Backwards Chronology

She was yelling from the top of a cliff. Her voice echoed back to her as strange. She was yelling from her daughter’s bedroom. Everywhere she stepped was an earring or a half-used bottle of nail polish. Underneath a pile of discarded clothes, a CD player rapped. Her voice echoed back to her as strange.

Earlier (think years, think another life) she’d stood in that L-shaped bedroom on 5^th and Park, the shadow of his arm raised, her vocal chords as yet untrained. (Practice the letters of your own name, then raise the volume.)

She listened back further to parents unwilling to shout, their disagreements always between lines, subtle, silent, her own young face looking up into the argument, confused and unable to help. There was no swearing, no hitting. When she misspoke (never with voice raised), she was reprimanded immediately, even before the end of the sentence. When she opened her mouth, no understanding came out, not even a squeak of sentience.

Then

In such silence, she wrote a life; tried on the words that fit, erased the others. She married a man who read. When he yelled, he used entire sentences and waited for her to answer.

Together, they learned to climb mountains. Rock. Dirt. Fear. Breath. Rock. Sometimes, up high, all she heard was the past. Most often, not. It was too much effort remembering what was. Miles up, who could tell the difference between laughter and lies? It was better to breathe in the new.

After a decade, she began to recognize her own voice, even when whispering from the edge of a cliff.

Before Then

“This is how you do it,” she read in the kit she ordered over ebay. “Open your lungs and lips. Let the past pour out.” But in the midst of those bruises on 5^th and Park, she had been too scared to practice. Something got caught behind her teeth. She thinks it was her soul.

She tried to remember how others did it, but all she could picture were TV dramas with the volume turned low. The make-believe characters were always flailing their arms, trying to untangle anger. Underneath the red of their faces, she wondered if they were having fun, if pride were rising up in their throats.

When she tried to tell this to her mother, one day in June long-distance over the phone, another story came out. It was a voice on the other end she didn’t recognize that claimed her mother’s name. Guilt was how it described the one time she had yelled, her words flung hot and fierce out the kitchen window at a neighbor girl bullying her daughter. “I was so ashamed of myself,” her mother’s distant voice exclaimed, then died down into a whisper.

“Ashamed to help me?” the now-grown daughter managed to ask before the phone clicked dead. It seemed too late to re-dial.

Now

“Listen to me,” her twelve-year-old daughter yelled, “For once, would you just listen to me?”

She recognized her daughter’s voice as her own, but younger and stronger.

It rose up, a crescendo of pride, unafraid to fall. Atop that mountain of words was her girl. The past was far below, a mere murmur.

What could she do but applaud, listen for the echo of joy?

Bio: Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (WordTech Editions); Weeknights at the Cathedral (Yellowglen Prize); When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (Redgreene Press); six chapbooks, and over 350 poems, stories, and essays in such journals and anthologies as Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, American Literary Review, US Catholic, The Art Times, Arabesque: International Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, A Fine Frenzy: Poets on Shakespeare, Hurricane Blues. She is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press 2005) and author of two children’s books from Boyds Mills Press: A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry (2008) and The Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009).  Her short story collection, What She Was Saying, was one of three finalists for the Katherine Anne Porter Book Award, and a semifinalist for Leapfrog Press’s book competition, Eastern Washington University’s Spokane Fiction Book Award, and Louisiana University Press’s Yellow Shoe Book Award. The recipient of numerous awards, Marjorie lives with her husband and two children in Williamsport, PA. For more info and reviews, please seehttp://www.lhup.edu/mmaddoxh/biography.htm