BIRTHMARKSHere are the opening paragraphs of Keegan's short story, "Birthmarks": My twin sister Tara and I were twelve years old the winter the Snoqualmie rose so high it floated our trailer. Dad must have seen it coming because he tied both ends of the trailer to the pine trees and threw car bumpers and boulders on the roof to weight it down. I didn't think it'd float anyway because of all the holes. Rats came in and out at will to nibble on bread crusts or scraps of bologna left out. One night when we came home from Leon's place there was a badger inside and Mom wouldn't go in till Dad had beat its head in with a tire iron. Tara said floods were supposed to wash away people's sins, something she'd learned at the Bible Camp Dad made us go to before we bought the trailer and moved to Carnation, Washington. "You're wrong," I told her. "It's punishment. God's pissing on us." "Then why's he doing it just on the people out Tolt Hill Road?" "Cause we're too stupid to live anywhere else." I remembered us wiping our breath off the bathroom window with toilet paper, rubbing so hard the paper squeaked, as we watched the water rise against the barbed wire strands on the fenceposts. Planks floated by and buckets and bushes, roots and all. The truck tire Dad had hung with baling wire from a bent over tree lassoed the corner of someone's porch steps and the river kept pushing until it finally uprooted the tree and then the steps and the tree floated on down until they bounced off the side of the Granger's barn and kept going, to the ocean I guessed. "This river doesn't go to the ocean," Tara said. "Everything goes to the ocean." "Not so." "Well, where does it go then?" She didn't have an answer, which was the way a lot of our discussions ended. I didn't have the answer either, but I'd learned from watching our dad that you didn't have to. We were supposed to be identical, except Tara had a purple birthmark on her neck that looked like a tongue. Mine was almost the same except it was on my butt. |
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