We Make Mud

Girl

Us brothers, we love the sound of that word girl so much that one day, out of nowhere, we start calling everything we see, Girl. Let’s go, Girl, we say, to each other. Let’s go down to the girl, one of us brothers will go to the other, and to the river is where we go. Let’s catch us some girl, the other brother will then say to this, and we’ll grab us our fishing poles and a muddy bucket of worms and into the river us brothers fish. Girl sure is girly, one of us will point this out, pointing with a finger at the muddy river flowing past our feet. After a while, after we fill our buckets up with a whole mess of girl, one of us brothers will say, Sister, I’m hungry. Let’s go fry us up some girl. Like this, us brothers, we go back and forth between us, girl this and girl that, until it is raining girls and girl. The moon in the sky is girl. The sky and the mud is girl. It’s us girls walking round this girl town with girl dripping from our lips, girl this and girl that, until bottles and buckets and rusty trucks and trains, until hammers and fish heads and bent-back nails — all of these things come rushing up to us brothers, all of them drawn to us by the sound that those four letters make: G-I-R-L. But girl the way that girl was meant to be spelled: with twelve r’s, thirteen u’s, and twenty-thousand l’s at the end of girl, stretching across the earth.

What We Tell Girl to Do with Us Brothers If We Ever Stop Making Mud

Bury us brothers here. Cover us up with the mud of this river. Let this muddy river run up and over us brothers, let it run its muddy waters up into the insides of our mouths. Let the fish of the river, let the mud too, nibble and gnaw us brothers down to bone. And the weeds of this river, those flowers growing up from the river’s rivery bed, let them wrestle and wrap us brothers up into their leafy arms: so that we might be held here, down at the river’s muddy edge, down here where there are stones for us to turn over, with our fingers and toes, stones for us to up from the mud pick up for us to throw: so they can float back up to that rivery hand, so they can rise up into that rivery sky — that nest of stars they fell out from back when they, the fishes of this river, back before they turned into birds, first learned how to fly.

The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish