Stag Country No. 2

A sister storm is an uncontained wind. When a sister storm takes over the grind, the coal men hide in their honeycombs for fear of being swept away. Sons left out in a sister storm are sucked into the sky, leaving their fathers to weep oil and sadness. Sister storms come with little warning. The men will hear in the heart of the valley a soft tick of gust rustling the pines and no time later the sister storm will be upon them, rifling over the mountain and the men, devouring those who do not run fast enough, lifting them upward into its eye and slinging them out and over the horizon, a surety

of darkness and teeth. Those with weak constitutions claim that the sister storms are punishment, but those men whose hands rattle like sledges against coal walls, they know that a sister storm is a reminder of sons and fathers, is a mirror of their muscles and their slickness. They know that a sister storm is a reminder that the women of the valley are the detriment, are the noise they hear in their honeycombs, when they are trying to sleep, the buzz and drone of knitting needles knitting snow, of

valley women growing coal men babies, of thousands of generations of baby sisters thrown from the cliffs on the edge of the world. The men of the grind, the women of the valley, the sons that build between them and the daughters that exist only as long as a sister storm, only an hour or a day or a few days at most, and then the sky is returned, and the work resumes, and the grind lights up again with the spark of men, the crush of breaking, and all is as it was before the

world pretended to matter. And the grind refills with noise, with men, with sons, and whomever lost a father or a son to the consummation of another sister storm, they squeeze oiled eyes into coal-well bowls, then drink back their tears, never willing to give one more thing to this sky, to the punishment of winds or the reminder of women. Then the mines back to work, the men back to work, the new sons to watching how the dredge and sledge work, how the sun warms the men when they climb out of

their work tunnels, towards their honeycombs. And Magpie in his honeycomb, his coyote at the ready, a fire lapping out into the seep of darkness, he watches what shouldn't be, a daughter in the corner, the baby of her, resting quietly, soothed on the drudged oil Magpie let from his fingertips, feeding what he was stolen, what he should have dropped already out into the abyss, what instead he uses to practice the word daughter, the name Dovetail, the pure perfect white of her new

born arms. Dovetail was hidden beneath his shirt and his coat out at the cliffs with the line of men who were unlucky enough to have grown with their raping a baby girl instead of a potential man. Magpie stood with those men, all with wailing babes, except for Dovetail whose eyes were only looking at the sky, taking in the last moments of valley living, of coal mountain wind, of ever-edging cliffs. It took Magpie an instant to pin her beneath his coat, beneath his shirt, and because the sound at the cliffs was only the sound of wind and no

longer the scream and pining of baby girls in coal arms, there was no suspicion, no guess that the daughter he should have thrown to the bottom, to the ocean or the edge of their world, was instead warming underneath his layers, sweeping into his grind heart. And Dovetail remained as quiet and radiating the whole way back, when the men and Magpie rejoined the men who had been given sons by women they took them from, and the men whose rape of different women hadn't taken, and the men who were in their last year of the grind and whose sons had already...