UPIKE English Major Halee Adkins

Her feet are bloody and torn up by the time she reaches the top. She’d left with nothing, not her jacket, not her phone, not even her shoes.

She had always wanted to come back here, you could see the whole county, maybe even the whole world in the daylight. Now, in the dead of night with not even a star to light her way, all she can see is her own breath and the tiny pinpricks of lights way down in the valley. All the houses, and all the families in them going about their nightly routine and not one of them knows she’s up here watching them. None of them hear it when she sinks to her knees in the dead leaves and mud and screams as loud as she can, beats her fists until they ache on the frozen ground. She screams so hard she tastes blood but keeps going until her voice trails off on a wheeze, nothing left in her.

She pulls herself up slowly, getting closer to the edge than is smart and flops down, feet dangling.

“What did I do wrong?” She asks the air, shivering now that the adrenaline is wearing thin.

“What could I have done? Was I supposed to just live like that? To suffer?” She hangs her head, defeated. “I just wanted to live. I just wanted to be myself. What’s wrong with that?”

She stands, peering over the edge of the cliff and burying her fingers in her shorn hair. It had been getting so long, thick and curly and she’d been so proud of it.

Her hair had been the final straw that had broken the camel’s back, had led her up a mountain in the pitch-black, bitter cold of late November with nothing on but pajama pants and a thin t shirt. It had been what finally broke her, what had made her realize they were never going to accept her, never going to let her be what she wanted to be.

She could still feel it, the arms holding her down.

Mommy had held tight, not letting her move an inch as daddy got closer with those rusty kitchen scissors held over his head like a mighty sword. She had whispered in her ear to just let him do it, “just get it over with baby, let him do this and I’ll let you loose. It’ll feel better to have all that off your head won’t it? I know you burnt up this summer. Let him fix you baby, and it’ll all be over with.”

She’d nearly given up right then. But when she caught sight of all those blonde curls falling around her in clumps, she lost it.

There’s still blood under her fingernails from where she’d scratched mommy’s arms, hair sticking to the blood around her mouth from where she’d latched her teeth onto daddy’s hand and tore into it like a bulldog. She had fought back; they’d never be able to take that from her.

“I was stronger than them,” she tells the mountain. “They didn’t expect me to fight them on it, that’s the only way I got away from them. I don’t know where I found that fight, but I used every bit of it. I scratched and clawed and I think I socked daddy a good one in the jaw,” she giggles. “I’ve wanted to do that for years, and I can’t even remember how good it felt!”

She couldn’t remember much between her hair falling away and climbing the mountain, but she knows she won, because here she stands, alive and mostly well. She imagines it was loud, and the neighbors probably came over to see what was going on.

They probably said it was a misunderstanding, a spat that got loud. They couldn’t lose their reputation as the good, God-fearing family that they were. What would they be without their golden reputation? Oh, the stories she could tell on them. That holler would never be the same if she told all that went on in that house; all the fighting, the bloodshed, the sleepless nights too afraid to close her eyes because she was wrong and they hated her for it.

“I couldn’t take it no more. How could I?”

“Like a man,” the bush tells her. “You were supposed to take it like a man. Because that’s what you are. You can change your hair and wear different clothes, but you can’t change your skin or your bones. You will always be a man.”

She laughs.

“No I won’t,” she promises. “I may have been born Michael Ray Whitaker. But I will die Maci Renee Whitaker. I’ll die as myself and there ain’t one thing any of them can do about it now.”

She throws a rock over the cliffs edge, listens for it to hit the ground; it takes a long time, the thud far off and muted.

“Ya know,” she tells the pine needles and twigs digging into her feet. “I could’ve had a real good life, if i was born someplace else. Imagine me in like, Seattle, or San Francisco!” She laughs, but it trails off into a sob. “I could’ve got that surgery. I could have had a life. A real one. I might have had a job in a coffee shop, or a bookstore. I coulda sold books to people just like me! I could’ve met so many different kinds of people. Imagine me, in some big city surrounded by all them people that the news says are bad for some reason or another, me right in the middle of them. I would’ve fit right in. I could’ve met some guy and we could have had a little house, with a porch and a garden. We could’ve grown old and gray together, like mammy and papaw.”

She chokes up, unable to speak past the lump in her throat that develops when she thinks of them.

