Winter Memories Game Download
Jaimee Jaffy
My father sat in the corner of the kitchen, curling and uncurling his hand around the hot tea my mother brought him, and watched her clean the rabbits, making a slit at the back of their heads before peeling the warm fur down their pink bodies. It was a ritual I tried not to watch, but I always watched it because no one spoke as she cleaned them under the faucet and laid them on a clean towel on the sink, then swirled clean water around and around the sink. Once, when he went hunting on a winter's night, I remember the moon floating in the blood at the bottom of the sink. It was more than a memory. But I didn't know what to call it then, nor can I articulate it now. But it's still there, as fresh in my memory as the feel of the rabbits hitting against my side as we walked through the ruined corn, our boots crunching the thin layer of new ice in the furrows.
My father never talked much, and even less out in the fields. He would touch my shoulder and point to crows rising out of the fields into the winter moon, and we would stop and listen to their cries falling into Turley's Woods as they became a dark V on the horizon. Sometimes he would not fire a shot, and we would hunker down on a dry log and watch rabbits poke their noses out from their den beneath the rotting stocks and hop cautiously around, nibbling the stiff grass sticking out of the snow. He never tried to shoot them then, and I wondered what the difference was. I think [End Page 122] he had a code he followed: if he was walking through the fields and looking for game, then it was all right to blow them into eternity and bits and pieces with his shotgun, but if we were sitting down, just waiting there in the cold, he would not shoot them. I didn't understand his code entirely, but I never questioned it.
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