by Bec Bell-Gurwitz

Fid Thompson, *soft edges III,* relief inks on US Road Atlas, 8.5 x 11.2 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Two Glories

Bec Bell-GURWITZ | MAR 2023 | Issue 22

Two glories on a walk today. The sun moves into fields, and I move with my shadow, which I track across land, showing me where I am before I get there. Where my shadow is, where I am not yet, a greenhouse glitters. I see there is no glass, no intentional flora, only fields of brown wheat that have taken over. The greenhouse is actually just bones, framing all that is left, a body with no panes. The plants don’t use this house to stay alive. They will die come winter. One glory, the greenhouse.

On a walk with my dog today, I remember where we would be if this was three months ago. I wanted to hold something I couldn’t, so I filmed the way forward, making a record with my phone. I was aware when I watched this film later on, I would be moving backward at least in the temporal sense, trying to remember the paces of Mount Tabor, of the dog park, how it swelled up into thick firs, how it moved downhill and became a dusty pit where the dogs bathed and fought. It was hard to see then how I would feel watching now, living in the state where I was born. Massachusetts, I hadn’t called home since I left at eighteen, where my mother was buried the year before I left. She is buried here still.

How would I look back? I assumed I’d be wistful. I assumed I would try to write about it. Unless I’d already forgotten. Unless I’d wanted not to remember. I didn’t want to remember the part of the pandemic I’d spent in Oregon. I didn’t want to remember the dogs and their violences, how my beautiful blonde was bitten one Christmas afternoon in the pit, how his play held me tightly after Caitie and so many others died, or how, together the dogs tossed the body of a squirrel between them and we humans chased after, trying to teach docility, even though the squirrel was already long gone, chewed up.

I can remember every walk I’ve had. I’m not being entirely truthful. I can remember each place I’ve lived, the cadence of my legs moving forward, legs that have changed shape, become muscular then dropping their sinew, leavening to fat.

Now I was here.

It feels true to write, that temporal confusion, both being and having been.

Two glories on a walk today. I will write them present, though I will be at my desk and when I read, I will be even farther displaced in time. I will write two glories as if we are still there together watching them happen and I am not here trying to render what can’t be.

My dog finds a dead baby bird face down on the path. I don’t look long enough to confirm whether it is a bird, or if it is really dead. My response is fast. I do not think of the bird, if it may still be alive, if it is a bird at all. I only think of mouths, not the bird’s body broken in my dog’s, but a mouth wide open with its tongue furiously lapping at the soft skin of my cheek. A mouth is a cradle. I pull hard at my dog’s neck. I try to think of another way, but this thought only comes after I’ve already hurt him. I look for signs of betrayal in his face even though I find none—he just trots on, forward movement, the moment over.

I don’t believe my dog thinks of Mount Tabor, but he’d know the thick, pine scent of Douglas Firs anywhere.

I am told it isn’t good to pull at a dog’s neck like I have. I am not told this by anyone on the path. There is no one else out walking today. But like I manufacture my dog’s betrayal, I also bring briefly with me, an Instagram trainer I follow for tips and tricks on how to raise a good animal, who always says if a dog doesn’t listen, he doesn’t respect you and I am sure my dog doesn’t respect me. When I call my dog’s name he does not listen, pulled by wolfish impulse, an old lineage where kibble is not served twice a day. He does not listen. He does not respect me. I snap against his neck. Two glories on a walk today. The bird is a gray stillness behind me. I resist the pull back to check over its body, to find maybe it was never alive at all—maybe it was something dropped, a curled scarf or discarded surgical mask—something human made.

Or I could have turned the body over to a beak still grasping and could have tried to save it like those men I found back in Oregon who moved in while I pulled away—all of us meeting at the intersection of a crow with its wing broken, its hovering brother calling us forward with their beaks, loud caws. The men seemed to know what they were doing. They stood before a red Jeep, on the phone with a wildlife rescue. I had my dog with me. He strained to get at the crow. I pulled him away. My last sight was of the men tucking the crow’s giant wings into a blanket, the car trunk open in cradle, to take a bird from its brothers. I told myself I would have done the same. What isn’t human might still cry for help, an interspecies desperation. We turn and kill in one moment, cradle in the next. How do birds trust? They are wary until a brother is hurt. I pulled away, always away, from the men who drove off in their red Jeep, the bird gone in their care. His crow brothers stood on the telephone wire above me, their talons neatly curled over the line as they held on, held out, for any possibility of return.

Can we take care from violence? When I lived in the Hudson Valley, before the Pioneer Valley, even before the Douglas Firs, I used to watch a child who lived in a house overlooking the river. He would run to the edge of his family’s property, run towards the river. He, pulled by the river—he, not knowing the kind of end a river might ordain. I understood the pull toward river. I understand it still.

Still, it was my job to keep the child alive.

It is never okay to grab at a child. My charge ran toward the river, toward the edge. I envisioned him going over. The bird of his body at the cliff’s bottom. I grabbed his shoulder hard, whipped him around toward my chest, picked him up clean and tidy. My response time is fast. He balled his fists up, struggling against me, and then the smallness of him flooded around until he really did become river, the crash against shore, the splitting and crunching of ice, its waters cracked through and the boy screaming all along like he was not river, like I was the one who kept him from river. He was not river. I was the one who kept him from river. He was angry with me. I said I understood why he wanted to go to the river. I said maybe when he calmed down, we could walk there together. I said maybe we can stand on the shores and throw rocks, listen to the ice crack. He wanted to go his own way. He wanted to go over the edge. He did not think I understood.

I understood.

Years later, that boy’s baby brother died while sleeping. Crib death is the old term for it. I never knew the baby who died. He was born after. I learned about his death while I was living across the country. His family stopped talking to me. I think because it was too difficult for them to swallow anyone who didn’t know their baby boy, who couldn’t nod and say yes, I touched his cheek—I remember his warmth.

One glory, the greenhouse. Now far behind me.

Another, a gray stillness—the bird or the possibility of one.

Now I find I have a split in my shoe. The split opens a chill of water bleeding through my socks. My dog pulls. The sun moves into fields, and I move with my shadow, which I track across land, showing me where I stood once. Where my shadow was, a greenhouse glitters. When it catches the light, I am in every place I have ever been. The leather of my shoe does not hold. The water moves me forward toward what is dry. The dog pulls at me, a sort of revenge I ordain. He wants me to find everything that is buried, sniff out all that is alive in this place.

Bec Bell-Gurwitz, *Two Glories,* digital photograph, 2022. Courtesy of the author.

Bec Bell-Gurwitz is a writer living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck land. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Thrice Fiction, and others. Bec won Writing by Writers’ 2022 San Juan Residency, is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, and placed as a finalist for The Southwest Review's Meyerson Fiction Prize. Bec is currently an MFA candidate in prose and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Fid Thompson is an artist, writer, gardener, wonderer, queer white human who grew up in rural England. Her art is informed by her bi-cultural family and the humans, cultures, creatures, plants, and landscapes of the places where she has lived. Her work inquires into inner and outer worlds and weathers, nature, mental health cycles, and portraiture of all the kinds. Fid has twice been a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ Fellowship, including for her Queer Enough portrait project, and is a 2023 grantee of the Washington Project for the Arts's Wherewithal grant. She is currently writing about worms, among other things.