​The Summer We Were Thirsty
 Andrea L. Hackbarth ​

 
We danced, the fire-red girl & I, on the sun-parched bluff above the Blackfoot swimming hole where children and watchful parents retreated into cool liquid shadows.  But she, who has always risen in sparks and I who have always been  like cloistered soil—we danced in the July swelter above the Blackfoot. We looked for a sky-born respite more lasting but only the dust levitated and swirled around our drought-stricken skin. Because the breathless air wanted movement because we were thirsty like the rising dust for rain because there might’ve been something to the feeling that our thighs—soft still, and heavy now—had some power in them after all, we still danced, the fire-red girl & I. Her flame-feet and my dirt-soles pounded rhythms out of sparks and earth and the wind picked up the drought-stricken grasses and made them sing sweet sussing songs above our feet’s percussion until the waters of the Blackfoot took notice and gathered themselves into clouds and our girl-thighs—soft and heavy—felt the coming respite, gathered up their mother-strength and gave one last entreaty to the rain. The clouds began to find their way in fat droplets to join our spark-earth rhythms, to speckle then splatter then drench the grey rocks black, to streak patterns into our dust-brown thighs, to permeate the air with scents of growing things, to settle the earth at our feet. We stopped, the fire-red girl & I. We raised our faces to find our sky-born blessing. We turned, descending in silence from the new-quenched bluff above the Blackfoot, unable to find the just-right words for what we’d done, unwilling to say whether we’d done anything at all, uncertain what sort of things we’d found in that rain.

 


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About the Author:  Andrea L. Hackbarth currently lives in Palmer, Alaska, where she works as a writing tutor and is an MFA student at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Some of her recent work can be found in The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review, Digital Americana, Flyover Country Review, and Gargoyle Magazine.
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GRAVEL