The Memory Thief by Rachel Keener

or maybe just best wishes. I threw it
     across the room. Stomped on it. Even put it in the oven once with the gas turned on. I didn’t want to be a check-holdin’ widow
     any more than you wanna be a Yankee Holy Roller. I just wanted to be his wife. That’s the way my life, how’d you say it? Was
supposed
to be.”
    Hannah nodded.
    “I learned, like it or not, that’s who I was. A check-holdin’ widow. And as I stared at that check, I began to see it different.
     It wasn’t the thing that took my husband from me. Instead, it was the last thing that he would ever give me. I had four babies,
     and I had to make it count.”
    “So here we are,” Sissy said. “Twenty years later. Momma raised us in that motel. We had a home and a business, all because
     she decided to turn the gas off and get that check back out.”
    “Wasn’t as easy as Sissy likes to say. She’s my baby sunshine,” Cora laughed. “It was hard on ’em. I ordered the kids to sleep
     outside under the snake tree when the rooms were full and the late-nighters were watchin’ TV in the lobby. It was a sad sight
     to look out there and see their hot faces peekin’ in the windows, the boys’ dirty hands—little boys’ hands is always dirty—wavin’
     at me. It hurt me, but we needed the rent money bad. And now there’s a real sweetness to it. They was wild, all four of ’em.
     But they laid under that tree all night for me. They never once acted up. I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been on ’em.”
     She shook her head. “They’ll break for you. If that’s what they think you need. They’ll lay under a twisted snake tree and
     never once cry
Momma
.”
    “She don’t tell it right,” Sissy said. “We was good kids, for one. None of that wild bit that she likes to talk. And we was
     happy ones, too. Sometimes at night, if no renters were here, Momma’d have all our cousins come and we’d have the biggest
     sleepover. We’d eat cheeseburgers, not a shrimp to be found. We’d jump on all the beds, run races down the hall, turn out
     all the lights and play hide ’n’ seek. Sometimes Momma’d pretend she couldn’t find us and start hollerin’ that she’d have
     to eat all the ice cream herself and, oh mercy, we’d come flyin’…”
    “Our point is,” Cora said, interrupting Sissy, “we livin’ in the snake tree now. Things ain’t how they oughta be. Won’t be
     till Jesus himself comes to uproot us all. Till then, you gotta make do.”
    They fed her sweet tea and key lime pie all week long. And at night, she would lay in Number Four and think about snake trees,
     falling freight on big boats, babies breaking themselves. But the thing she thought of most, the thing she whispered into
     her pillow like a sweet lullaby, was the thing Cora first whispered.
You poor baby girl
.
    When the week ended, the cabdriver drove her down to Folly Beach for one last look before driving to Columbia.
    She lingered. Searching for something different. The piled rocks of old broken fishing piers were the same. The war cry still
     matched the beat of her heart. The people, staring at her four-foot-long hair whipped around by ocean winds, seemed the same.
    Still, though, something was different. And though the cabdriver honked his horn, Hannah could not leave until she knew what
     it was. She took off her shoes, felt the deep chill of the ocean. Dipped her hand in the water, to scoop up a shell. Brought
     her hand to her mouth to taste the salt.
    And then she smelled it. Not like before, with the smell of salt. She could smell all of it. The dead fish and the clean live
     ones. The rocks being pounded into sand. The bait that had been discarded at dawn. The nylon of summer swimsuits. The oil
     of old shrimp boats.
    Something stirred within. Like a storm inside her body. Like hot snakes twisting in the sun. She was working to build a new
     universe. From her blood and bones and tissue. It wasn’t that she felt a baby. It’s that she