Kasey Butcher Santana
Archeologists found a young woman’s bones with those of a premature baby placed on the wing of a swan. The burial, Tomb 8 in Vedbaek, Denmark, dates to 4000 BC. Reflecting the mythology of that place and time, the swan’s wing provides an intriguing flourish, but when I close my eyes, I see the mother’s skull, angled away from her child, and know that is not how she would have rested.
We bring Veronica home to pandemic isolation. Intrusive thoughts of tripping, dropping her, breaking her perfect head visit me daily, subsiding once I search for books on postpartum anxiety. Acknowledged, confronted, the worry fades, but returns like a ghost. The roar of trucks jolts me from sleep with a vision of Veronica beneath their wheels. I look for statistics on how many parents outlive their children.
When I was three, I tripped on the stoop and fell face-first onto the pavement. I only remember the aftermath—at a motel between home and the beach, my mother cleaning the wound and applying scar gel, fearing my screams would make someone think she abused me. Zinc oxide and a scab covering half my face, stinging in saltwater. I have no scar, just an adult tooth that never fully erupted, roots fused to the bone from the trauma of hitting cement while it grew, hidden by baby teeth.
I rock Veronica, reading a beekeeping forum. A Ukrainian beekeeper posts after evacuating, leaving her hives behind. She needs to share her fear with people who will understand. Supportive comments pile up so fast, the post auto-locks before I can hit send. In summer, watching my bees forage on sunflowers, I wonder what happened to hers. My search yields no answer, just an article about a colony neutralizing a Russian grenade placed in their hive by filling it with honey.
Two weeks after starting preschool, Veronica trips on the playground and lands face-first. When the phone rang, I had just tested positive for COVID-19 the first time. Her father, Julio, brings her home, and she has caked blood under her nose, a split lip, a bandage across her temple, and a smaller one over the puffy skin by her eyebrow. I want to kiss her through my K-n95. When she fell, she ran away, panicking, surrounded by adults she still considered strangers. Eventually, she was convinced to accept a hug so her cuts could be treated, her little body relaxing into her teacher’s hair, long like mine.
Miss Firecracker, one of our alpacas, distrusts me, shielding her cria with her stout, fluffy body. Initially, I thought her defensiveness stemmed from her daughter’s malformed feet, but after another baby arrives, she runs across the pasture as I approach, jerking her chin in warning while that cria’s mother casually eats hay. I respect the fierceness in Miss Firecracker’s eyes.
“I wrote a letter to the ones I love.”
“Who?” Julio asks, sending me a look.
“You guys,” Veronica says with a sly grin.
The world steals children. Shot in classrooms. Kidnapped in war. Buried beneath rubble. Hit in crosswalks. Premature births. Tragedies global, personal. I sneak into Veroncia’s room after reading the news. Listening to her breathe, I think about her snuggling between us for bedtime stories. “Are they all like this?” Julio asked. “This loving?”
“I think so,” I said, and we held each other’s eyes to keep the knowledge of such goodness from turning to pain.
As we toddle to story time, Veronica’s acrylic sandals clacking, a burly man in a utility jumpsuit accosts people on the sidewalk. I avoid eye contact, but he starts to preach about my duty to protect her from “all evil.” Holding her little hand tight, I want to scream, to ask how he dares to lecture me. We saved the newspaper from the day she was born—headlines about wildfires, hurricanes, and would-be authoritarians. I let the library’s glass doors slide closed, cooling off with air conditioning and Raffi.
I wake from a nightmare at dawn, the terror of loss rising, then subsiding as I smell the mug of coffee Julio placed on my nightstand. I dreamed of fire, but snow falls outside. I soothe myself by pulling the elderly little dog close. Veronica sneaks in and climbs into bed, over the dog. “Gentle; Rory’s here.” I improvise, “You two are the bread and I’m peanut butter.”
“Who’s the jelly?” she asks.
“I’m jelly, too.”
I love her down to my bones. These nightmares of death and strongmen and fire reach back through the ages as surely as this love does. It seems unjust that the force of what I feel for her alone cannot protect us. I try to shield her from my anxiety by making myself a nest from which she can fly and return. I hope someday I will have wisdom to pass on about how love carries us. I hope she lets me hold her a while longer.
Taiwanese archaeologists uncovered the 4,800-year-old remains of a mother gazing at the infant in her arms, perhaps entombed by sudden disaster. Their fossil memorializes these primal feelings, as intimate as a womb, as strong as a swan’s wing.
I look down and Veronica raises her eyebrows in a wide-eyed face designed to make me laugh. Drawing a chuckle out through my sleepiness, I stretch an arm up and around her, wrapping it along the curve of her spine, and rest my chin in her curls.
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Kasey Butcher Santana (she/her) is a writer and caretaker of a small alpaca farm where she and her husband also raise chickens, bees, and their daughter. Recently, her work appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Great Lakes Review, Superstition Review, and Passengers. You can follow her on Instagram @solhomestead.