The sun sinks low as I follow my brother up the deer path from the river. We slash through reed and cattail taller than our heads and climb. Sagebrush explodes with little brown birds at the top and we don’t stop, we don’t say anything when we see the sheriff’s car crawling slow on the dirt road below. In the dusk atop the ridge my brother is now a sliver, watching the car, then I break trail and we barrel down, kicking up chert and stone. At the base of the ridge, land flattens and greens. There is tall grass ahead, clean and fresh and loaded with seedheads, and in the center of the field are the trailers.

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Thirty-five white rectangles, each with its own stoop and naked window. Built on fixed steel chassis, they sag in white vinyl with metal roofs. As we pass into the park the neighbors seem not to see us—the old woman who grows roses and talks too much, the army vet who did five tours in Iraq and doesn’t talk at all, and the old man in guayabera and hat of battered straw. It is only the Sleepless Man who watches us, smoking and wide-awake, his twelve-gauge shotgun leaning beside him on the stoop and his eyes glittering like bottle glass.

By the time the cruiser parks in front of 565 we’ve reached the deep shade of the cottonwood tree, and Evan strips off his shirt and sneakers and begins to climb, even as the sheriff steps out of the car and our mama stands on the stoop to meet him.

I say a warning:

Evan.

The wind lifts, and leaves go musical above.

Evan.

He climbs. Straight up the tree. Leaf-shadow strikes my twin’s bare chest and back and legs. Evan is a good climber. Above, the branches hold armfuls of sky and the blades of my brother’s shoulders shine like maybe they are wings. I stay where I am, listening to the Tick  tick  tick of the sheriff’s engine as he adheres the eviction notice to the door.

Mama touches the old scar, the one from where we were birthed. Everything she loves in this world has been cut from her and this place will be no different.

She says, You two. Come on. We got to go to town.

*

The bus stop is at the end of the dirt road. It is two green benches separated by a wall of plastic. On either side of the plastic, people wait. Across the road a grove of aspen stand white and tremble-hot in the sun. Aspen are all connected, so they are talking to each other under the ground where no one can see.

I pretend that Evan and I can do this too. I tell him: I hate waiting.

He tells me back: No choice.

Fuckit. Sometimes I swear in my head. For a while I did it out loud but Mama said, Keep it classy, Virginia. Now I keep it classy on the outside but on the inside I say what I want. I hate waiting. Waiting is what poor people do—for buses in lines at school at everywhere.

Evan aspen-thinks at me: Elsewhere. And goes to the other side of the plastic. He’s always doing that—taking himself under or on top of something. Somewhere else so he can dream. Now he starts reading the words scratched into the plastic: Need to get high call Johnny 897-937-9288. Rhonda K sucks—

Evan, says Mama.

OK, I won’t say that word, Mama, but this one is nice: I did so love Jeni P, truly.

Did? I ask.

One of the girls with a cleaning bucket is eating a Jolly Rancher. I stare at her very hard and for a long time, until she laughs with her white teeth and rummages in her purse and tosses me a green apple.

Evan places his hand on the other side of the plastic, so I can see it—not Evan, but the small shadow of his hand, and I throw my own hand up to meet my brother’s. Thwap. And then we turn the slaps into a game, my brother throwing a hand up to make himself visible and me seeking it on the other side of the wall, back and forth, the game is about where the hand will fall, and how fast I can find and meet it, and we go faster and faster and find each other over and over again, the sounds of our hands thwap-thwap-thwap—I love you, I shout, I love you! and I mean everybody standing there, I mean I don’t want to leave.

A boy wearing very big headphones, the kind that say Don’t talk to me, moves them off one ear and says, Rad ink, man. He’s talking to Mama.

Here is the bus.

*

Mama took me with her to get the last tattoo—down blind alleys and right into the beat-drum heart of the city to an apartment building the color of a dirty cloud. Laundry dripped from fire escapes. I galloped up the stairs, which smelled of pee, and Mama caught up slow with her big belly.

The woman who answered the door was called Jacoby and wore a navy sweatshirt that hung to her knees. Her nose was pierced. She looked Mexican or Indian or both.

She looked at Mama and crossed her arms and said, Uh-uh. No way.

Please, said Mama.

Too pregnant.

It won’t hurt the baby.

The woman sighed. I don’t know, she said. What if you go into labor in my kitchen.

Mama laughed. Please.

She had Mama sit at her kitchen table and they talked. She drew what they talked about, making a picture of Mama’s words. And then she soaped up her hands until the whole kitchen smelled of Dove and laid out needles and ink on a clean white towel. She told me: Go on, sit in that other room and watch the TV.

I sat with the woman’s little girl, who had the same large jewel eyes as the mama. The little girl begged a sippy cup of milk.

Don’t spill on the couch, it’ll stink, said Jacoby.

The girl came back and spilled. We sat there in a big, warm, wet patch of milk. When Mama was done, she called to me. She was sitting at the table, and the woman held her hand.

All right?

Just dizzy, a little bit.

The four of us girls waited for Mama’s world to stop spinning.

All right, she said, and stood.

