The Illinois River winding like a snake. Snakes inside the river, riding the current.
The current dancing with my hands. My hands in the green water. The water rippling like a snake.
Mama and I haven’t spoken in days. I have been on the river, no cell reception, working on my tan. Angel, the girl I’m seeing, is here, casting shadows with her mouth on my back. I am not running away. I am on vacation. It is my last real summer, everyone keeps reminding me. Soon, I will be an adult. Soon, I will start classes at the community college downtown. Soon, my mother and I won’t recognize each other. Something in the water tells me it has already started.
My father’s family is from a town just off the river, I’ve been told. When I was younger, Mama used to bring me out here, slather me in sunscreen, and shove me into the water. I told her I didn’t know how to swim. She told me I’d learn. This was part of her effort to preserve my father’s memory, I think. She wanted me to have something of his, so she gave me the river. I can’t say, with the minnows nibbling on my toes and the cicadas screeching in the dense trees behind us, that I feel particularly close to him. I feel something. Call it hunger. Call it growing pains. Call it fear of the cottonmouths hiding in the wet and swaying weeds.
*
My mother teaches me how to braid her hair. My nine-year-old nails are long; I haven’t started biting them yet. She hangs her head when I scratch her red- stained scalp. I have to redo the braids many times. Her hair is so fine that they can’t seem to hold. I marvel at the color, the artificial red she has used for the past fifteen years. It feels like I am weaving little strands of fire. I blow on her head just to make sure.
*
Feet in the water, toes wiggling. Mama shows me how to find crawdads. She says out there in the dark parts of the water there are catfish. They have whiskers, it’s true, she tells me. She pulls out my purple Scooby Doo fishing pole and says why don’t you try to catch one? She didn’t think I would. But a few minutes with my hook in the water and we’re reeling something in, a catfish bigger than me, its mouth wide and open and gaping. It’s trying to sing a song, I shout. Mama lets it off the hook and back into the water, and tells me that’s enough fishing for today.
*
It was on the river that I first realized I was not quite a girl. I’d been invited on a float trip by some friends in middle school, their mothers trailing a few yards behind our raft. I pictured my mother in a kayak beside them, joining in on the gossip about other parents, sneaking sips of a frozen margarita out of a stainless steel cup. But my mother was at home, rolling joints in the living room, already making a stranger out of me. Besides, she never would have fit in with those women, not with her Egyptian tattoos and vampire red hair. I told myself it was better this way.
On the Illinois River, floaters under eighteen are required to wear fluorescent orange life vests for the duration of the float. The blinding, nylon vests puffed out like armor, shielding our changing bodies from the world, from each other.
We struggled on our raft, splashing each other with yellow oars, until we finally pulled off beneath Elephant Rock to swim. I had grown up in the shadow of this rock, the jagged face of an elephant with her trunk in the water, her trunk circled by catfish and cottonmouths.
My friends stripped off their life vests to swim in the slow current. The other girls dove head first into the water, laughing, screeching when they felt minnows picking at their anklets. I watched them from the shore. I didn’t understand why I was suddenly so frightened of this water, the massive elephant towering over me. I was warm, flushed from the dizzying heat. I couldn’t bring myself to unbuckle my life vest.
We were about thirteen. We were girls, but for how much longer? Melody had spent fifteen minutes in the port-a-potty before the float attempting to insert a tampon, since she’d just had her first period a few days prior. We coached her from the outside, although I was talking out of my ass—I wouldn’t brave tampons until my twenties. But my friends were practiced, they had started to call themselves women, they spent the float applying sun-tan lotion so that when we got back to town, the boys at the mall would find them hot. They cheered Melody on until she emerged, victorious and visibly uncomfortable.
Beneath Elephant Rock, I watched them swim and splash around in the water. I watched them tighten each other’s bikini tops, ask each other to feel their freshly shaven legs, and I knew that I would never look like them. I knew that I would never appeal to boys in that way. I knew that I wasn’t yet a woman. I didn’t know yet that I never would be.
*
I never got the hang of braiding, but I liked those minutes spent with my hands in her hair. I loved being close to her. When I was little, she would wrap me up and barrel roll across the bed, her arms a protective cage around me. Both of us giggling like maniacs while she recited ten little monkeys, jumping on the bed, one rolled off and bumped his head. It was the two of us against the world.
