Spasm and Shadow

“Christina’s World” (Wyeth, 1948)

The fence that hems the empty garden leans heavy downward, posts crooked like fish hooks in the wind, some driven so far into the soil they’ve hit clay and now sink lower into the dirt when it rains.

The farmhouse feeds a clothesline from a first-floor window to a clap-board shed, a mimicry of design in crippling miniature.

The girl’s stricken spine rises through her dress. Where it reveals the spasm, a shadow lifts into place, its shape not so unlike the fading prints death’s grip must leave on lifting—on leaving a girl alone and meddling elsewhere.

She clutches at the landscape, inches nearer to it all—the ladder propped against the shingles, a warped wheelbarrow left unmanned.

Her spine rebels against itself. Her body, nearly numb, moves like ice forming, though she wills it home with every muscle she can still control.

Inside, her mother scalds food from the porcelain dinner plates in the kitchen. She hums a hymn she can’t place, though it comes so natural, her voice lithe though her mouth is closed.

Her hands do all the work of making clean the filthied dishes, flitter through soap bubbles like birds. How gracefully they move, weaving between one another like knotting heavy rope underwater; how unaware of their own capacity.

The child in the field passes her fingers through roots of dead grass, taller than her body convulsing in the dust.

If she could, she would call her mother’s name, or the forgotten, sacred one of God. If she could, she’d tend the garden now, loose the weeds from the soil like her mother taught her how. She’d return to church, bow in the pew, and sit stalk-straight—straighter, even, than before.