Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Danniel Schooenbeck

Sunday Stories: “C’est la guerre”

On April 19, 2015 By Vol.1 Brooklyn

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C’est la guerre
by Danniel Schoonebeek

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

OCTOBER 8, 2013

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Atlanta, GA • October 8

It’s a kidnapping into another family, waking up with Vera and her mother in Virginia, but it’s an abduction of love. You’ve lured yourself into their life and you don’t want to defect. These women take you into their home and they fix you coffee and blended bananas and they buy you hibiscus tea. They hand you a yellow flannel sheet to cover yourself on the trains. You’re going to meet some people on those trains, says Vera’s mother. She dials up her weird disembodied brother. He’s ridden Amtrak across the country so many times that he’s the train brother now. You’re in the south and these are women of Virginia, Vera and her mother, a woman alone with her daughter and wasting away in a cul de sac. What do you mean you’ve never read Travels with Charley? She pulls out her worn copy and hands it to you. You can’t take that one, she says, but you’ll find your own, really you have to. But mom can we go to the farm, says Vera. She squirms underneath her blanket and it’s no trouble seeing her as a child in this household. When you arrive at Frying Pan Farm, how many birds are squatting on the power line above the barn in the rain. Little bunch of plovers, little bunch of cliché fathers-to-be smoking cigarettes. And inside the stable it’s goats braying and piglets asleep in the haylight against their mother’s stomach. This is the black horse named Jesse and he stares all day through a hole in the planks at the place where the horse he loved died in the neighboring stable. That horse was named Michael and he died twenty-six days ago. If you’ve never watched two women, a mother and daughter, touch a black horse on the snout and fall silent together, my advice to you is don’t. Same goes for seeing a calf in the next stable staring out the window and she won’t turn around. Events will find you. Events will say, time to steer through the rain [...]

Sunday Stories: “C’est la guerre”

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