Homework for June

I am not sure if all of this copied, but I am gonna post it anyway. Seriously old story, not necessarily looking for heavy critique, but I may rewrite this later so I want y'all to see how I have improved. (: Let me know if you did read it though! And if you DO have specific critique I will take it, it's just not super important at this time since it is such an old story and it needs major editing.

Rabbits

    She had found the thing pressed against the house with its face turned away from the wind, all curled up into itself and as stiff and silent as death. It had not stirred when she lifted it to carry it inside, but she could feel small movement in it’s wheezing breath. With the animal cradled in the crook of her arm and her head tilted toward the ground she had climbed the short steps to the door and nudged it open with her shoulder, then slipped inside along with a hiss of dust propelled by the angry wind. She turned and felt the force of it, like a sharp burn across the exposed parts of her skin, when she pressed the door to close. It took all of the weight of her body to do so, and considerable effort to slide the latch that would keep it shut.
    The animal was still quiet and unmoving when she crossed the room and placed it carefully on the seat of a small chair with legs that were crooked from the weight of heavy use. She left it there when she went to fetch a thick, patchwork quilt and fix it to the place where the door and floor nearly met. She weighed down each end with a bucket; one full of rocks and one full of dirty, brown water. When she was done she tugged off the wetted remnant of a printed flour sack that had been tied about her face and dipped it into the bucket of water to wet it again. It did not come out clean, but it came out clean enough, and so she crossed the room, crouched down, and began to wash away the dirt that was caked around the animal’s nose and mouth.
    In those days the earth was so dry that it was weightless, each step kicked it up into the air so that with every breath it was sucked in and settled as dust in the lungs. When the winds came they carried the earth in great black clouds that rolled over the land and piled it up against that which would not be moved. Houses creaked and groaned against violent storms, but they could not keep the earth from slithering in through the small cracks and open spaces. There was nothing that remained untouched and what was not untouched was unclean.
    It had been years since the land had dried and rain clouds had passed over the plains. Things had not always been the way that they were then, once the earth had been alive with golden rows of wheat and the wind had pleasantly swept away the heat of long summers and kept the air from going stale. The sky was never lost to those who looked up to view it. People had come with many names and from many places, all with the same idea, and they had settled on the land to make things grow. Eventually, when the rain stopped, they had found that they would be their own undoing. The land was overworked and when the crops died there was nothing to hold it down anymore. It ached for now attainable freedom and roared to life with the wind, it moved and it screamed and it killed.
    Chests grew heavy with the weight of the sickness it brought and some stopped rising and falling altogether. Many of those who survived the sickness packed their belongings and gathered their families, leaving their former lives behind them as they headed west to flee from the angry earth. Others stayed behind. What crops that remained were ravaged by swarms of small, hungry creatures that had nothing to fear from predators that had been driven into the arms of death by anxious cattle men.

    The first time she had seen them round up the jackrabbits she had not known what to expect. Men, women, and children had chased them into chicken wire, with their hands wrapped tightly around clubs and makeshift baseball bats, and their knuckles white under layers of grime. Nooses were slipped over their small necks to keep them from running and their legs kicked wildly while their skulls were crushed in a bloodied frenzy. They screamed while they died, a sound so shrill that she had not been able to sleep that night for the ringing in her ears, or at least for the memory of it in her head.

    Rabbits did not always scream when they died. Sometimes they slipped away quietly and simply ceased to be rabbits anymore. When she had been young she had found a rabbit dying quietly in the grass, she had watched its breathing slow and ran her small fingers through its short, soft fur until it stopped moving entirely. She had carried it home then, too, and sat with it for a long while before her grandmother had found her.
    “Ayuhwasi,” her old grandmother had said, “We must leave the people where they die. Rabbit is a trickster, he is clever, and he knows where he wants to leave his body.” Her grandmother was a medicine woman, with the longest braids she had ever seen and serious black eyes. She had spoken the stories for many years and was known to all as a wise woman. And so the girl had carried the rabbit back and left it where she had found it. She visited it now and then and watched while time and weather, and other animals, wore away at the flesh and the bones sank slowly deeper and deeper into the earth. She had not counted the days until the rabbit was gone, but she had noted when to stop coming back to find it.

    The jackrabbit was dying quietly that afternoon, there was nothing to be done about the dying. But the animal had loosened its body and began to uncurl. Small, dark eyes, barely open, regarded her with fearlessness that could only come from being so close to death. When its nose and mouth were as clean as they could be she stood and lifted the animal at the same time, then shifted to sit and settle it in her lap. Her fingers found a spine under gritty fur and grazed each delicate rib as they moved over body she was cradling close. Outside, the wind was rattling the shutters and inside dust was creeping around corners and snaking its way through loose places where the sheets were not tacked thoroughly enough over the windows. She began to sing, accompanied by the sounds of the storm, in her mother’s language.

