• Your neighbor’s daughter Sarah, a girl you remember riding passenger side in boyfriends’ black cars, fingertips wind-dragging out the open window, how they would curl and twist when she saw you and your daughter, and you didn’t know for sure, but every time you waved back
• The small brown bugs that you find dotting your bathroom sink every morning for three weeks, your daughter seeing them first, poor little bugs, crying the way children do, and now wipe them away first thing in wads of toilet paper, the freckle of their small bodies in your hand
• The wild rabbit in the street that you and your daughter saw from the car window, poor little bunny, she said, and poor little bunny you agreed, and by evening, it was torn piece of fur, road stain, gone with the first rain
• The back-yard house sparrow, talon-clutched by hunting hawk
• Your car, and you drove your father’s old pickup for three days, rumbling with disrepair, your daughter looking out the window, singing over and over again here we go round the mulberry bush
• A distant cousin of your mother’s, and your mother called and said remember and remember, and you said, yes, yes, though it was mostly a lie
• A character on a television show that you had liked, and your daughter asked mama, why are you crying, and you couldn’t really explain because they weren’t real, it wasn’t even real
• The praying mantis from summer that you’d found perched on the fence between houses, body leaf-curled on the back step that you swept away with a broom, that you couldn’t touch bare
• The power on a cloud-heavy night, and you and your daughter looked out into the dark together and it was black, black, all black, except at your neighbor’s house, where they had strung blue battery-operated lights along the fence, for Sarah, they said, and they were there and they were shining, and you and your daughter, that night, sat at the window and watched, watched, watched.

About Cathy Ulrich

Cathy Ulrich is a writer from Montana. Her work has been published in various journals, including Wigleaf, Puerto del Sol and CutBank.

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