From Kissing William Davis After Eating Grandpa: The Unbelievable and Totally True Diary of Margaret Fairchild’s Journey as Part of the Donner Party | Leigh Chadwick

December 23, 1846

Last night I dreamt of leftover legs—sharp edges of bone discarded and forgotten, left to be swallowed by the earth instead of being dropped into a black cauldron and boiled into gelatinous broth. I was still dreaming when I stepped through a cloud that lost its will to keep looking down. After pushing through the cloud, I found myself in Grandpa’s lean-to. There was thunder in his lungs. His coughing made the walls shake. Dad was standing in front of Grandpa. He held a bucket with both hands. “Now,” he said, as he placed the bucket under Grandpa’s chin. Grandpa nodded and opened his mouth. His tongue fell off as he began to cough up field mice. Dad caught the field mice with the bucket as they climbed through Grandpa’s lungs and leapt out of his mouth. Dad carried the bucket outside and buried the mice in the snow. Then, I was in our cabin, crouched on all fours, my hands digging a hole in the dirt floor. The ground was hard, frozen. One-by-one my fingernails began to rip off as I clawed at the ground. I wanted to dig a hole as deep as the length of Liz. My hands, soft and raw, bled geyser as more and more pieces of them fell off. I was searching for something, anything, but the deeper I dug all I found was an empty graveyard. There was nothing left to bury—our insides, our outsides, everything we have ever known or loved or touched was gone. We had become nothing but bottomless pits. I heard a sound and looked up. Mom was sitting on the edge of her bed. Her hands were gone. They were replaced with Mincey’s paws. Mom smiled. “Don’t tell your sister,” she said. She began to lick her paws. Someone, somewhere, was laughing. The blood dripping from my hands began to fill the hole I just dug. I picked up my fingernails off the dirt floor and walked outside. I opened my mouth and began swallowing pinecones, acorns, pieces of bark scraped off the tree line. My stomach bloated with soil. My nose was running. I felt the need to vomit, to purge everything I had become. Snot dripped into my mouth. It tasted like pea soup. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It was as white as a femur. In the distance, a man was stretched out on the ground, floating on a pile of snow. His body was ripped open. His insides were now his outsides, and his outsides were gone. A woman knelt over him. She was shaped like a prayer. 

XOXO,

M.F.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the poetry collection Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Adrienne Marie Barrios. Her poetry has appeared in Salamander, Passages Identity Theory, The Indianapolis Review, Pithead Chapel, and Hobart, among others. She is the executive editor of Redacted Books and is also a regular contributor at Olney Magazine, where she conducts the "Mediocre Conversations" interview series. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.