Mammy and papaw had died 5 years ago, when she was only 13. Mammy had always been a quiet, frail woman, but papaw doted on her until her last breath, then followed her 8 months later. Papaw had loved her his whole life, and promised his granddaughter he would love her just as long.

He’d been her best friend throughout her childhood, taking her out of that silent, hostile house and bringing her to his land to explore. They went hiking, went hunting, and when she was no longer interested in playing rough with the dogs and perusing the boys section of the toy store, papaw hadn’t said one word.

“Whatever makes you happy, baby.” He’d stopped calling her Mikey when he saw how it made her flinch, baby from then on. “Don’t matter what it is. If it makes you happy, you do it.”

“This would’ve made me happy, papaw.” She tells him, sees his tired old hands and green eyes in the tree stump just to her right, rotted and half-eaten by termites. “I would’ve been so happy as Maci. Maci wouldn’t have been afraid of nearly as much as Michael was. Michael was afraid of everything!”

And she had been as a child: afraid of the dark, of the sounds in the hills at night, the neighbor’s dog and the boys down the road. Everything made her flinch, and she thinks now that she was preparing herself, getting herself used to flinching because her body knew how much she would do it. She would flinch at church when the men shook her hand a little too hard, called her a handsome young man. She would flinch when she looked in the mirror and saw her jaw rounding out, body getting rid of baby fat that she could pretend was curves, the sharp edges making her sick. She would flinch when daddy took those shears to her hair.

She learned to flinch, but she’s not going to anymore.

“Raise your fists all you want, you son of a bitch!” She tells the bush that watches her with father’s eyes. “I ain’t gonna flinch for you no more! Maci don’t flinch.”

She looked down the drop again, broken trees sticking up like sharp teeth towards her.

“Maci won’t flinch.”

She wonders if it will feel like flying, before those teeth tear into her. She thinks she’ll open her arms like a bird spreading its wings, just in case the wind catches her and carries her straight out of here, all the way out of these hills that she loved so dearly, that feel like a prison now.

She knows it won’t happen, but she hopes to God she flies.

“You think anybody’ll find me?” She asks the moon, just starting to peek through the breaking clouds. It no longer looks like snow, the night clearing up to be beautiful. “How many people have fell off this ledge and never been found? How many bodies am I gonna land on?”

The moon doesn’t answer, but the stars revealing themselves do. They’re innumerable, as far as the eye can see, and she knows.

“I’d say there’s hundreds. Thousands.” She doesn’t mean just in these hills, she means everywhere. How many bodies of kids have never been found? How many girls like her, ones born wrong have disappeared? Never mentioned unless in passing, “what ever happened to so-and-so?” How many kids were hurt so bad by their families that they went into the woods to curl up and die like a sick dog? The stars tell her, “you can’t count that high”

She imagines geologists coming across her bones one day.

“Something wrong with these bones.” They’d say. “Wasn’t made right or something.”

“I was made just right.” She tells them now, eons from when they’ll actually be here. “I was made perfect, they just wouldn’t let me show it. Look here, “she points at her hips, wider than her father’s, round like her mothers. “See that? And this!” She gestures excitedly at her hands, long and thin. “that’s girl hands if I’ve ever seen ‘em. But they couldn’t stand it. They made me hide it, and they cut my hair.”

Oh, her hair, she can’t think about it without crying. That hair made her feel alive.

“They made me hide it, but i ain’t hiding no more. I’ll fly right over top of them, show them what Maci can do.”

Maci can do things Michael never dreamed about. A sound behind her makes her turn, and in the shadows of the trees there stands little Michael in his too-big church clothes and sad eyes.

“Hey you,” she greets him, kneeling to his height. She remembers being so tiny that everyone towered over her, always looking down on that quiet, effeminate boy. “You see? We get to be right, even for just a few hours, I made us right. “

The little boy just blinks at her, unbelieving that anything will ever improve.

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him it doesn’t, not really.

“You know,” she tells the stars. “These mountains kept me safe when I was little, and everything was so big. I felt like they’d protect me from anything. I used to imagine them standing tall and fighting off monsters that wanted to get down to the holler and eat us.”

She looks back up at all those unnamed children. “I think them monsters got in anyway, ate us all right up.”

