Great Blue Heron

W

anda is supposed to go to the grocery store but finds herself rambling through hills of western New York in her station wagon, Charles’s .38 lying on the seat next to her. She had another not-fight with Charles all morning, him sitting and reading the Sunday paper, her trying to draw him into a conversation about what they are going to do about their boy, Henry, who has been fighting in school a lot, and now it’s escalated to Henry having threatened a teacher, so they suspended him and are thinking about expelling him, and she can’t blame them for that.

And she sat on the couch across from Charles and said, “You have to take a firmer hand with that boy.”

And he said, “Yes,” but he didn’t put the newspaper down. It wasn’t yet noon, and he had a glass of iced bourbon sweating onto his side table, deepening the graying ring there.

And she said, “Please, you’ve got to do this.” And like always he agreed with her and sipped his drink, and talking to him was like trying to catch a bubble, and so now she’s out in the woods and she pulls over to the side of the road and walks out to the edge of a marsh, and she screams and blasts away at the scummy water, all six shots and then reloads, but doesn’t shoot again.

She thinks that this is the season of frogs and toads, when they come back up to the surface and participate with the world instead of being sunk in their deep holes. She thinks, this is the season of mud, finally thawed out. She thinks this is the season of geese and ducks back from the south.

The moment she thinks this, she sees not geese or ducks, but a great blue heron come over the trees, gliding the way they do, down into the marsh, where it lands. It’s so graceful coming down, it’s like a miracle, and Wanda thinks, this is not a place of grace, so she fires, and she thinks that this is not a place of peace so she fires again, and she thinks this is a place of violence and silence, so she breaks the silence firing four more times, all of her bullets landing in the water around the bird that lifts as awkwardly into the air as it was graceful on landing.

She hopes the heron flies far because maybe there is a paradise in the north she does not know of. She’s glad she doesn’t know where it is because if she did, she would go there and infect it.

Let it have life and peace and hope. Let it exist forever without her.