by Jona Whipple
She kneels at the edge of something, ragged dirt at the mouth of a hole you can’t see. Her arms encircle the bundle like this: One high around the shoulders, the other around the legs, palm hidden under the white bag. It is tied at the top, a crude knot like what I make with the handles of grocery store bags, a shredded tuft. She turns her face into the top of the bundle, where there is the shape of a head, a curve, the shroud pulling softly under her arms. Her lips move, she whispers into the primitive shell of the ear, she speaks softly through the cotton, her hands move, one rubbing softly at the shoulder, the other patting gently at the back of the legs. She rocks side to side, patting, whispering, her arms around this child in a hold like a figure eight, infinity, a hold recognized by mothers worldwide as the safest, the most secure.
My child does not let me hold her this way anymore. She says she needs space for her body, needs to move, she has too many things to do. Now that she has reached five years, nearly six, she rejects the security of my arms, regards with suspicion all attempts to wrap her up and keep her warm, reduces the blankets of her babyhood to knotted wraps for plastic dolls and small bears. She has reached the edge of independence, has forgotten that just last year I rocked her in a chair, I wrapped her in a blanket, I held her in a figure eight and whispered into her ear to calm her as the blue rock of a bruise formed on her forehead, an injury of play. She has forgotten that I was once her home, the ultimate and only comfort, she pretends not to know that I will always have that power.
There is a tight, crude knot in the top of the shroud, a layer of white sheet doubled down over a fist, like how I tie the top of a trash bag. The Palestinian woman kneels at the mouth of a hole I can’t see. I say hand me the remote, I say we need to stop watching the news when she’s around, I tilt my head toward where she sits building a small house of magnetic tiles and filling it with plastic animals. This is something I can control for only a little longer: what she sees and hears. I can switch to something loud with color, something with songs and dancing, the opposite of rocking and keening, ignorant of white. Here, we will be safe from ceilings felled by explosions, from dark lines drawn in conflicts between men we don’t know, men who don’t know us. Here, they will find other ways to take from us, but here, I can imagine toe holds, limitless strength in my arms, endless places to hide.
One of the woman’s arms is under, supporting the head and shoulders, and the other is over, locking the little white bundle into her arms. She rocks from side to side, gazing down into the shape of a small face under the shroud, stroking the white shoulder. We watch her last moments with her child, when she should be screaming, clawing at the ground, cursing the black smoke billowing around her, but she is silent, tearless, pressing her cheek into the white bag, whispering comfort, the only power they have left her with.
Jona Whipple is a writer, librarian, and archivist, in that order. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction Writing at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis. Her stories and essays have appeared in Heavy Feather, Catapult, Bluestem, and others. She lives in Missouri, dangerously close to where she was born.
Hawaii Pacific Review 