapes cut from light all belonged to you. Until, as clearly as shapes cut from light, none of it ever had.
Your parents send you to Thriftway for hamburger. Red meat in white Styrofoam wrapped in cellophane is on sale. At the register, someone you went to school with rings you up. Someone you didn’t see dropping out of school makes change, as you complete this transaction from a never-ending afterward. Someone who sat at a desk two rows from your desk, who endured the seething ferment of their body alongside the seething ferment of your body, hands you a receipt. Someone you didn’t see moving out of their older boyfriend’s house under cover of night hears your stomach whine through your sweater. Someone you touched once on the arm at a school dance doesn’t remember your name, doesn’t see that behind your eyes is an empty wasp nest in a winter tree.
Driving past a field of yellow evening-painted grass, you roll down the driver’s-side window—the one that still works. The passenger window rattles, stuck a quarter-inch from closed. The pocketknife she left here cuts cellophane like cobwebs. Hamburger slips through your fingers hanging out the driver’s-side window. Meat sails glistening into the field. Hawks hear its minerals streaming across the yellow grass. Hawks picking fleas from their plumage, hawks scrying tomorrows in tangled rabbit gut. Hawks you heard from your bedroom window, when it was still your bedroom window, cry for mates struck by semi-trucks. They cry for mates lost into the unknown country a billboard claims as the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Mates poisoned by bait, reduced to feather and hollow bone. Mates who’ve shared hunger and sky. They all hear your meat offering, ghosting former bodies rustling the yellow evening-painted grass.
They circle, tasting iron in their beaks, watching you throw hamburger from your window. You chase their shadows along the road in a dream where their shadows are your shadows. While hawks dream of piercing your windshield, talons tearing through a sweater she gifted you last Christmas, ripping through your belly and knowing the momentary cessation of hunger.
Today’s shoulders and hands are almost transparent. You pass the driveway to your parents’ house, where your parents’ stomachs mewl in hunger. Deer leap away from the road in your headlights. On the wheel, your hands turn to the highway arcing over Blue Mountains. You could lick your hands, moist with meatstink, for the taste of anything but your voice rubbed raw by weeks of thanking family and friends for their turnstile litanies: “Sorry for your loss. Sorry for your loss.”
Today’s light falls behind you. Shadows cut from larches, pines, irrigation rigs, and billboards fall along the way to where you’re going. Window-glass rattles in the passenger door. You’ll never fix it. It’s not hard to understand this. Cold stings your face and hands. Your hands turn up through the mountains sinking into another night arranged in a shape to wake up from and know the solitude of hunger again, sinking into another night arranged in a shape to wake up from and know the solitude of hunger again.
Desmond Everest Fuller
Desmond Everest Fuller is a first-generation college graduate and writer from the Pacific Northwest. He earned an MFA in fiction at Boise State University, was a 2023 Sun Valley Writers Conference Fellow, and a 2021 Glenn Balch Award recipient. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appears in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Grist, Nashville Review, Florida Review, Permafrost, and elsewhere.