    At one time, the language had been hers as well, but when she had gone away she had become someone who could not claim it as her own. The boarding school had been a large facility, built like barracks out of brown bricks and arranged in several buildings that stretched from the ground in strong structures toward the sky. On the morning that she had arrived the clouds had gathered low and dampened the light of the newly risen sun. She had not been alone; there were many children who had arrived with her, and many children who had been there for some time already. It was easy to tell the difference, not just in the way that they looked but in the way that they looked at each other, as if they were two different kinds of animal.
    Upon setting foot on the grounds the children were herded into the main building and thoroughly inspected by a series of severe looking women dressed in black. Boys and girls were split into separate lines and ushered through a series of doors. A few children were pulled aside, made to stand against walls and stay perfectly still while a man with a camera set up on long, thin legs took photographs of them. She was not one of these, and so she found herself soon sitting in a chair and studying her shoes.
The first thing that they took from her was her hair. It had been long when she had arrived, dark and wild, just like her mother’s hair. But her mother was a savage, a poor creature who was beyond help now that she had reached a certain age and was already set in her ways. Civilized women in those days kept their hair neat, pinned up or fashionably cropped. Civilized young girls wore their hair in a bob. When the first dark locks began to fall and gather on the ground she felt as if someone had knocked her hard in the chest.
    Hot tears welled up in her eyes, stinging them at the corners, then rolled silently down her cheeks. The next time she saw herself, in the reflection of a window that was cloudy with a light layer of dust, she did not know who she was looking at. It was not “Ayuhwasi”, like her family had called her, that she saw. She had been given a good, Christian name now: “Mary”.
    The clothes that they had given her were unlike any clothes she had ever worn before. They were stiff and colorless and cut in a way that made it difficult to move freely. She remembered that she would sit rigid for hours through her lessons, just like everyone else, and try to keep from shifting in her seat. When she couldn’t stand to stay still her teacher would send her to stand with her nose lightly touching the wall. While she stood she would listen to her lessons, hands pressed firmly against her sides, and her palms would begin to itch from contact with the thick, gray wool of her uniform.
    She spent hours memorizing bible verses and learning to say her prayers in English. Reading and writing would come slowly, and not without struggle and repeated failure. With failure came punishment and she learned what it meant to fear the people who fed her, even as she leanred that she could not survive without them. By the time that she was old enough to be released to the world, newly educated and shaped for society, she could no longer remember how to communicate with her people. What belonged to them no longer belonged to her and the only thing left of who she had been was a song her mother used to sing her to sleep with, though she could not remember the meaning of the words. She had never really known if her mother had sent her away or if she had been taken from her home.

The rabbit had begun to kick every once in a while. It would be calm for long moments and it’s dark, glassy eyes would close, but they would open wide again when its legs moved. Perhaps it was involuntary, but it seemed like the thing was becoming so comfortable in the act of dying that it would suddenly and unexpectedly remember what it was like to be alive. When it kicked it wheezed loud, frantic breaths, which rattled back to near silence as soon as the bursts of adrenaline faded. She kept her hands moving over its body and gently freed the claws that caught in the fabric of her skirt.
    Sometimes the storms lasted for hours. Sometimes they were so thick and furious that they blackedout the sun and it was just like night. Whether they were or not, most people kept their houses boarded and blanketed up as tightly as they possibly could and couldn’t see what it was light outside. In spite of these efforts the dust always found its way inside. It was collecting in crevices and creeping slowly across the hard floor. When the storms were over she would sweep it back outside again, but it was impossible to get rid of it all. Eventually there would be nothing but dust, and then what good would it do to sweep at all?

Her family had never lived in this house, they had never lived on this land. Those who remained were some miles away, but she had not seen or heard from them since marriage had come for her, and her mother and grandmother were long dead by the time she had gone back to her village. Her husband was a man whose people had come from across the sea, though he had been born in this country himself, somewhere where the east edge of the land met the water. He was taller than her, with skin not nearly as dark in tone and hair that was the color of dead grass. He had come through the village with a crew of cowboys when she had only been home for a few months time, when she had been home long enough to realize that she would never feel at home with her people again. She had left with him that night.
    He had moved west to look for a new life, working his way across the plains where no one would refuse him employment when they heard the name “Delaney”. When they had married he had decided it was time to settle down. They would start small with what little money he had saved; he had found a small house, for a good price, on a plot of decent land. The owners were eager to sell and to head to California to seek their own fortune. That had been a few years ago, back when people still thought that the rain would come back.
    “If it rains,” her husband would say, “We will have the best plot. There will be nothing that we can’t grow.” But it didn’t rain. The drought dragged on and on, and what they began with withered and died. Her husband had taken what jobs he could find then, just like he had before, from rabbit roundups to killing cattle for the Drought Relief Service. After a few years he had taken to drinking whatever he could find and less and less money had been put aside for food and other supplies. Still, her husband was a proud man, and he would not have their name printed under the list of families receiving government assistance in the paper that people read around town.
    Most of her days were spent waiting. Waiting was the worst part. She would make whatever small repairs she could to the house, dig the windows free of dust, sweep what had seeped inside back out again. When they had food she would plan carefully and stretch it as far as she could. She saved bones to boil and hid strips of dried meat in tin boxes that she buried at the base of fence posts in the dust drifts outside of the house. Sometimes he came home well into evening, but she always had dinner ready when he arrived.

