Nonfiction by Tyler Mills

Sunday Scaries

Today, instead of doing laundry, I strapped the child close to my cage of bones, stood under the shared trees no individual owns, the one with the hawk that hunts the rats, the one with the ladybug larvae I once lifted on a fingertip with the first child as though in another kingdom, and with you, I touch the paper peeling off the bark, smoked loose, this fire and that, the burning comes and goes, and sleepily I say, touch the tree, a less energetic caretaker than the first time, like a ghost haunting the memory, after the orange sky, heat and drought, dust and punching rain that patterned the path with limbs. I observe neighbors, grumpy or happy, it’s hard to tell, and study the movement of individual people into shapes gathering together in the meadow

behind the baseball diamond’s dirt, blue-jay jerseys & white pants & traffic cones delineating sides: there was a game, there is a game, there will always be a game. I feel forewarned. The elms, with resting roots, fenced off, the last crowns of leaves to turn, soon browning, dangle now with green garments like scarves a friend might wear to a retirement party. Last night, I dreamed I was in another bed and when I woke I thought I could see the open windows of the other room, the dream, facing a forest that was and wasn’t real.

A group of kids converge around an ice cream truck and swear as though they are practicing a new language, buying blood-red popsicles and cussing at the coins and cash they hand over, at the elms that have seen all this before. What did I find today other than something to give away, a gold cloth bag, a sheet of fake tattoos—hearts and barbed wire—a book with my own words inside, and hung the iridescent pink gift bag the color of the insides of an oyster loosely on the fence outside my window. Someone would swallow it all, quietly, as I had found these gifts. Now a dog slips the leash, burgundy, long but not long enough, reminding me of how it feels when no one else remembers the end of the party but you. I peel a mango for you, slip the green jacket off the crescent, thinking about the time I almost did I line of coke off a mirror in the bathroom in a basement in a city far away from here, how I was such a mess someone actually noticed and shepherded me away, her arm in a paisley sleeve, her hair smudged with cigarette smoke, untethering me

from my curiosity. We kissed, I think. Some other Sundays, I would keep myself needlessly busy, inventing questions to ask in the margins of papers as though mucking my own toes into the depths of thought, but really I was cold, hungry, and without meaning. Now I’ve made daughters who do not want to close their eyes on the world. Recently, I learned Kentucky Derby horses race only for three years. Then they breed.

Awake, kicking. I don’t want to think about that metaphor. I am not a horse. I am a she and also feel like a they. I want to expand on the feeling of the wind, here, hair flung back by the blast of it, hands of it pushing the wings of the shoulders back. But I don’t want to. When you don’t win, the afternoon carries on. There is a silver helium balloon caught in the arms of the tree where the ladybug larvae gather and hang their little sacs. I’ll look back on this afternoon, maybe, with better context. Or forget all of it. Bicycles don’t stop to let us cross at the light: “the woman with the child.” As though in the Tour de France, the neon-shorted men blare by, speeding up when my white sneaker with the laces loosening steps off the curb. I tilt back. I want to collect the sound of the clicking spokes. I watch the flashing metal gears, the riders intent on the future, which they believe to be theirs, the loop claimed without me in it, cut free like that balloon in the branches. Why would I let myself be written out of this? No. Tomorrow is Monday. Today is Sunday. I cut through

the path, empty for a moment, and let the emptiness wrap around my shoulders, my two-headed self, but two individual brains, the infant’s eyes wide open.

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Tyler Mills was born in Chicago and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024). Her other books include the chapbook City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and Low Budget Movie (co-authored with Kendra DeColo, Diode Editions 2021). She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute.