I Am the Woman in the Canyon | M.C. Smith
My friend reads tarot in the shadow of the red rock formation in Ten Sleep, WY, next to our tent circle set up in an empty field.
In Evan’s borrowed straw brim hat with the long feather, I feel both most myself and an imposter. I feel both crudely naked and concealed in costume, unsure of what and where and who I am, of what I am supposed to be.
The rock formations are marked with signs of their geologic time periods. One of them reads, “Upper Mississippian.” This does not help my sense of disassociation, of displacement.
When I was a baby, I cried when I wasn’t held properly. My mother couldn’t do it - only the nurse could.
Perhaps this was a sign.
There is one singer Evan befriends with a bummed American Spirit. The singer’s jeans pool around his ankles. His mouth kicks up on its right side in a lazy grin. He wears a black wide brimmed hat with a long feather from a bird I do not know. We do not learn how old he is, but we think he must be young: “He doesn’t have the heaviness behind his eyes yet.”
When he sings his voice is as smoky and ragged as the haze from the wildfires settling in the canyon. His timbre shakes my bones and causes the meat of my heart to quiver.
My mother says she misses hearing me sing, misses the acrostic poems about Catholicism I used to write as a child.
“You write about ugly things now,” she says.
Disassociation. Displacement.
All weekend I pull whiskey from the bottle, drown myself in craft beer until I can smell it in my blood when I slice the tip of my finger on a piece of broken glass. I am alive again, flitting from person to person like a baby bird who has just learned how its wings work.
I walk with Evan barefoot to the car to get more beer. I let him slip his fingers inside me and tell him I love him. He says it back. We are already sweaty, so no one suspects when we come back flushed and salty and dripping.
Minutes or seconds or hours later, I have lost sight of Evan. He is supposed to be in a meeting, but apparently, they can’t find him either. I ask a lady with a clipboard if she has seen him and she says “Oh, are you the woman?”
Are you the woman? It makes me laugh in a way that burns in my chest. Are you the woman? Are you the person who has cast a spell on him? Are you the woman? Are you the person who has broken marriages, who has given her body away like bread to the hungry, who can detach herself from her spine and brain and flesh and still fake the moan of ecstasy? Are you the woman? Are you the person who seeks pleasure, who seeks to be destroyed?
I have considered the question. And the answer is I Am.
MC. Smith Originally from Mississippi, M.C. Smith now lives in the mountains & is a Creative Nonfiction candidate in the University of Wyoming's MFA program. Her nonfiction has been published in The Bitter Southerner and her poetry in both Flyway Journal of Writing & Environment and Witch Craft Magazine. Smith currently lives in Laramie, WY with her three-legged cat, Barry Hannah. She spends her limited free-time thrifting vintage dishware and learning how to be an 'outdoors person.’