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Our Picnic
Maggie Von Sacher

Everywhere I look around me, nature is green and the summer worms are out, hanging from the
storied old oak trees. It is hot, and I kiss my boyfriend. Of course there is such doubt, trying to define what good things I can have and what I am able to say without falling into a series of lies.

My head is on the picnic table. I am stoned, managing few words between the ragged drivel of nearby
car horns. Wooden crosses are stationed next to each other, keyed into the earth, a graft of warm red
reflected in the base of the clouds. My hands fumble with the tools, the feeling of lowering hairy roots into hard ground. I eat one of our biscuits, freshly jammed.

There is always someone roaming the sidewalk in the heat. I understand why a girl from around here
would try not to look fat, just in order to be left alone. Two billboards sit above the only movie theater that’s around, the strip of sky papered over. From behind all the cane and trees and bushes, I wonder if our picnic can be seen from the road.

Creased wallpaper with tiny yellow arrows, the one vantage I had, pale even on the darkest nights.
The things I foresee almost never reflect what is desirable. This is as admissible an excuse as any to
lie, I have told myself. Oil has a structural chokehold on this town in the sense that there is no oil to plunder, nothing to inflate our pride or bring shareholders in. Still, it brings a charmed and faithful comfort to live here, like a well lit path.

I think I see blooms of blood in the glasses of ice on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth. But it is a man moving toward us in brown overalls. He is here, and like a lunatic with a gun in a mall. He
clinks as he walks. We are packing up our picnic, the biscuits, the egg salad, the strawberries, but we
are not doing it fast enough. I can see our three constellated fates, connected like meat from between
hooks. My heart pounds an addled beat, should I find myself any closer to him… should I slice
through the deranged fears.

I am assured I am not imagining what I am seeing because the sky is still dirty. Straw and water still
mix into a slurry. Soon his knife is on me. Soon he is plunging his knife into you as your body curls
up, yet I do not feel the guilt that comes with watching in one moment all my human debts percolate
to the top, the gravity of a twin soul. Lying is no good to me now. I remember how, out front of a
nearby house, I once found a dead nestling which had hardened in grout, glowing from within its blue
shellac bones.

Our Picnic
Maggie Von Sacher

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V for Vinegar
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