Claire Boyles

Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there. 

One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too. 

“Watch it, Jerry,” Smith said. “I stay here long enough, I’ll find those birds. This is an illegal chicken facility you’re running. New rules say you build them a special shed or you don’t raise them up anymore. It’s for their own good. For the good of everybody. Can’t be too careful with this bird flu thing.”

“Jesus, Smith,” I said. “Next you’ll come tell me that you have to lock all the people up inside sheds. For their own good. To keep safe. Is that what you want?” I know my history; I believe the government is capable of that, maybe even eager. The worst part of it, I think, would be the vicious establishment of the human pecking order inside the shed itself. 

Smith stared at me for a long time then, but he only shrugged, and he didn’t find the birds.

“You better get these weeds taken care of, Grace,” Smith said as he got in his truck, waving at my corral. That corral is a mess of puncture vine and Russian thistle since they took the water, with purple loosestrife blooms infesting the edges of my old irrigation ditch. “You know I have to report them.”

“Spray them yourself if you want,” I said. “The government is the only invasive weed I worry about these days.”

I worried for a while after Smith drove off, a plume of red dirt rising off the road behind him, about calling the government an invasive weed. They say we still have free speech, but it’s hard to tell for real anymore. 

Behind the playground, the proposed fracking site sits dark under starlight and gilded crescent moon. There are no fences or gates surrounding it. A single bulldozer sits lonely on the empty lot. She is a little afraid, but her backbone, sturdy and expansive, a tree trunk of mud and twigs, ice and granite, had widened with new rings. The machine’s cap opens just as the website said it would, and she pours both gallons of bleach into the oil reservoir. 

Sister does not know whether her efforts will ultimately charge anything at all, but for this moment, her joints have stopped aching. When the pain returns, suddenly, she closes her eyes. She imagines her doubt and her fear encapsulated by her pain. She imagines holding all of it in the palm of her hand, white-hot, imagines placing it humbly on an altar.

Please accept this offering, she prays. Turns out she can’t, after all these years, give God the silent treatment. She believes that He has seen her, that He always sees her, even when He doesn’t respond. 

Sister returns to the candle glow of the vestibule off the main sanctuary. She does not know whether to expect a blessing or a punishment. The silence sits still in the chapel air, breaks into particulates, clings like incense smoke. At dawn, there is a mini-Mardi Gras moment when sunlight streams through the strained-glass windows and lights the hard wooden pews with flecks of purple, gold, green. This beauty is neither miracle nor God’s voice. Sister sees this beauty every day, like the sunrise, no matter how she behaves.