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Watershed
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
78 Watershed Then I understood: we are versions of ourselves— third grade, Mrs. Goodwin’s lazy eye multiplied me in math class, and I looked down to see the lines on my hands, a treacherous map, branching, dendritic. When it happened, I could not tell you what I knew, though you pawed wildly for a brake on the passenger seat’s empty floor. What separates us if every moment is a chimera splitting into eagle, lion, snake? We lived in the same body once. We were parallel universes: in the chalk-dust, one gaze fell on me, stalled at seven times six; one gaze hovered above my shoulder, watching the girl I could have been say, Forty-two. On the shores of the Monongahela, slick with yellow clay, I watch the water as if for your body. Mud climbs the hem of my jeans. We are no longer seventeen and sixteen, hurtling down Camp Horne Road toward the 279 on-ramp, but I am knee-deep in muddy water, still crushing the accelerator to the floor. You are still screaming. 79 The radio still played in the wreck. I opened my palms, white with airbag dust, and saw a map, the gnarled tree of a waterway branching and branching— Multiply. Split again and again into every permutation of I am. There is a world in which you died, but it is not this one. ...