    When the jackrabbit finally died it choked and kicked and stretched its entire body out in a last effort to feel alive again. When it was over the wheezing was done, but the body twitched a few times and the eyes were stuck open. It was warm and limp and she kept running her hands over it and parting the fur with her fingers. Sometimes things died quietly, passing out of the world without a large fuss and without leaving a noticeably empty space where they had been before. But sometimes, even when they did die quietly, the loss lingered.

    Her pregnancy had been unexpected and she had not been sure of it until her moon did not come. It was only a few days later than she began to feel it. She was ill sometimes without provocation, often having to stop her usual chores to sit down or to evacuate the contents of her stomach. At first she had not been attached to what was growing inside of her. She could not picture as something real, she could not imagine that it was something that could be named. But as the weeks had passed she had begun to wonder what sort of person it might have became. Would it be a boy? A girl? She had begun to save flour and sugar sacks for fabric so that she could piece together a quilt made up of patches of floral patterns.
    It was when she had become comfortable making plans that her plans had fallen apart. They had not unraveled slowly, taking their time and sneaking away from her, they had fallen apart all at once. Waiting, really, always had been the hardest part of her new life. That evening she had waited, tearing fabric into neat squares and stitching pieces of it together. It had become dark and she had not noticed, having made sure that the windows were covered completely to protect the house from the dust that was beating at the walls of the house and trying to find a way in. She had become so accustomed to the howling wind that the sound soothed her and steadied her hands. She had lost track of time entirely.
    It was only later, when she was lying on the floor and clutching her stomach, that she thought about what it could have been. It had been a long time, since before she had told him about the baby, since he had touched her like that. She had stopped waiting. Perhaps that had been her real mistake. It was usually better when it was all over, after the waiting was done, after the violence was done. She had always found that she could fall asleep then. That time, though, had been very different. She could swear, as she had pressed her warm, bruised cheek against the cold, dusty floor and the blood soaked her skirt, that she could feel something die inside of her.
    They had not spoken of it. He had fallen asleep in their bed and she had spent the night on the ground, but when he had woken up he had found her dressed clean and with a small breakfast ready for him. She had set it out on the table and sat down in silence with her needle and fabric squares in hand. Later than morning he left for work and she remained quiet, sewing steadily into the afternoon. When the quilt was done she had spread it out over the table and looked at the pretty pattern she had made. Moments later she had tugged it from the table and walked over to drop it on the floor in front of the door, pressing it into the space where dust was already starting to blow in, then moving to find something heavy enough to keep it in place.

It had been one year since that time, and still they did not speak about the baby that was never born. She did not speak to anyone anymore, not anyone at all and not in any language. But sometimes, when the time was right, she did sing. She sang her mother’s song and felt the words in her chest, not unlike the sickness so many had suffered from the storms.
    It was a few more hours before the wind stopped and the strange silence of the calm after the storm set in. Even still, she remained where she was sitting with the dead animal in her lap for another hour. Her muscles ached from the small stroking movements that had not stopped even when the animal had stopped breathing. She did not know what time it was, but she knew that he would not be back soon. Sometimes, when he left, she wondered if he would ever come back at all. Perhaps, one day, he would simply walk out the door and never walk back in again. She had long since learned to fear the people who fed her, and she had never learned not to need them to survive.
When she stepped outside the sun was sliding down the sky to meet the horizon and the dust had settled so that everything was all too clear, she could see for miles. After a storm the dust was always piled high in places, against the house and over the fence posts, but other areas looked cleaner than they ever had. The angry earth had stopped screaming and had left the red sky in its wake. She stood for a while with the carcass in her arms and watched the sun sink.
    When she did find a spot of smooth, soft earth it was easy to dig into in with her hands. The dirt wedged itself under her fingernails and worked its way into the ridges on her skin. She dug for so long that by the time she was done there was no light left in the sky and the hole she had made would have buried her beyond her knees. Before she placed the dead thing in the grave she had made for it she laid it out on the patchwork quilt. While the moon was rising high she lifted the sharp end of her kitchen knife and began to cut. Long black locks fell to the earth and when she cut off all that she could she scooped up the strands and placed them on the quilt as well, then wrapped the package up tight and lowered it gently into the ground. She used her hands to push the earth back into place.