Midway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Hayden Saunier

a challenge. ”

But she couldn ’t help it; the bear was looking directly at her, its eyes honeyed and liquid, and when it stood to peer down at her from a better vantage point, she realized it was male and that he was aroused (she would learn about the baculum only later). Oddly, the sight steadied her. She was familiar with this reaction and, unconsciously, she touched her hand to her hair, lifting it from her neck, the movement loosening the inexpertly tied bandanna so that it fell away and her hair flowed over her shoulders.

The bear made a keening noise and fell heavily back down onto his forepaws and took a step toward her. She remembered how the ranger told her to play dead, and she crouched on the ground, wrapping her arms around her head (“Protect your neck, cover those big arteries. ”) the way she did in elementary school when she and her classmates bent beneath their insubstantial wooden desks against the vaporizing powers of the atomic bombs.

Through slitted eyes she saw his claws arced against the earth of the trail just inches from her nose, registered the hot breath against her face. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt his snout, cool and dry, against her elbow and she braced for the clamp of jaw, the pierce of fang, but he merely nudged her arm away from her head and put his nose to her cheek. She felt it grow moist and thought she must be crying again, but realized it was his tongue, gently cleaning her face, lapping the length of the scratch, touching carefully to the corners of her eyes and lips, flicking away an errant gnat. Then he pressed his head tightly to hers and held it there a long minute as she breathed in his musky scent, withdrawing so quietly that it was some moments before she realized he was truly gone.

She stood slowly, unfolding her limbs as though they were strange to her. The sun drenched her in warmth, but she found herself shivering, noted the chattering noise that at first she thought was a woodpecker, but turned out to be her teeth. She turned slowly, a full circle, but saw nothing. Even the wind had died, and the trees stood like sculptures against the bowl of sky. She had an impulse to wonder if she ’d imagined everything, but could not yield to it; there, heading back down the trail the way she had come, were prints sunk into the crumbly earth, big as soup plates, each preceded by a row of deep holes poked by those claws. She moved her mouth experimentally, touched her tongue to a hair caught in her lips, and when she pulled it away, she found it both shorter and thicker than her own, like a strand of copper wire. So it had happened. She rolled the hair between her fingers, then shoved it deep into one of the pockets of her cargo pants. From another pocket, she withdrew her cell phone, but it told her, as it had nearly from the moment she had entered the park, that she was out of range of any signal. Her legs trembled, but when she shoved one before her, it worked, and so

Midway

By Hayden Saunier

The two-headed pig was jammed into a jar so I couldn ’t tell it from the cat with two bodies

or the cloven-hoofed devil baby discovered dead in a dumpster in New Jersey but Snake Girl

was alive— no arms, no legs, no bones in her body. The word illusion floated, pale grey, like a misty ocean

underneath her name, but I was distracted by two men hosing down the world’ s smallest horse

so I only remembered that later. Snake Girl was alive, a woman in her twenties, her head stuck

through a hole in a fake table and wound around with perfect fake snake coils. She wore her hair

in bangs and flicked her eyes from side to side but mostly she looked tired. I asked her how she was,

she answered: cold. After that, there wasn ’t much to say. I wandered up and down; I couldn ’t go. The horse

looked like a long-necked, stump-legged dog and I, well, I’d finally figured out I was part of the show.

Hayden Saunier ’ s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Nimrod, Margie, 5 A.M., Drunken Boat and Philadelphia Stories. Her book of poetry, Tips For Domestic Travel, is due out in Spring 2009 from Black Lawrence

Press.

she shoved the other, and eventually she discovered herself walking up the trail again. It seemed insane to head more deeply into the woods, but she didn ’t dare return the way she ’d come for fear of seeing the bear again. The trail described a twenty-eight-mile loop and she had already hiked nearly ten of those; two more nights would bring her back to the parking area. She wondered if the bear had really gone, or if it would return to stalk her; wondered if there were more bears ahead. She walked and cried, trying to push away the regret swelling within her for choosing such a lightly traveled route. She vowed to hike farther than she had planned each day so as to spend only a single night more on the trail. The thought cheered her, and she moved more quickly, hiking on legs grown rubbery until it was nearly dark, noticing little about her surroundings.

She stopped reluctantly where a beaver dam across a creek formed a small pond and, with hands shaking anew, raised her tent in the middle of the meadow, thinking it less likely that a bear would creep out of the trees toward her. She was hungry, but feared that even the tasteless, strangely textured substances within her freeze-dried packets would prove too much of a temptation, so she crawled into her sleeping bag and listened to her stomach rumbling. Improbably, she fell asleep just as abruptly as the night before, waking to the same grey fog that had heralded the previous morning.

She was ravenous, and headachey from going so long without food. She disentangled herself from the sleeping bag, and with some apprehension, unzipped the tent and tentatively put her face to the opening. The first thing she saw were the fish, three trout, water beaded upon scales whose rainbow hues still shone bright, their perfection marred only by the puncture marks of the large claws. The second thing she noticed were the footprints across the dew-glistening meadow, the outsize depressions leading into the trees. The last thing she saw was the large circle of flattened grass not eight feet away. She crawled from the tent, stood slowly, then tiptoed barefoot to its center. The grass beneath her feet was still warm. She curled her toes into it, contemplated the footprints, then turned to the trout. Her stomach lurched demandingly, and within minutes, she had inexpertly gutted them with her Swiss Army knife, scraped away their scales, and sliced them into ragged fillets. She hastily pumped the little stove into life, boiled water for coffee, then sautéed the trout fillets. It was awkward – she had neither butter nor oil and they stuck to the pan, so hot when she scraped them free that they burnt her tongue, but the flesh was moist and delicate and delicious, and she forced herself to slow down and savor it, alternating bites with gulps of coffee as the sun chased off the fog. An indignant beaver surfaced in the pond, saw her, slapped its tail against the glacier-green water and dived deep. In the trees at the edge of the clearing, a raven croaked and another flapped to join it, the pair of them clearly waiting for her scraps, and she rose and stretched and laughed aloud and

SISTAH by Linda La Rose © 2008