Landscape without Reiver
​
Put in Carlisle and Langholm and fill with solid
egg tempura. Leave out the dull spool of firth.
 
Put in lines drawn in the sand-fells. Leave out
bastle-houses built of logs and salt, safe-for-now
steads.
              Put in pointillist sheep and sprig of gorse,
leave out another country’s national flower.
 
Put in farm-labourers like in Bruegel’s famous
The Harvesters, leave out problem clans:
Armstrongs, and Laidlaws, and Scotts.
                                                                        Put in
vanishing lines, disappear through a peep-hole
to Scotland. Crop at the edges, and hang
in frame of makeshift gilt. Leave out to dry.
 
First published in ASH

The Pride of Murder
 
“Would you rather be starving but alive or eaten by the starving?” That was the first thing Mama said when I asked her if she ever killed anybody. I seldom saw her without a gun. In the mornings, her .45 always sat on her hip, glistening in the window’s sunlight as she scrambled my eggs. In the afternoons, she’d pick me up from school, her rifle with the chipped butt lying in the bed of the old Camino. At night, she slept with an A5 shotgun mounted above her head, just too high for me to reach. Some evenings Daddy would come home late and startle her. She’d sit up in bed, her hand on the hunting knife wedged between the mattress and box spring.
I sat at the kitchen table while she slapped jelly on a slab of burnt toast. The knife scraped at the ash as she spoke. “When you smell rot and charred flesh more than fresh air, everybody’s gotta answer that question.” She sat the plate in front of me and disappeared into the family room. When she returned, she held a water-damaged shoebox in her hands. White Polaroid edges poked out from underneath the warped top. The box Mama slid off the top and her haggard fingers flipped through the labeled photos. One photo’s edge dug under her cuticle and drew blood. I winced as red pooled the bottom of her nail, but she didn’t seem to notice it. Mama’s hands paused on a photo before sliding it across the table at me, and leaving a smattering of blood on the label. Across the bottom, scrawled in Mama’s painfully neat script was the name, Abigail. “This is me when I was your age,” she said with a haunted twinge twisting her tone.
I picked up the photograph. A twelve-year-old version of Mama stood before me, congealed in a time of disease and war. Her blond pigtails hung on either side of her head, frozen mid wave in a death-stained breeze. Her knuckles turned white as she squeezed a Zippo lighter. In history class, Mr. P. told us they had to burn the enemy to make sure they were really dead. Mama’s other hand strangled a rifle that was a head taller than her. Her left boot laid flat against her enemy’s face. I had heard the stories about the blinking corpses, how they pounced like wolves and took whole magazines to the chest. I had heard all the stories but never had I seen a Geek until then. Under Mama’s boot, its mouth gaped as sallow eyes watered like a yawn. A sanguine tear crawled out the corner of one of its shine-less eye. The eyes stared past me, bloodshot veins in a desperate tangle like interstates on a map. Abigail’s stare was just as dull and dead as the one beneath her foot, but her mouth curved with the pride of murder.