*
When my dad died, I was hanging upside down in the redbud outside. I was four, my hands covered in dirt and dyed pink by the blooms. It was a beautiful day. The sky was an Oklahoma blue, bright and clear and warning of a hot summer ahead. Mama was inside, the front door open so she could come running when I fell, cleaning the baseboards with a toothbrush. In a few years I would be old enough to do this for her, and she would take advantage of that. But for now I swung around like a monkey on the redbud on a perfect spring day.
I guess Mama got a phone call. I guess it was quick, not so painless. She came outside and told me to get my ass down. Then she told me my daddy was dead.
I only ever saw him a few times a month, spent the night sometimes on weekends. He had a motorcycle and he would show me how to rev the engine. I would squeal and cover my ears and he would smear grease all over my button nose. He told me I had his eyes.
Mama sat me down on the porch steps and put her arm around me. Her voice didn’t shake. She didn’t tremble, she wasn’t stiff. She was just quiet. She said it’s going to be okay, Baby Mae, and I believed her. The next week we went to his funeral, and I guess I cried. I don’t really remember.
Later, I learned that he got cut off taking an illegal left turn on Cherry Street. He never let go of the motorcycle. When he collided with the electricity pole, they both wrapped around it like putty. The electricity pole is still there, sturdy as ever. Sometimes, when I’m feeling reckless, I’ll circle the block and make that left turn as many times as possible. Just to see.
*
When I acted on the gendered impulse and shaved my head at seventeen, the rift between us grew so wide that I could no longer cross it. She looked at me and saw a stranger. I looked at her and saw my mother. She spent all day at the kitchen table, the breeze easing in through the open windows, blowing the scent of her anger throughout the old house. I spent all day out at the skate park with my friends getting just as high as my mother back home, or at the river.
*
Cottonmouths look like chipmunks with their cheeks full of fall. Or me, after the dentist drilled into my jaw and handed me bloody molars wrapped in gauze. They swim in calm waters, or sun themselves on the river rock. When you spot one, and it spots you, it’s like guns drawn, the sun hanging hot in the sky. The cottonmouth opens his mouth wide and hisses, fangs dripping, body tight and coiled like a muscle, but all you can think is how sweet he looks with his chubby little cheeks, his big, big yawn.
When the car pulled into the driveway I pretended not to notice. When Mama slammed the back door and threw the keys against the wall I pretended not to hear. When she told me to get my ass down to the basement and kick the water heater I rolled out of bed and kicked it. Without a word I heaved the tent into the back of my truck and grabbed the cooler from the yard. I waited until Angel and I were miles down the turnpike before I texted my mother gone fishin and lost service. So maybe I am running away.
Cottonmouths are most definitely venomous. Like rattlesnakes but without the warning. Like my mother, with her forked tongue and snakeskin eyes. It’s all way too obvious, the metaphor I’m trying to make. I bury my feet in river rock and watch the waterbugs skim the low current. It’s too dry for crawdads. The turtles are probably baking in their shells. Angel is in a chair under the shade, reading, drenched in sweat. We should go home, I tell her.
*
Summers, the two of us crammed into the little room off the kitchen. Bamboo curtains hang in the windows, little pinpricks of fuzzy light pushing through the slats. I lay on the carpet and trace the lines of light as they light up the tiny hairs on my arms. I roll over and watch my mother’s foot press down against the pedal, the room rattling as the sewing machine shakes the old blue house. Years later, when college brochures begin arriving in the mail, my mother will tell me that she’d given up her dream to study costume design in New York when she met my father. But in that little room off the kitchen, eye level with the lotus tattoos on her feet as they push the pedal down, I don’t know all that. All I know is how to wait. I wait for her to sew the rips in my school uniforms. I wait for her to sew patches on my backpack. I wait for her to speak, to break the dusty silence of the early afternoon.
Jerakah Greene is a fiction writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Their work can be found in Crab Fat Magazine, Impossible Archetype, the Lab Review, the F(r)iction Log, and Hair Trigger. Jerakah was a Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee in 2019, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in 2021. In 2023, they were shortlisted for the Granum Prize. Currently, they are pursuing their MFA in fiction at The New School, where they are the Fiction Editor of LIT.