She was stripped down naked to her waist and stood with her back to the mirror, looking over her shoulder at the new one. I tucked myself to her side. The woman said something in Spanish about doors and daughters.

What did she say?

Every time a mother opens a door, her daughter is there.

There are four antelope twisting and flying up her hip, her side. The man at the bus stop can’t see them, because they are hidden under her T-shirt, but when I close my eyes, I do: they are black and white and amber and horned, flying there together.

I don’t know the baby’s name yet.

*

At social services we go down the ramp lined on either side with beige cinder block and down the hallway with the little see-through plastic bins hanging on the walls that hold fliers and food stamp information and birth control information and now we are in the actual line, which is all built of women and children and always has been. All of us wait for the three women in glass cubicles. They are the tired angels who will save us or not. Mama holds each of our faces.

Be good. Hold still. This is important.

Next, says a tinny voice through the microphone. What happens next is a woman in the very front looks all the long way back to my mama and says: Your turn.

No, it’s all right.

You hear me now, says the woman. Go on and get up here in the front of this line before you have that baby on the floor of this office.

My mama, she passes to the front. These women are queens, and I will grow up and be like them.

After it is done, we lead our brokenhearted mama up the stairs. She has to stop halfway up to lean against the railing because she is so pregnant.

Mama says, They can’t always help.

Up here, the world makes its normal world-noise. A car goes by. A person chats on the phone. Evan looks for a plane but there isn’t any. At least we’re not underground. Or waiting.

We walk over the bridge together.

I like to stand at the railing of the bridge, which has a sidewalk running down each side of the train tracks, and I like to watch the water crashing below. I like how fast water goes without trying. I like when the train passes, how it stains the air with coal smoke and fills it with clatter; I like a noise so big inside my chest. Also I like the teenagers cluttered here, who don’t wait for anything; they are ready to bridge-jump, smoking cigarettes and jacked up on energy drinks, half-naked, with their bodies warm and rounded out of their clothes, all skin and crackling heat. They touch each other. Against the railing. They touch with body and hand and open mouth. The river below is cold and clustered. A boy climbs the railing, and his body forms an exclamation point against the sky, like: Here! I! Am! before he balances on the balls of his feet to leap, the air doesn’t catch him, he snaps his body straight and when he slices water there isn’t even a splash.

There are long seconds where he is just gone.

Then his head bobs up downstream and the others cheer.

Watch, says Mama. See how he kicks his feet out in front? See how he doesn’t fight?

Then I see my brother’s face.

You listen to me, Evan Woods, says Mama. That water down there? It’s farther and colder and faster than it looks. That’s too high. You land wrong, it’s like concrete.

How do you know? Evan asks.

And Mama says, I know what it is, to fall.

*

Later that night, my brother asks: You sleeping?

No.

Well, what are you, then?

In between. I hate sleeping.

Why?

Makes you forget. Then you got to wake up in the morning and the bad has got to happen all over again.

V. Look. See how there is a crack in the ceiling of this trailer? My brother shows me, then, how if you follow the crack from the corner of the window to the edge of the trim, and all the way across into the next room and the next, you can see how the whole roof might crack open like an eggshell, let the night in.

He says, Imagine clouds over us.

I can’t imagine.

*

I wake to the stink of smoke. Standing on the bed, I look outside, find a black column.

Evan. Wake up. They’re burning them. The fields.

He opens his eyes and I see that thing in us matches the wind today. It is the white notice on the door it is the boxes it is the way our Mama is not out of bed. We let the screen door smack behind us.

Our hollering rockets us across the back field. We do not know the names of roads. Just land. The underneaths and on-tops, the places for climbing, for hiding. The sharp things that grow here: wild aloe, yucca, ocotillo claw and scratch our legs as we run. The ranchers are toy men, faraway in smoke.

I stand at the edge of the burning field and all inside me is crackling. Insects and mice dart at my feet, a squirming in the grass.

I’ll race you, I say.

So long’s you don’t mind losing.

I won’t lose.

We drag lines in the dirt with the toes of our sneakers. Allrightthengoalready!

Like flying.

Flying because you can’t see the ground for the smoke. We run parallel to flames, legs split over char. Eyelashcrinkling heat. Fiery tongues lick the rubber soles of sneakers and I think they are hungry, these flames with their snapping red mouths! But little fire wants to be big, doesn’t it? It is important to remember that big fire eats little fire no matter what. Swallowing smoke in poisonous gulps, we run, and the wind reaches up to meet us, the fire has tired of boundaries, the fire tires of being small, and the fire eats the field. Evan turns a corner ahead and his face is washed red like blood in a sink. All the life of the field startles and a flock of starlings

flush holding the shape of the flames. Then the ranchers turn on the irrigation.

I stand there in the soak. Holdstill, says my brother, looking at the rainbows water makes, but I won’t, can’t, I am thinking of the eviction notice, the days ahead, the baby rolling like a river inside Mama, I am thinking how we fight for a home when there isn’t one, and then my thoughts tear loose, I am spinning round, arms out, water flying off me, the field hissing and stinking.

__________________________________

From Crown © 2025 by Evanthia Bromiley. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.