on fever dreams in june

for mom,

do you remember when grandpa died? it was st. patty’s day and raining and the sixty-watt lightbulb above the bathroom sink was buzzing so much it looked like it was about to burst. do you remember when aunt julie sang at the funeral? the air tasted something like expired peppermints and baby powder but i think that everybody held their breath when the piano started to play. they must’ve.

for some reason i can never seem to run fast enough in my dreams. there’s always this burning in my calves. a dagger lodged in my thigh. and it’s kind of funny because it always feels like i’m going fifty down the interstate, weaving through all of the semi-trucks with their bloated headlights. it’s kind of funny because the fastest i’ve ever ran still feels slow when i’m dreaming. it’s kind of funny because i always end up dead in the end anyways.

did you know that uncle paul traced grandpa’s ancestors all the way back to the sixteenth century? they let him flip through the church archives in hrdlořezy, let him page through a book of names and births and deaths, let him hope he’d find one of his own. do you remember how you yelled at me when i told you i hated jaternice? how you said that if i wasn’t gonna eat it, who was gonna feed it to my kids? who was ever gonna eat liverwurst when you were gone? who was gonna remember we were even here? when i told you i didn’t want any kids you laughed.

in seventh grade they made me run at the conference championship for track. i didn’t tell them i didn’t like running races, that it made my head spin and my throat swell. i didn’t tell them that i hated the way they measured my worth in seconds. how fast? how fast? how fast? i quit after that year, threw my tennis shoes in a rubbermaid and shoved it behind the fold in the basement drywall. how fast? not fast enough.

if i ever met my ancestors i think i’d probably hate them. i think they’d probably hate me. i think they’d wonder where you went wrong, why you raised a girl with slipping faith, a girl who’d rather not marry a man, a girl who didn’t cry at her grandpa’s funeral. a girl who hears voices at night and wonders who’d miss her if she was gone.

ms. m asked me a couple weeks ago why i didn’t do cross country this year. she said she’d seen me running around the neighborhood, said it wasn’t that different, said i could get faster. i think i might’ve shrugged (i think that in that one second all of seventh grade came flooding back). i wish i would’ve told her that i only run for myself now. i only run to forget.

last night i woke up at 3 a.m choking on my spit. in the dream, everyone had czech accents and half-moon frowns (bohemia in a crowd of crossed arms and pursed lips). i was sprinting and blood was dripping down my legs in fat drops. the corn was laughing and the car-horns were honking and i could’ve sworn i saw grandpa. i can never run fast enough in my dreams and it kills me. everything i want to leave always catches up in the end.