What the Desert Gave Me
HALLIE HAVICAN
He told me when he was seven he filled Ziplocs to the brim with cicadas he’d crab-pinched the heads off. All fed to chickens he’d later lasso, an alphabet of fatalities. In our nest, I learned him like a dust devil and I can’t say he ever learned me. He’d sing me George Strait and forget to flush. Talked to his Momma. I made him grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and sat on his lap while he ate them, when he didn’t. We wed in a lush expanse, green and fertile. I painted my toes olivine and the nail tech begged me to change it to something pretty. I cared too much about being pretty back then and I didn’t want my nails to give me away. He was uncorked like a panicked crowd. Sometimes sensational, a sliver of pyrite in a dark mine. Sometimes daunting, with nothing left to undress the awful. Me, a Midwest radical and him, a ranch cowboy—we only agreed on iced Jack and Coke. He knew how to hog tie a pig, a woman. Face down, limbs bound: no one has ever called me docile. I showed him my heat by tipping our televisions over, they rolled and smoked like a grackle on fire. He has a shrine in the ruin of all those TVs, their glaucous, cracked screens sunning in a landfill. At twenty-one, war asked him to kill kids in the way of other things. He called from that desert, voice forked around my neck, as his hands had been. In me, he found another desert—a dusty, howling wind that begging wouldn’t wet to grow.
HALLIE HAVICAN is a San Jose–based writer, psychotherapist, and psychic medium. Their work explores healing and transformation by tapping into the unseen—drawing from nature, the cosmos, and the inner world. They live for interdimensionality, exploring the unknown, and the wild intelligence of plants and animals. Find them @halliehavican or at www.halliehavican.com.
