Portrait of a Milkmaid
Portrait of a Milkmaid
By Alyssa Blankenship
I began walking on open-blistered feet, a faint trail of blood making a rich and rusted mud of footprints behind me. The sun was a red eye on the horizon ahead, dipping the dirt road and the lining eucalyptus trees in carmine, dripping and saturated. The road stretched endlessly behind me and seemed to go on into the horizon. My legs felt deadened, weak. Perhaps I had been walking a long time. Perhaps once, I had been running. The dry and wanting tongue in my mouth told me this was closer to the truth.
I could smell the heat of the day, a lingering ghost who had pressed itself into the atmosphere, into each blade of flaxen foxtail and splintered fence post. I wandered off the road and came to rest my hand along the fence, barbed wire coils like twisted metal worms. Steel shard sentinels guarding open, barren fields. I was leaking, my fingertip relinquishing a runaway trickle, crimson and sluicing. In the solar flare of sunset, we were all a violent and ephemeral burst of vermillion, temporal red sprites firmly rooted to the ground. Tree and girl and fence post, we were all alike in that indiscriminate, inescapable light.
When the sun abandoned us, so did our likeness to each other. In the pitch of night, I was the only one who did not belong here, the only one not rooted to the earth of this place. So, I sucked on my dripping finger, letting saliva and iron swirl together in my mouth, as I once again set upon the road. The moon crept up behind me, butter yellow and gigantic against the endless black ocean of the sky. It shone wan light upon the silken shimmer of my corset, baby blue turned a dull grey by dust, ribbons trailing against my skin like tickling worms. My skirts were cotton, stained, hitched. I smelled of sour milk and sweat, human and animal mixing on my skin and becoming indistinguishable.
It was then I remembered where I had been, because I saw it standing before me. A barn, sun-bleached and shoddy. The quiet shuffle of hooves and huffs betrayed the beasts housed within, the cream and black of their hides. It was these hides that pulled me in, to shelter amongst them one more time. One last time. My bleeding feet were raw, and the straw beneath them was warm, sharp, merciless. It was home. The bloody trail I left behind would give me away in the morning, but there was no one to see me now but my cows, my moon.
I lifted my hand to the fur of my favorite cow, Cornflower sighing into my touch. I stroked a red line across her, my hand throbbing as it melted against her warm side, her deep and untroubled breaths. Resting my head against her, she held my weight as I sagged. My eyes roamed, lighting against the shelves that lined the walls. They were laden with skulls, chewed clean by insectile mouths and heat’s devouring tongue, white forms flickering in the dimness as if possessed. I had collected them, the remnants of this place, spat up like owl pellets into the dirt. We all died here, in one way or another. Animal or milkmaid, the hands of these fields were calloused and starving, and any flesh would do.
In the muffle of the night, I heard the farmhouse weathervane creak, the claw of metal against metal. The rattling bars of a cage, the teeth of a trap snapping shut. There was no difference. It had always been the same. There was no god in this place but appetite, divine consumption sucking bones and fingers clean. Holiness had never been anything but a sapping force, bibles propped on nightstands to belie unclean deeds and unsavory palates, crosses nailed to the wall above the begging of prayers. Televangelism was a static crackle during the day, church bulletins a littered confetti that teetered in stacks and fell, dusty and forgotten, to the slatted floors.
Divinity is a sickness, an allegory that felt like hands around my neck, squeezing on my pale throat the same way my fingers squeeze on the soft pinkness of an udder, as if there lies within my neck something to give, a commodity that only needs to be unearthed. I have worn that noose before, been powerless beneath it.
I shuffled around the straw beneath Cornflower’s trough and unearthed my pack of cigarettes, the paper peeling and saturated with the sickly-sweet scent of dried, yellow grain. Striking a match across the boards, sulfur lit the air as a tiny wooden stake bore flame, singing against tobacco. I savored the soft burn against the wet interior of my throat, the pull and coax of a lover’s finger traveling into my lungs, lingering. I did not close my eyes.
A shovel lived in the corner, sharpened for killing snakes, the metal edge primed for separating their heads from their bodies in a makeshift guillotine. I had a different purpose for it, although the result would be much the same. I took it in my hands, hardened and strong from hours and days and years spent milking, an endless job of beginnings and endings.
I was used to the song here, cicadas screaming a warning from the trees, the hiss of milk hitting the pail, the breath of the horizon rustling dry grass. I made my own song then, the rhythm of shovel in baked earth, the pry of dirt from its rightful place. I must have been walking all night, but now that I was here, my strength returned, a resolve that belied my shaking legs. My shovel was like the mouth of an earthworm, each load of dirt a meal, a swallow. I made my pilgrimage into the world, traveling downwards. Each shovelful dropped into the wheelbarrow, a rope hanging down from it, frayed and rusted by iron oxide’s stain.
The moon was above me, my enemy and closest friend. Witness to all the wrong that had been done in this place, the sins that did not beg forgiveness. The death sentence of a sucking, inescapable life in almost-isolation, the rural jail a trap I could not wander from. The witness was full, whole and unblinking above me. It would disappear into the ether tomorrow, carrying with it this last memory of me above the dirt.
When I had carved a hole deep enough, I filled it with myself, curled and fetal in the hands of a place that had never nurtured me. Was not capable of such a thing. I looked up into the moon, the brightness of its surface, the shadows of its craters, and wished that it could hold me instead. But this had never been a life of choices, so I took the rope in my hand and let the slide of dirt fall like a shroud over me as I buried myself alive.
