by Julie Hensley
Fire and Water
Nohl has spread his guns out
for cleaning, arranged weapons
across an oil cloth
on the kitchen table
where the two of them
eat meals.
Not unusual, this ritual
on a winter night with snow
trapping them in tight,
his worksite shuttered
for two days. Both of them
a little stir crazy,
they’ve been fussing
all afternoon over nothing
and everything—the empty
cans he leaves on the end table,
the smell of the dog wet
with snowmelt, the puddles
on the flagstone entry,
the rate at which they’re going
through hay.
She made the mistake earlier
of bringing up the girl
from last spring, made the mistake
of saying she had never
been unfaithful.
Tonight, she’s rough
with the dishes, clanking
the plates into the strainer,
Their argument now distilled
to little sounds. The click
of the Colt Python as he opens
the cylinder.
His tiny bottles of solvents and oils
have the look of expensive cosmetics,
little brushes like the wands of mascara,
the scent that rises off the greasy towels
is cloying like crabapples
fermenting in the sun.
The power’s been out for hours,
and kerosene lamps cast small circles of light,
strange shadows. Wax is starting to pool
around the candles lit on the mantle.
She is nearly finished, stirring
the silverware in the soapy water,
when she hears the metallic rattle
of loose cartridges, the spin
of the cylinder, the solid register
of the weapon clicking ready.
She ticks her eyes up
to where the darkened
window above the sink reflects
his posture: arm extended toward the back
of her head. She doesn’t move,
doesn’t lift her chin
from the gray suds. She rinses
the breadknife in her hands,
rinses and rinses and keeps rinsing
as if something as pure as water
might make them clean.
Julie Hensley is an Appalachian writer and core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches both fiction and poetry. She has been awarded fellowships from Jentel Arts, Yaddo, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. Her poems and stories have appeared in dozens of journals, including Image: Art, Faith Mystery, The Southern Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, Blueline, Mom Egg Review, and Willow Springs. She is the author of a collection of poems, Viable (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and a book of fiction, Landfall: A Ring of Stories (Ohio State University Press, 2016), as well as two poetry chapbooks, The Language of Horses (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Real World (Artist Thrive 2019). Her new novel, Five Oaks (Lake Union Publishing), is forthcoming.