The floribunda rose bush and blackberry vines grew tangled together, like a crotchety, ill-suited couple, in the patch along the fence out behind the farmhouse. When she was a child, she and her younger brother, Mickey, had gone to pick berries for pie and always pricked themselves to bits on the thorns. Now it hurt less, except at night before bedtime when she put cream on her hands and then they'd burn.

 

Memories flickered into her consciousness like glass slivers, something to retrieve cautiously. They had summered there tucked in the backwoods of Southern Illinois for twenty years, she, her mother and brother. In the 1950's when her parents were still together, they had bought the place, the farm already fifty years old. Rose was seven. When they visited the first time, the realtor, a very, very big, bald man showed them through the tall, dark rooms. The stately, white wooden pillars on the wide front porch had impressed her as grand. Inside, though, the floors were so uneven, she had the sensation of rolling through the house. Maybe the floors had been rebuilt because she didn't notice the strangeness anymore.

 

The berry patch was above the Indian mounds. Once some archaeologists had notified them about wanting to excavate the site. Her parents had refused and she was relieved. They rolled above the grassy plain that ended on the banks of the Little Wabash. When they listened to the jukebox at the table in the Blue Bird Cafe in town, her mom would play The Wabash Cannonball, proud that the water on their land was a tributary of the Great Wabash. It was like having an important relative. The mounds were where she chose to go most often. She and Mick had found some arrowheads there and buried them beneath the floorboards in her room with a note on tree bark to Whoever Finds This. The message she had since forgotten and she couldn't figure out which floorboards they were because none of them were loose.

 

The mounds still brought Rose back. She had felt the first stirrings of her own separateness in that place. Her breasts had started to grow, and when she lay on her stomach napping in the afternoon sun, they hurt, as if marbles were stuck in her shirt pockets, driving themselves hard into her chest. There Mickey and she had played with their bodies, gently exploring all kinds of ways to touch. Once there was a kiss, so deep, a tingling gushed over her, melting her bones to warm liquid that seeped down into the ground below. There was more and only because she was older and learned other names for it, did it bother her at all. Truth told, she loved this secret time of sweet pleasure, nervous awakenings that tickled like long feathers grazing flesh.

 

At some point, it had slipped away. She guessed they outgrew it. There was no trace of that time between either of them now and for that she was grateful. It wasn't him, anyway; it belonged to her own self and the silent mounds of earth filled by sacred ritual, put away with great care forever.