In the morning you invent me. Under the eaves in the attic, as the light throws itself sideways through the grimy window, you make me with your knives and your careful screwdriver. The bare planks of the floor are littered with tiny curls of what I was before.

"Here you are," you whisper into my newly carved ears. "Here you are."

Your fingers are long and quick-moving, the nails bitten to skin. When the knife slips and nicks your thumb, you press the bead of blood into the grains of me, a small gift. I am an infant in these hands, and I am grown. The first thing I see when you give me my eyes is the yellow shout of day out the attic window. There is the neighbor's roof, the polygon of new sky above it, a net of spring branches across both.

"This is your life," you murmur, taking the hands you made in the hands that made them.
    
We go down into wide rooms, bright with morning against the blue walls. Your house is filled with floral print and jars of fruit preserves. You made the cabinets and the chairs and all the little tables. You made the mantle and a dozen wooden spoons. We pause just a moment at the front door. Then you lead me out into the sun, the miracle of grass.
    
"Look at the colors," you tell me. And I look, and look.

Sionnain Buckley is from Long Island. She has worked as a muralist, a farmhand, a personal chef, and a facilitator for a queer book club for LGBTQ+ teenagers. She has fiction in New South and others.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Don Shall.

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