Daughter Tongue

Winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project in Nonfiction, selected by Benjamin Busch

On Guam, snakes hung from power lines. Hungry for birds, they stretched from grounded pole to live wire and died instantly. My mother was walking when she saw them, snakes on a wire, draped in loose coils, like they fell from the sky.

She used to imagine Guam crumbling in an unremarkable disintegration, a cloud of sand, diffusing at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Waves like hands, peeling the beach apart, splitting the island in two. The ocean a mouth, an esophagus. For some Americans, living in the Western Pacific is a suspension of disbelief, the uninterrupted dream of coconut palms and cerulean water as clear as glass. For my mother, it was the swell of peristalsis, the gravitational pull of an omniscient swallow, an unabridged nightmare. Even the island was shaped like a tongue. It careened in hunger. Guam was eating itself alive. My mother called it claustrophobia, which isn’t inaccurate if we’re talking about panic over the inescapable. I’ve heard a lot of stories about Guam and none of them offers a way out.

Perhaps this is why my mother told me stories of Guam in exchange for my silence, an implicit contract that whatever she told me in confidence would not be duplicated or questioned. Such has been the code of discretion between us. But surely a part of her knew that Guam was a harsh mirror, a pulsing river—when one looks closely, the story moves; it shatters. A part of me must have known this too because I’ve never told anyone what I’ve already said, what I’m about to say.

She lived on Guam for less than two years, long enough to send a few postcards back to Houston. To start a family. Long enough to establish a routine: get to the animal hospital by 8:00, and by 9:00 begin vaccinating and palpating and prodding at that favored vertebra—yes, there!—of the hapless pet dogs and cats of Guam’s denizens, my mother’s neighbors. Guam is only thirty miles long and twelve miles at its widest point. And the veterinary clinic was even smaller, the exam rooms cramped and muggy from nervous animal breathing. But one of the things about the American military is that the base checkpoint is a border you carry around with you: it vibrates out between the veterinarian (an officer’s wife) and a Guamanian fisherman even as he jokes about how much his dog likes beer. Even while they both stroke the mutt to calm her.

Like I said, my mother lived on Guam for two years: long enough to touch and go.

In the evenings, she grabbed groceries at the bx on the way home. She rode her bike next to my father while he ran. When my father was away, flying weather recon in a c-130 called Ellen, my mother walked. Maybe she caught a glimpse of his plane in the sky. A silly hope, she might have thought, but she listened and watched the sky. She saw snakes.

My parents were in love. I imagine my father pulled my mother in an inflated raft because she was afraid of the Pacific undertow. He splashed her and she covered her hair. But it is possible to love your husband and also be lonely. Zoom out: she was a white dot and the horizon curved around her. Remember how the ocean fucks with gravity? She might as well have been on the moon. In a white bikini and snorkeling mask, she grasped the raft’s edges and plunged her face into the water: satin reef, color jungle of angel, damsel, and parrot fish glittering in their full world. Beyond the coral reef, ocean deepening to night.

My mother told me that starving dogs foraged Guam’s forest and alleys. The naval and air force men and women who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay to have their dogs shipped to the next base abandoned them. They fed off waste, hassling with gulls at dump sites...