By Joseph Kenyon 

Maybe you haven’t felt enough pain? 

Maybe. But this hike is Aberdeen’s idea. She chose the hill and the trail. Not a mapped-out, sneakers-without-socks path where the roots have been dug up or tamped down. This path starts at a narrow wedge of an entrance and immediately slants between two thorny shrubs that prevent me from seeing where it goes. When I pull the car to the side of the road and ask why here? she doesn’t even bother to give me a look. She just swings her disdain at me with her pack as she exits the car. But she doesn’t close the door until after she makes her withering statement, the one she promptly blunts with a question mark. 

Maybe you haven’t felt enough pain? 

She is a mountain, this niece of mine. She’s solid and bountiful and giving and unpredictable. When she rages, she uproots routines and buries people. She changes landscapes. She’s been an explosive force ever since the nurse wiped what was left of the womb from her newborn skin. Now, two years into her teendom, she creates avalanches with more frequency. Her father — my brother — puts it like this: she’s such a soul-filling, delightful pain in the ass. 

Maybe you haven’t felt enough pain. 

That’s the way you say it, Aberdeen (who is crashing her way between the barbed shrubs guarding the trail). A question mark is curvy and gapped. It doesn’t have the fisted closure of a period. It leaves everyone too much room to maneuver, too much room to squirm out from under. Like me. With my feet squarely on the road. Here they go. Coming for you. 

The bush on the right tears my hand on the way in. At first, I don’t think the cut’s too bad, having only a momentary awareness of the skin ripping. I’ve worked with knives and sharp tools all my life without cutting myself any deeper than what a Band-Aid could repair. But when my hand begins to burn and go numb, I look. Blood runs from the gash like Grade-A syrup, pouring around the vein that protrudes from the skin much more prominently than it used to. The burning/numbing activates a voice in my brain, the one I call Mr. Sure-Brains, who tells me this isn’t the kind of pain Aberdeen meant. 

Hand out-thrust, elevated, and wrapped in a bandanna, I walk the trail which could only have been charted by a drunken snake. I keep on because Aberdeen can be rough but she’s not reckless. Destructive but not malicious. A pain in the ass, but she fills my soul. I go quietly because I’m sure she’s listening, and she’s not on the trail. 

I spot her about thirty yards to the left through hardwoods and thick undergrowth. A standard-sized teen girl wouldn’t be seen, but Aberdeen’s Sasquatch body, ungainly even when inert, stands out. I move closer and stop, squatting down so she won’t spot me if she turns. She’s staring at a totem pole, an authentic one by the looks of the thing, facing a carved but kindred face whose eyes speak of being and not being, of confidence and mystery, intensity and indifference. 

Aberdeen tries to curate all that with her pose. She’s not succeeding. Look at her. The emotions flow around that pole like heat waves rising off the summer pavement, revealing Aberdeen to that ancient pole in a way she can’t reveal herself to anyone else, except through inexplicable rising anger and violent tantrums. Here, her emotions say, is where she feels open. Where she feels safe. Where she trusts. 

Where she brought her aunt, Mr. Sure-Brains pipes up. 

In response, my internal chessboard tilts, sending the pieces of what I know about my niece scattering and tumbling. Maybe you haven’t felt enough pain? Seen in the light of Mr. Sure-Brains’ comment, that question mark sounds like a challenge. A subtle one, very non-Aberdeen-like. Given my standard appearance, which is not that of a Sasquatch-shaped girl, and given that I’m the one hiding behind a clump of sassafras saplings, maybe she was simultaneously asking and answering her own question correctly. I fear I’m not up to the task of staunching the gash Aberdeen is revealing to me. After all, in the best of times, Aberdeen deflects adult advice as if she does it for a living. What can I possibly say to her now? 

Maybe it doesn’t matter. 

I unwrap my wounded hand. More blood is dry than oozing, already beginning the process of scabbing over to cover the injury. It’s injury that’s loud. The things that cover over, the coagulative burying, do their work quietly. Permanently. 

What I say better not matter because the act of standing and stepping through the underbrush empties my brain. I shimmy toward Aberdeen until I’m one pace behind and to her right, her shoulder level with my chin. I lean in and whisper the first thing that comes into my head. 

That turns out to be a quote from Agnes Martin. Ever hopeful — and because I, too, have been a pain in the ass of this family for a lot longer than Aberdeen — I hear my voice land hard on the period at the end of the sentence. 

I wait for the pain. Hers or mine or both. 

                                                              *   *   *

Joseph Kenyon is the author of one novel, All the Living and the Dead, as well as short stories and poetry. When not writing, he teaches the craft at the Community College of Philadelphia and spends time observing the way words and light shift moment to moment, in and around us.