tracks

Ann Kathryn Kelly

Ann Kathryn Kelly

i

Sunshine streams from a cloudless sky through leafless maple branches, winter white bright bathing a backyard, bouncing across unsullied snow, undulating rows. Spit-polished. I poke my head out the door to test the day as prick … tingle … prick spears my nostrils and I withdraw turtle-like into my bathrobe, the confident click of the closing door stopping the draft in its tracks. I slip out of my robe, slide into my puffer coat pulled from a peg, stoop to tug on red wool boots over blue pj bottoms. I cross my threshold into white, traction cleat strides biting into ice and snow that marks the land with a breadcrumb trail. 

ii                                                      

A small silver key unlocks a metal maw and I pull paper crusted together from yesterday’s storm that infiltrated the brass letter slot when the snowblower swiped too close and streams shot into the air before arcing back down, slipping through hairline seams, sealing together what lay within. I turn my silver key to relock, turn and push human tracks up the driveway alongside animal tracks. I think about a man I know in Vermont named Tim who tracks for the university. I wouldn’t know muskrat from mink, evidence of a coyote or just Koko, the Husky across the street. Tim would. I bend from the waist, narrow my nearsighted eyes. Squirrel.

iii

I think about deaths around the world as I follow breadcrumbs to my door, crisscrossed coils dimpling a crusted surface with bird-like imprints. Fork tines in dough. I think about the bitterly contested election that still dominates news after a season of ads and animus, broken promises and broken spirits, worry, constant worry [for some of us], in the lead-up. Tracking polls as men traded places, prayers, prayers, relief [for some of us] at the outcome, before: violence. One man bent on destroying us, another wanting to save us [from ourselves?]. I think about deaths around the world—two million, and counting, in a winter just getting started that promises more, more. A virus we track as we try to understand it, contain it, pray it … Spares us. I turn again, into the winter white, bright morning.

Ann Kathryn Kelly lives and writes in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her essays have appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/   

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