When the fleshy clefts healed in the lambs’ ears, finely edged with fur, I knew it was time and grabbed a sheep by the leg. I flipped her to her back, binding her ankles with baling twine, tossed her excrement aside, snipped at her knees and thighs, then released the twine to stretch her wide, rolling back her greasy coat. Along the tender outskirts of her belly, flecks of skin populated the wool— by holding the body too taut, tenting the skin in the pivot point of the shears, I etched tilted windows into her, revealing lavender veins over a pearl backcloth of fat. No blood, but her breath caught each time. The trick, I know now, is to pull the skin down, nestling your fingertips against the blade, and cut as closely to the pelt as you can. Cut the new sheep out of her that way.
I used to think my son said mama until I realized it was his word for car, or for the sound he thinks it makes— muh-muh-muh. Each day, we idle in the driveway and he plays with the radio while I wait for the world to be safer. He has no interest in its intended utility until we drive to a lake, where he startles at the expanse and the wind whips his face pink and snotty. He shrieks with the gulls hanging above us like marionettes and I shut my eyes to etch the sound into my bones. Again and again these days, I dream my feet are concrete and I look just in time to see him twirl away from some glittering fender like a ribbon in a breeze. Unable to move, to catch him, I slump to my knees. I’ve made a rule for myself: I don’t write the same childhood scenes anymore, not the ones I once considered evidence of some suffering, now that I know the most painful part of mothering is learning how loved you were. In the dream, both of us sick with grief, I drive my mother to a barn filled with owls. Cats spiral the creaking floor, driven by duty and hunger, keeping watch as we try to wade in. The owls know, she says. I like to think I’m not alone in my dreams, that other souls slip in to guide or comfort, but I’ve been told that each figure flickers a light over the self. And it’s not too hard to see my self in the car that brings us here; in the barn that holds us all. In the owls and the cats, my son in the road, the truck that refuses to slow; and my mother catching me as I fall.
Clara Strong was born in Virginia and grew up in New Hampshire and Indiana, both of which often feature in her poetry. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2020, and is presently working to finish her first collection of poems. Her work has appeared in Rascal, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in southern Indiana with her husband, their two children, and a handful of rambunctious chickens.
These illustrations for the 1906 French edition of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds are by Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa. Not a great deal is known about Corrêa, who died of tuberculosis at age thirty-four, only a few years after the illustrations featured here were published. During the first decade of the twentieth century, as The History Blog puts it, Corrêa “developed a style of strong contrasts and dynamic movement in both drawing and painting,” returning again and again to themes of “eroticism and violence individually and in combination”. Reading The War of the Worlds in 1903, Corrêa saw a work perfectly suited to his talents and obsessions. He did several illustrations of the book “on spec” and traveled to London to show them to Wells, who was apparently so impressed he invited him to illustrate the new Belgian edition of Davray’s translation. “Alvim Corrêa”, Wells said after the artist had died, “did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen”. See The History Blog at http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/36376 and The Public Domain Review at https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/henrique-alvim-correa-war-of-the-worlds