She used to think she was stronger than those monsters, but here she stands, dangling herself over a cliff’s edge and trying to get the gumption to step off of it, not an ounce of fight left in her.

But shes still standing, with her pink-painted toes digging into the pine needles under her feet; every time she moves, more pebbles fall off the ledge and take a long time to hit the ground.

“All I wanted was to be true to myself. Isn’t that what they teach us? ‘To thine own self be true’. Does that not apply to me? The only truths I’ll ever know is that I’m a girl, and everyone hates me for it,” she hangs her head, goes to grab at her hair but it’s gone now. With nothing else to do with her hands, she kneels and bows her head.

All the fight and anger has fled her, hightailed it back down the mountain to the trail that will lead it out of this place, and she bids it farewell; resignation takes its place, and she looks back at the ghosts that have joined her.

Daddy and his cruel eyes in the bush, watching her and daring her to ever come back.

Papaw and his big strong shoulders in the tree stump, smiling and telling her to “keep your chin up baby, don’t never let them knock you down.”

Little Michael with his skinned knees, looking up at her with big pleading eyes, begging her to tell him it gets better, that life will work out for them one day.

The mountain, her favorite place and happiest memory, she hopes it welcomes her with open arms, uses her body to grow new life, a tree or a bunch of sunflowers—her favorite, just for her.

“Why didn’t you love me?” She asks the mountain, looking down the ravine into the black abyss of the drop. “You were supposed to protect me, weren’t you? I loved you my whole life, wanted to start a family and live here until I was old and decrepit. But there ain’t no place for me here is there? Mountain’s too full of God-fearing rednecks who’d sooner spit on their neighbor than love them as thyself! They take up all the space and hate so loudly that it echoes in me even now. Where’s the space for me? Where’s the space for the different ones? Is the only place I was destined to end up at the bottom of this horrible rock? How is that fair? How is that love? I’m so tired.”

For a split second, she wants to turn around and go home, like nothing ever happened. But it was her hair, the only thing she could do to make herself feel like she fit inside her skin, and they stole it. She grew that herself, nurtured it and made sure it was always silky and healthy, the only part of her that she could keep alive. If it hadn’t been her hair, the only physical tie she has to Maci Renee, she would have rolled over and let them win.

But the strong-willed girl that’s always lived in her will not let her turn around, refuses to let her feet move toward the safety of the trail. This is her parents’ penance, this is the only retribution she can give them; let the whole town ask what happened to their only child, let them all wonder what they did to run her off.

“I hope it haunts you,” she sneers down at the dots of light in the valley. “I hope you can’t sleep at night without seeing my face. I hope you wake up choking on that hair you stole from me, and I hope it hurts you.”

She’s never wished things like this on other people, had learned never to do such a thing in church. “Intention can lead to fruition. Be careful what you wish for child because you just might get it.”

But now, she’s tired and sore but still so, so angry deep down, and she wishes her parents a miserable existence from this moment on.

“I hope you hunt for me but never find a clue. I hope one day you’re old with no one around you that loves you. I hope you remember the exact date of the night you killed me.”

Laying on the ground beside her is a bird’s nest, long abandoned in the cold months. She thinks about those baby birds that flew far, far away from that nest one day and never looked back, and how they must have felt so free as their feet left the ledge.

She wonders if any of them dropped, left behind by the flock, unable to get their wings underneath them, and if they ever managed it or if they had to live their life on the ground, walking around and feeling wrong because they weren’t made for that.

“Will you catch me if I drop?” She asks the mountain and the stump and the twigs under her feet. “If my wings don’t open up, will you catch me?”

No one answers. She’s alone up here. The only one in the whole universe, not soul but hers will ever know what truly happened up here.

She takes a step too close. Rocks and dirt slide out from under her, her left foot dangling over open air. She feels the wind cascade over her, chilling her bones but smelling brand new. She feels something at her back unfolding, something like wings opening up and shaking their feathers into place.

Her right foot follows her left, and Maci soars.

Years later, in a field at the bottom of a mountain a big bunch of tall yellow sunflowers grow. No one knows who planted them, or why they grow at all, in a place with no other flowers for miles and miles, but everyone that passes them thinks the same thing:

They look beautiful there, like blonde hair swaying in the breeze.