Hallie Knox

We All Pause for Hawks

“I think it’s an osprey,” he says, but it isn’t. It’s a redtail. Under the stupid mesh nursing cover with its stupid crocheted daisies the baby clamps down a little harder on my nipple, plastered stickily against me, a fiddlehead curl of marshmallow softness. We sit in a sliver of shade, his back against a willow, my back against his shins. The daisies aren’t stupid. My mother made them. I’m just so hot.

“Yeah, an osprey,” he says again, and I just breathe and feel the pull, pull, pull of milk leaving my body, and I watch the redtail cresting a cool billow of air up there, passing us all by, not even meeting my eyes. The slouching, swaggering, baggy-jeaned teens on the swings have stopped to watch it too, and so has the old man playing chess against himself at the picnic table, and so has the group of church people praying far too loud in the grass. Far too loud, what do they need a sound system for out here anyway? They’re all looking up and elbowing each other, even though the earnest young man up front still has his eyes closed, one arm raised and a microphone nestled right the hell up against his teeth as he hisses about heavenly fathers in a cadence so familiar I can feel that adrenaline prickle along the backs of my hands that usually only happens when the baby screams or falls or I can tell we’re starting to fight about the same old things again.

He’s looking at me, at the back of my neck and ear and maybe a bit of cheek. I feel him touch my shoulder blade, right where a wing should be, and I’m sure it’s sopping wet. Fuck this heat. Fuck this place. 

“Let’s go home,” he says. As if it were that easy.

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Hallie Knox is a memoir ghostwriter and community garden manager living in Boise, Idaho with her husband, three formidable children, and a menagerie of fuzzballs. Her work has been accepted for publication by Literary Mama, Paper Plane Press, and The Orange Rose.