Photo by Chase Eggenberger on Unsplash
When the summer girl sang to them, everything slowed: the browsing, the chewing, the four-chambered bellies filling, the kids’ frolic, the nannies’ milk.
When the summer girl sang Tin Angel and The Boxer and Piece of My Heart, they forgot the fence that held them, her voice an open gate, a sweet prod, a spur to nuzzle and rub and point their ears from love.
Before the summer girl sang, they hadn’t known they had souls, hadn’t known they could be serious.
When summer ended and the girl was gone, they waited and listened, listened and waited, agitated, restless, but they could not play, dreaming only of wandering, wandering farther than they’d dreamed of before, beyond the neighbor’s pond, the garbage pit, the brownfields, pawing at the dusty earth, trying to sing like she had, but only corrupting the songs with their tongue-thick bleats and shrieks.
When one day, a buckling nuzzled the fence where the girl had always leaned as she sang, he felt it there, her voice, a vibration in the thick wire, faint but resonant, and he called out to the others to claim a square of fence and bite down on it, so that every one of them could have a piece of the girl’s singing, enough for the lice to drop from their coats and the lesions from their hooves, for them all to pull and wrestle and wrestle and pull until they tore holes, one so large that a pair of kids fit through and wandered as far as the highway, never coming back, another hole so small a wether poked his head through and was strangled, food for the coyotes, holes that brought men with smaller and stronger squares of steel, high strings of wire for shocking, men whose rough voices had no music in them.
When the new fence was done, they lay in the dirt, no longer hungry, cursing the girl and her songs, cursing her for closing the gate, for reminding them they’d always be captive, always be beasts.
Eileen Tomarchio works as a librarian in a small NJ town. Her most recent writing appears in Hunger Mountain, Variant Lit, and Reckon Review. You can find her at eileentomarchio.webnode.page on Bluesky @eileentomarchio and Instagram @gondaline26.
