Heritage

Heritage

by Joe Buckler

illustration by Sadie Hutchings

“A little further,” your mother says, reaching for your hand. “We’re almost there.”

Her grasp is firm in yours, still slick from the uphill hike. The waning summer sun ignites her dress, turning the yellow fabric into gold and the carefully stitched orange flowers into wildfire. She moves like oil over water, fluid, unburdened by her surroundings, narrowly avoiding the same hidden burs and reaching thistles that cling to the cuffs of your pants with desperation, sticking even to your fingertips as you try to pull them out.

She laughs because she knows you were made for the city, that you feel more at home among sharp angles and rising towers. You try to find the beauty in the empty, sprawling field, looking through her eyes like you promised to, but the rolling hills remind you of the cold, endless oceans you read about in school, and the sky looks like it has been pulled too thin, stretched from horizon to horizon until it is ready to tear. You feel small beneath it, even as the sun falls behind the trees and throws the world into twilight.

“Here,” she says, finding a spot for both of you to sit.

“See, little little one. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Your mother spreads her arms, framing the night sky between fingers, and takes her place in the soft grass, pulling you down to her side. She folds her legs beneath her and cups the rising moon in her palms, as if she could lift it to its place in the sky. You frown at your own hands, caked red with dirt, calloused from long afternoons of climbing over stone columns and tripping over uneven trails. You wipe them on the dry grass, but they still look unclean, stained pink like the long-forgotten alien symbols that you’ve seen peppered across the city walls.

“Your father would have loved it here,” she says. “It was all he talked about—wanting to see it for himself.”

You wrap your arm around hers and wonder what it would have been like—having the three of you there instead of just the two.

“I miss him very much,” she continues, laying back on the grass. “Your father wasn’t a rich man or a famous man, nor the strongest or smartest, but he was a good man. He was a loving man. Like you, little one. He didn’t have much when he was young; the world he grew up in was very different from this, very poor and very sad. There was war everywhere, marching through the streets day and night. When it finally showed up on his doorstep, your father ran. He ran until he found a ship to take him far, far away.”

In the distance, night animals start to stir, their haunting calls carrying your mother back from the past. She blinks the tears from her eyes, embarrassed.

“I met your father on that ship,” she continues, putting on a smile. “I miss him very much.”

You put your hand on top of hers and watch, quietly, as a second, smaller moon breaches the horizon, straggling

behind the first like a younger, timid sibling. For the first time time, with the two shining orbs filling the lavender sky, you think maybe you can see it through her eyes; all the beauty of the world.

“Look,” she says, pointing just below the trailing moon. “That blue dot there. Do you see it? That’s Earth. That’s where your father came from.”

You study the dim light at the end of her long, slender finger, eager to unwrap its mysteries and pull it down from its place above. It soon fades away.

“Where did you come from?” you ask, scanning the sky for something more to hold onto.

“Oh, little one,” she says quietly. “That’s a story for another day.”