To Be Crushed

Bigfoot didn’t come that day in the car.

(Shane thought it did, but he’d been smoking.)

When we held our hands high and voiced echoed in those ever, ever green trees, where the orbs had been spotted? 

They didn’t land and I felt let down.

We raised the devil and raised hell, but those ever showed too much more than the scar on my right knee from the tennis court incident.

I put my hand on a curling iron once and held frozen peas until morning.

It was really bad the time I picked up my brother and he was a vomiting wreck and shaking, shaking so hard, and he needed $300.

Waterfall cove, where you jump in and under, but the boys didn’t know you had to be heavy in order to come back up and didn’t tell me and I was under just long enough to fill up my lungs.

When the snow fort collapsed and crushed me, that hurt.

They all hurt.

But.

On my worst birthday, I sat in the kitchen and ate cake alone in the dark and crying.

I was seventeen.