By PAIGE BLACKBURN.

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Stopping by the Valley on a Snowy Evening

“Illinois Valley man arrested after shooting, escaping on lawn mower, police standoff”
—centralillinoisproud.com

The murders, here,
are as sure as the wallabies, the boa constrictors, the chemical rain,
the explosions, drug busts,
suicides, mine collapses and sinkholes, hospital closures, fast food arsonists, local celebrities,
local legends, local pedophiles…

Dangerous and tetchy as a bomb,
the Valley is its own pressure plate,
a place made for minding your step,
the dip in the earth already
a pre-made blast zone.
But I can’t stop stopping
by. Can’t stop
staring into this mess
and seeing home, even now
that I have a choice whether I
stay or go. It’s really
not that lovely, but
the Valley is home against all odds to me.

It’s nurture, I guess is why.
Why I stop here every winter,
and each time,
with my toes on the edge of the valley wall, threatening a slip or a free fall,
I take the step. Start the descent.
I listen to the wind blow and whip
the snow into a longsword,
I watch the river run, sluggish, and
I brace myself for the place I love.

It feels less real each time I stay. More like a sci-fi sitcom, a fantastical satire.
The joke goes like this:
It’s the darkest evening of the year.
I’m at the bar. Which one? You know.
(No you don’t, there are eighty of them.) The Man Who Exudes Pure Evil

sits to my left, the
Valley Vampire on my right.
“What brings you here?” I ask. “I’ve always been here,” they speak.

“Why stay?” I ask, and they answer, “I have promises to keep.”

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MOUTHFUL OF GLASS 

Reflect a moment
on the Lady of Shalott, forever
weaving her tapestry from the image behind her, coming first
through the window,
then onto the mirror into which she stares. Leaving her threads for the world she sees kills her.

Repeat the likeness, but shift
its glare: think of Snow White’s
Evil Queen: “Mirror, mirror,
on the wall.” Again, she stares
all day long. She begs of it, and the answer shatters her.

Lady Macbeth looks longingly
into a mirror, too: she chomps
at the chance to be her husband, and
the face of ‘manhood,’ the guilt
of what she thinks it takes to be something maddens her.

You. Driving down a road – any road – glancing up in the rear view
and catching your own eye.
Always checking

the behind. It’s casual, it’s normal, it’s constant.
No matter how fast you drive, you cannot escape it.

They say women are vain. Like Narcissus,
they gaze
into their reflection

to pass the time, to lure
men in with a beauty perfected, unchanged, eternal.
As if beauty was a weapon
and not a threat.

In truth, it was never beauty the Evil Queen wanted, was it? It was

to be the best –
and haven’t we all had a taste
of that? To have a mouth
full of glass if it meant you could change, if it meant you could reign supreme,

above all others and else, faster,
more beautiful,
more anything.

The Evil Queen. Lady Macbeth. The Lady of Shalott. Any number of them,
willing
to do anything to prove herself.

Herself. Always her.

Strange, how something which only shows us
what’s behind
has become

what we become.
Maybe it’s because whatever becomes –
whatever enters this world as screaming as we do,

whatever bakes in the oven or aches through the loom as hot or as tense as we do
comes first from us.

Or maybe it’s because the woman
is always made to face
the back.
To cope with the past alone and cope with the past of others.

To be looked at, but never to see. Maybe it’s because, in this world

of dichotomies, the man is the window, the clear glass, the domed atrium
ceiling, all-seeing and high-
reaching, and the woman

is forever a copy
of the man, made
to shine back at him.

Maybe this is why
the women who look for more are often made evil

or cursed. The men know ambition well. To look within
is to become greater. To reflect
is to change.

But Truth is a woman who rises

out the surface of the water–
and she emerges ambitious
to spread her word. We come from beneath: that reflection, that rippling change
in Her wake. It was never
beauty, never vanity. Always power. There is power
in a dream, in an image, in a
well or a stream.

The Lady of Shalott is still rowing down that river. You’re still driving
down that road.

Press the gas. Look behind you, catch your own eye. Go, go, go,

go look in a mirror.

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PAIGE BLACKBURN is a twenty-two-year-old writer raised in the small, dark corners of rural Illinois–the same corn-huddled cradle where all their stories are born. Now, Paige resides in the Chicagoland area, working as a full-time editor for an academic publisher and a part-time coordinator of publications for the English department of Lake Forest College, her alma mater. Recently, they have also taken on the role of Managing Editor of The Fortnightly Review. You can find her other work in Unbroken Journal or Fiction Attic Press.