Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Haunted Earth

2005; University of Iowa; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.17077/0021-065x.6014

2330-0361

Nic Pizzolatto,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

NIC PIZZOLATTO Haunted Earth My fingers slip under Tsuny's blouse and pick at the clasp on her bra.She sinks under me, down in tall cordgrass, and the stalks crackle beneath us as my hand maps her ribs, follows her smooth back to the dampness at the base of her spine.Outside this stand of chest-high grass is the open lawn where they say aliens landed two weeks ago.I'm trying to undress Tsuny in an autumn when our town, Big Lake, is buzzing with reports of demons and ufos.One group in a Buick said they were chased by flying lights on the high way.A guy at my school has an aunt who moved to Houma because she saw a dark, hairy man-thing staring at her from the backyard, two nights in a row while she was washing dishes.None ofthat matters, because it's all on the other side of the cord grass, not down in here.Our breath is hot and my hands keep shift ing, searching for an open pathway.She moves with me, blocking the waistline of her skirt.This is our conflict, and we repeat it with frustrated, fading spirit, like an argument we're tired of having.Before she spread the black blanket today, Tsuny stood beside me and we saw past the tall grass, to the other end of the rice field.Over there a circle got scorched into the ground of Leon Arceneaux's farm, where he says a spaceship landed.Everybody's seen that.But today, before I tangled my hand in Tsuny's heavy black hair, we both saw that Mr. Arceneaux had gotten a couple boys to help him spread a banner across his roof that reads welcome in tall, red letters.Mr. Arceneaux doesn't work since City Services shut down the oil refinery in Big Lake.I know that because he used to work with my pop.I figure with the banner and the spaceship he's trying to get interested in something, which is good, because if you don't stay busy in the prairie slums, time and the sun will make you crazy.I'm busy with Tsuny.I watch where our skins meet, my white arm against her rich brown.Her color mixes her mom's Vietnamese and her dad's black.She has plump lips from her father, a tiny nose and slivered eyes from her mom.Her skirt is from Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic school she goes to, and it bunches in my fist.The wool in my hand, its plaid pattern of navy and gray and H University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review www.