Summer Soul-Saving, by Neda Ravandi

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

Summer Soul-Saving

In Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth there is a woman in the foreground. In front of her, far into the distance, a big gray barn perches on the hilly grass. The woman lies on the dirt, her dark dress strewn around her body as she holds herself up with one arm, the other reaching, in vain, towards the building.

On warm weekends we drive up to the hill country, stay in a cabin on the flat, yellow grass. Up north, the air thrums lonely, shifting across raggedy reeds, into the dry pines of the treeline. I feel impossibly singular.

I am sitting in the backseat, watching feathered eaves of corn peel away from us on either side of the road. The moon hangs low and lonely, and the dull tang of dill yogurt drifts in with the heavy sweetness of chicken kebabs from the takeout bag on the seat to my left. A Cavender’s cowboy boot store looms up, yellow-red fluorescent and massive like some wretched technicolour altar. My mother screams, a long, animal scream, heavy and gashed. 

Ethel Cain is a singer I like because she has a tattoo across her forehead like a crown. Strangers is a beggar’s song.

I thought the noise was four-legged, a coyote in the grass, a wild dog.

In the dim glow of the TV my father says he’d punch a certain kind of man in the face. We are all soft animals against a highlight reel of last season’s game. Blood turns in my stomach. I can’t tell girls about the song "Strangers" because they get caught on the crosses it bears. I can’t tell my father about girls because it would make him feel sick.

Am I making you feel sick?

It’s a haunting song that tells me of consumption. Who are you to tell me of consumption? 

My mother and Christina / me reaching for my mother / Christina reaching for her home / my mother reaching for her home / all of us stretching / yearning / straining for something we will not get.

The first night in the cabin I wake up before the sun. My mother sleeps. I watch the gentle bobbing of her chest under a tattered quilt. In the woods outside a doe stares at me, reproachful. Her dark eyes swim. I feel so nakedly close. In the bed by the chimney my mother sleeps a stranger. 

She is so solemn. I cannot see her face but I know it has been still for a long time. 

Sometimes I imagine a painting where I am the only girl in the world. Grass undulates in some forgotten wind, scratching my sunburnt shins. Ahead, a barn waits for me, close enough to touch.

The doe grinds a bird-boned leg into the dirt. She knows what I think about. I am asking the doe of my mother the stranger. I am asking the doe where I have gone. She looks at me, like, “where do you think?”

my mother the stranger / me a stranger with a bovine smile hide

The painting exists in a book I was gifted when I was six, a flimsy page I’d flip to so I could pretend I was Christina, I was the woman on the ground, all four foot six of me stretching towards something unreachable.

My mother and I are soft animals in the dark of July. Her parents rest limp and shadowed in hospital beds on the far side of town, years of stress pressed deep into their bones. I wander into the gaping maw of my mother’s heart and fit myself into the two-person hole there, hibernating. 

Alone in her wretched kingdom, Christina drags her body through torn grass.

She prays for me. She tells me she will save my soul. I want to ask what part of my soul needs saving, but that is a stupid question.

I watch my mother bring our dinner home, steaming racks of lamb and beef and chicken, spiky pink radishes glowing with health, stewed golden plums, yogurt spiced and white in big plastic containers. 

In the future I am not a woman screaming. In the future my mother is not a woman screaming. We are both stilled. We have both reached the barn.

In the future I want someone to pray to me the way my mother did to Cavender’s cowboy boot store.

In the future I will curl around the soft animal of my mother, and in both of us will be a drawing out, a silver, sweet, and solid exhalation.

Neda Ravandi​

Neda Ravandi is a writer from Texas with publications in So To Speak journal and Furthest From Home Publishing and Press. An alumnus of the Kenyon Review and Iowa University Young Writers Workshops, you can probably find her- when not writing- adding a review to her beloved Letterboxd account.