Mary Hannah Terzino
I was too young to remember when the authorities first put it up. I’d just turned four, my mother said, when giant rolls of barbed wire suddenly appeared at the back of our garden. She had to stop me from running to touch them. She’d just read me “Sleeping Beauty” and I thought the spikes on the wires would make good stand-ins for needles on a spindle. I don’t remember that, but it sounds true. I always acted out the stories she read me.
Further down our road, a young man once jumped over the tall curls of wire from the other side. He made it over but badly hurt himself. He pulled his body to the back of the G.s’ house, bleeding a path over their wintered grass and the small drifts of white that remained from a light snowfall days earlier. Snow had never before reached our town in early September, my mother said, although I now take it for granted. The G.s were old and afraid to let him in. He died in a red pool of himself, arm reaching for their bright blue door. My mother told me this story when I became a teenager, excoriating our neighbors for their timidity. I wondered what I would have done.
Two years after the barbed wire, newly-elected authorities decided the separation needed more permanence, and the concrete wall was erected. I remember the dogs in the houses on our road barked continuously for those few days. At night lights blazed on the places where the wall was going up, blinding us even after we pulled and pinned the curtains shut. We couldn’t determine the source of the lights. My father nailed boards over the two back windows of our house. I don’t remember seeing workers or watching the wall being built.
After that, it was just there, as if it had always been so. You couldn’t see the field or the buildings beyond it. You couldn’t see the W.s’ garden or the little grocery the W.s kept open for my mother if she was running late and wanted their homemade pasties for our dinner. You couldn’t see vehicles on the roads, the courthouse, the cluster of our town’s churches on the other side, or my school. You couldn’t see anything but the big gray wall.
The boards remained on our windows and we stopped going to school. I had been indifferent to school but found I suffered great loneliness without it, along with occasional longings for the W.s’ pasties. We moved our garden to the front of the house, planting flowers in clumps around a small vegetable patch. My father sometimes failed to water it. Blossoms drooped and tomato-plant leaves crisped in the sun. My mother used the back garden to hang our laundry. She cut the grass, too. She was the only one in the family permitted in the back garden. Sometimes she remained into the night.
When I was fourteen, my mother became bedridden with a breathing illness. That summer I had to perform mother-tasks, which I resented. A few years earlier, a guard tower had been constructed on the other side of the wall behind the G.s’ house. I suspected they chose that spot because of the dead man, but no one talked to us children about it. When I went out to perform mother-tasks in the back garden I could see a man, often more than one, in the guard tower. They looked small in there but when the sun was in the right place in the sky, I could tell they had binoculars pressed to their faces. There were slots next to the windows for guns, or for other things I couldn’t guess.
I imagined they looked at me. Sometimes it didn’t take much imagination because of the angle of their heads. You’d think I resented it, but that’s not so. By then we had curfews and limits on how many could gather in one place. I spent even more time alone in the back garden. I want to be clear that my feelings for the guards were not romantic or sexual, nor was I afraid. The guards otherwise had only the G.s’ dying hedge and our sheets flapping in the breeze to contemplate. It is only natural to seek what you need.
As the weather turned warmer, I varied my costumes when I pinned laundry up to dry. Sometimes I wore a party dress. Other times I wore my swimsuit. Once I appeared in my nightgown. When I cut the grass, I would first wheel the machine out to the garden with a dance. I played music on my little device and danced wildly before I began to mow: the Twist, the Samba, the Earthquake, the R47 Exercise Drill, QST Rifle Mimicry, other old and new dances, dances without names. I imagined the men talking about me.
One sweltering morning near the end of the summer, my father took my mother to a hospital. She had gasped for air loudly throughout the night, blood in her sputum. My brother had gone to a compulsory Truth rally; I was alone in the house. I put on my swimsuit and went to our back garden. The neighborhood was still. I looked at the guard tower and saw two heads with binoculars angled towards me.
I studied the back gardens to my right and left, their grass a dry yellow, the G.’s house now empty. I faced the guard tower and waved. I removed my swimsuit, first the top, then the bottom. I thought about my mother in the hospital. I didn’t want to keep doing mother-tasks, but now it seemed I would do them for a long time.
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Mary Hannah Terzino began writing creatively in 2016 near the end of a career practicing law. In addition to publishing flash and longer short stories, since 2021 she’s provided occasional guest essays on writing and the writing life to Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog online. Currently she is developing her first collection of character-driven short and flash stories. Stories in the book focus on loss and resurrection, with most characters entangled in secrets, obsessions, or eccentricities that affect their attempts to rise above. Mary has resided nearly all her life in the Midwest, and presently lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, where she writes overlooking the Kalamazoo River and sings in a community chorus.