Anna Christina in the Field, by Zoë Meager

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948

Anna Christina in the Field

Since the girl lost the use of her legs, she drags herself into the fields each day. Her mother watches without seeming to, from wherever she is about the old farmhouse or the barn—folding laundry or boiling rags or reluctantly wringing the neck of a bird—squinting to see Anna Christina as she takes herself away into the fields again, the bullish roll of her shoulders brightly lit from above. Then later in the day, she wonders at what looks like quiet in the child who sits looking back towards the farmhouse at something unspoken, her body washed over with greying clouds. For most of the day the girl is no more than a smudge of pink light, cast away in the unhinged nature of the day, and it leaves her mother to think—as she dishes out pie or beats a mat or sews on a child’s severed finger—that even the damndest fire can look tender at a distance.

Zoë Meager 

Zoë Meager is from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has appeared in Cheap Pop, Ellipsis Zine, Granta, Hue and Cry, Landfall, Lost Balloon, Mascara Literary Review, Mayhem, Meniscus, North & South, Overland, Splonk, and Turbine | Kapohau, among others. She’s a 2024 Sargeson Fellow.