by Elizabeth Burton
Water
My father, the math professor, offers to help me with my calculus. An object is moving along a line, with time in seconds and distance in feet. What object, I wonder. Makes no difference, my father says. It does if you’re a snail or a train, especially a snail with a train coming at you. And I cry for the snail. I wouldn’t have chosen calculus, but my first college advisor knew my father and assumed I loved math. I loved my father too much to correct the man. My father takes my tears and cradles them, remembering me as a baby, but I’m grown, about to launch a life and I shrug his arms off, run to my mother and say he doesn’t understand me. Each word is a stab but not because he wants me to like math. I cry for snails, commercials, a puppy I’ve found abandoned at church. I cry until my tears turn me into a river, flowing far and fast away from him. That river washes me clean of any shared past, rushing me inexorably into the future. Find the velocity function v(t), and the position function s(t), an equation unsolvable without values. What are my values? I’m creating headaches to keep me home from the church where my father preaches and I prefer my friends to my parents, the poetry of the nineteenth century to the politics of today. A weeping willow stands at the edge of our farm, its branches crying along with me in the breeze, and I send my river out to take in its tears too, watching as the water rises, covers everything. My father caused a house fire once, leaving a flue open in his rush to get to class. He came home to nothing but his parents and sisters, even losing his dog. I always cry when I hear that, fearing for the dog’s last moments, praying retroactively he didn’t suffer. Time is fluid, Einstein says. The position of the object at time t = 0 seconds. My father’s favorite candy bar is Zero. The train is coming for the snail, but my river washes the train off the tracks, the power of water greater than anything human made.
Elizabeth Burton writes and teaches in far Western Kentucky, where she shares her life with five cats, three dogs, two horses, and one often bewildered husband. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Split Lip, JMWW, Bending Genres, South Florida Poetry Journal, and others. She has a fiction chapbook forthcoming from Appalachia Book Company. Find out more about her and her work at www.elizabethburtonwriter.com.