Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Michelle McMillan-Holifield
—
You Hope He Crawled Away From Her
You’re twenty when a girl you knew in grade school was kidnapped from her home and tied to a tree.
And murdered. You hear this on the news about a woman kidnapped from her home and tied to a tree
and murdered and she doesn’t have a face until you hear her name is August. And then you remember
you touched that face once. With your fist. At a sleep over. All the girls were there. And she put your
underwear in the freezer because you fell asleep first at that slumber party. And you were the first to
wake up because you had a softball tournament that started at 7 which meant you had to leave her
house at 6 in the morning. And she pulled your frozen panties from that icebox and handed them to
your mother who never forgave her. And she went back to sleep and you tucked your cleats under your
arm and left her two-story house with 10 acres and a tennis court. And you played softball in the sun till
your face, throat, and arms turned a deep cherry then fevered and blistered and your mother knocked
on the pharmacist’s door at a quarter till midnight because the blisters had swelled frighteningly large
and the pharmacist came out to the car in his pajamas and said you had sun poisoning and your mother
should take you to the emergency room. And you wonder how long August was alive tied to that tree
and if her hands blistered from rope burn and if she thought, at any time, he might let her go and you
remember your cousin tied you to a tree once and it was fine, you were fine, it was all a joke until the
town’s emergency siren began its monthly scream and then you began to scream and then your
grandmother who loved you both equally was there untying those knots. And you wonder about the
women in August’s life and how long they revisited what they were doing (Groceries. Dishes. Coffee.
Book. Stairs. Bed.) when their girl was tied to a tree and whether they ever stopped dreaming about
undoing those knots (if only) and you wonder whether her mother forgave you for blacking her
daughter’s eye that one time. And you curse that there is no emergency siren for women kidnapped
from their homes and tied to trees. And murdered. Then you’re forty-eight and the features of that girl-
from-grade-school’s face eludes you but her name survives. August: a fighter’s name, not in the sense of
fists to a friend’s face but to a fiend’s. And you know she lost, but you hope she fought like hell. You
hope he had to crawl away, himself almost dead.
Michelle McMillan-Holifield, Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet, hails from the American South. She was a semi-finalist in The MacGuffin’s 29th Annual Poet Hunt and longlisted for the Dzanc Poetry Prize (2024). You can find her poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and occasional book reviews in print and online in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Rooted, Stirring, The Main Street Rag, and Whale Road Review, among others.
