I Wanted to Make a Home Like an Animal
in the dirt just under the leaves on the forest floor. Or inside the papery dry trunk of a tree with a hole only big enough for my body—chipmunk, field mouse, wild rabbit, brown owl—and a knotted overhang of bark to keep the rain out. I had seen in the pages of a children’s book, or in one of my father’s Field Guides, a domed house built along the length of a blade of grass, light enough to balance like a globe upon its stem, yet strong enough to hold the feathery-gray clawed occupant who could poke from the center hole and drink the dew. Inside: well-appointed, neat—like my dollhouse, but much smaller—with a smooth table planed from bark and chairs with wheat-caned seats, hung with dried bits of things to eat. Useful objects made from acorn tops, and a strawberry-jam shade of velvet plumped over a pincushion at the foot of a cross-stitched reading chair. In the morning: a bird’s beak knocking on a nearby tree, last drips of precipitation landing dull but satisfied on the soaked tops of leaves. Now at night, I pass the intermittent lit-up windows of apartment buildings, peer in to see a lampshade or the top corner of a painting—soft dark color of someone else’s walls—wish again for that house in my mind, knowing all this time I was never small enough to go home.
published in Semicolon Literary Journal, Issue 4: Fall 2020