by Carrie George
In another memory I didn’t want, I am a thing hooked in an elbow crease. The only young girl at the picnic, because my family has joined a local recreational group for dads and their kids, and most dads prefer to spend time with their sons, at least these dads. We usually tube down the river at these things. Large black inner tubes that smell like rubber, like the auto shop I once waited in for my father’s car to return tuned up and adjusted. Tweaked somehow with oil, sweat, and hands that know the inner workings of machines. My dad is an engineer. He makes batteries for the government, and I do not ask what they power, what they make move.
I am standing among the trees in August, and I am dry, fully clothed, so I have not spent any time in the water. One of the boys talks to me like he knows more than I do. The leaves rustle and the grills char bulk packages of hot dogs. Burning meat and late summer. I don’t have to wear a bra yet. At least the way I remember it, I am flat, or mostly so, and my hair waves down past my shoulders. Whatever I say in response to this boy, it’s mean. Cruel, even, the way a growing girl can be in the summer, in the heat and rising fumes.
My father’s company outsources work to a machinist who lives in the forest and grows raspberries. When we visit one summer, we go to the rows of bushes with buckets and pinch the small berries into our palms. My father shows me and my brother how to do so lightly, how to find the ones that are ripe and take them between our index and thumb without bursting out the juice. We learn we can be gentle if we try.
I turn away from the boy who I have just been cruel to and I do not initially feel regret. Instead I feel a pulling on my neck, pressure around my collar bone. A force stopping my body where it stands. His arm around me like iron. Like the smells of the auto shop where the men’s fingers are oiled and stained. Where the wrenches and drills line the walls. Where metal clangs and clangs and clangs. The hands making and unmaking. Without pause.
Carrie George is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Northeast Ohio MFA program. She is the graduate fellow at the Wick Poetry Center where she teaches poetry workshops throughout the community. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.