Afton Montgomery

Stand of enormous orange poppies on the hill in the back of the yard, next to and behind the echinacea I was afraid of. Because of spikes and because of bees. The black at the center of the poppies told a story from across the lawn about Halloween, but when I snuck up, through the grass, to look over the petal-lips from below, the centers were really powdered indigo, dusting.

Her eyeshadows smashed the yellow bathroom counter every single hue through my entire childhood, and they all survived bleach, especially purple. She did make-up for drag queens and actors when she was nineteen, and one of my first lessons in beauty was that a little green powder can undo the redness of pimples and hair follicles on a shaved face.

I was on a slab of red rock in the Rocky Mountains, shivering, when the sun crested the horizon white and warm, and paramedics called me in a world I could briefly not-at-all see. I told them he had a DNR and got in the car to drive back down to Daddy’s cancer-filled body.

Grandma Ginny’s body was covered, but her exposed face was the wrong shape, round instead of narrow. They had her in way more eye makeup than she ever wore. I asked Mom to take me back to the cottonwood tree in Grandma’s front yard before the neighbors started a fundraiser to cut it down. The branch that fell and killed her lay partially across the driveway next door. The tree was sorry, I think (my eleven-year-old self thought). There was too much wet snow, too early in the season. It was just too heavy.

I ask if God is heavy. Mom and I go looking. The golden dome of the Greek Orthodox church off Leetsdale is painted navy on the inside: day from outside, night from within. The cushioned seats at Institute for Self-Actualization meetings were always that same blue, just a shade closer to white. The Church of Religious Science in Lakewood wasn’t yet teched out like a megachurch. Carpet floors, herbal tea. Mostly, we just liked the singing. The lines for seminar blessings wrapped the first floors of conference hotels, in and out of hotel patrons eating steak and sipping drinks. When the guru touched us, he smelled of roses. We’d try anything.

The Jewish Community Center’s Schwayder Theater stage held tiny neon Xs in tape, to show me and the rest of each cast where to land our feet at the beginning and end of every number. It’s where I learned to perform. I ask what God means and Mom says maybe magic but means one thing turning into another.

Mom’s Wiccan friend Diana used to mix dried leaves into the cauldron on top of her stove. Mom was still allowed to practice magic then, but she’d been scared that Diana was becoming too powerful, dipping into the darkness. I miss Diana, even though I heard that she burned her house down with a spell.

Grandma Ginny gave me A Girl’s Guide to Spells for my birthday. It was springtime. Mom told me to be careful what I conjured.

I climbed the tree in the park to practice manifesting. The day the three brothers came from the next cul de sac, I was eight or nine and asked them to gather dandelions and pass them up to me so I could make us all crowns. For hours, they ran from me and back with hands full of blooms. Yellow stained my thumb tips with, perhaps, evidence of my success, although I don’t know if it was white magic or black. What I’m looking for, whatever it is, keeps landing in my lap.

Making a Cat’s cradle, my favorite parts were always the slip of the thumbs—twisting abstraction into the face of a feline—and the alchemy that came with the pinky drop and the inversion of the white string, right after.

Alchemy was the two goats on the route to my high school, eating clovers all day, eating while shitting, eating while walking and standing still. They tore the clovers from the ground with a violence that existed in the head and neck alone, bodies barrels to turn green into sustenance and waste.

Mom and I painted the downstairs bathroom “Jungle Trail” and then the hallway “Jungle Trail” and then into the living room. A pale green that Grandma Ginny used first, at her house, and which I wouldn’t stop begging for after. Mom’s friend told her she was ridiculous for letting a child pick the paint color, but Mom just put her big hands over her big ribcage and shrugged. Green is the color of the heart.

After Daddy had his heart attack when I was in elementary, I read Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by E.L. Konigsburg in the waiting room of the hospital and called my best friends Maddie then Abigail, Maddie then Abigail, on their parents’ home phones. The whole jacket was one dark pink rose whose petals I fell through, to an invented town in New York, where Margaret was trying to protect big towers of broken ceramic and metal and glass that her great uncles built from developers new to the area.

A stainless-steel slide comes out the bedroom window of a house in the hills. Yard of brambles, glass sculptures, windchimes. The dad wears a hat with a clown’s propeller to every gathering there, where a few hundred people come to play croquet through the day and into the night once annually, even when the smoke comes into the valley, even after the mudslides killed three of the boys from the foothills’ little world.

A teenage boy we knew and his flying teacher went down in the mountains in a prop plane. We never heard what went wrong. He was so good at flying by then, but still they both died on impact. Mom tells me to close my eyes; ask Source my questions. I hear God is all.

When I jumped out of a plane over farm country, the rectangles and crop circles below didn’t seem to change for a long time, while time was holding still. We pulled the chute a little late, and the ground came up fast into my ankles and then tailbone. Earth reminded of itself, its capacity to shake a person.

I shook Grandpa’s giant shoulder, jamming my armpit into the bed’s plastic railing with the effort of the big reach. I yelled at him, something I never would’ve dared if he were conscious. Wake up! which he did, and then later didn’t.

When I was awake through the nights the summer Daddy was sick, I drove myself to the mountains at two or three in the morning and started up the trail to Torreys Peak with my headlamp and the moon. When the sun came up, I’d be alone at 14,267 feet, peaks and snow below in every direction. It’s not till I’m coming down that I see the red paintbrush and mule’s ears, lupines and columbines and fireweed.

These old knees, Mom always says, a little slap to her thigh. AC Separation, the doctor said, palming my joint after Daddy was gone. I wrung out my shoulder girdle in a yoga studio, missing the point entirely, even though I learned yoga comes from the Sanskrit verb to yoke and means yoke the mind to the Divine. In my tattered copy of the sutras—threads for weaving together knowledge—the first says Atha Yogānuśāsanam. “The practice of yoga begins now.” Meaning: when you fail to get God’s bit in your mouth and the reins on right, start again. Same as Mom’s constraint.

Failing alone in the garden in the West, I spent a whole season digging out bellflower roots until, each day, the straps of my top cut into a new sunburn. The roots grew back overnight when it rained. I hoped it would rain and hoped it wouldn’t. In fall, when the smoke came and turned the sky apocalyptic—a new, human, kind of fire season—I knew I was right to half long for my own time’s demise.

When Mom was sure the Bird Flu would kill us all, she got her man to find a used hot tub we could adapt for water storage in the end times. Her best friend sat in that tub and sang “Amazing Grace” and every other hymn from her church over a glass of wine every night the world didn’t end.

Uncle once sat humming for hours with a glass cutter and a spool of lead came, soldering slivers of cobalt and peach into an angel in a blue robe holding a baby. It was for Mom—to honor that I was on the way. Grandma Ginny dog-eared pages in the angel book with her favorites, so she and Mom could mural the walls of my nursery with panels of women and heaven.

At the glass table, we picked from the deck of Angel Cards each week to guide our intentions. We sat on the forest green couch with the flowers woven into it and set our cards on the table. I learned the words prosperity and discernment and authenticity but not because anyone told me anything. Whenever I didn’t know a word, I had to take down Mom’s dictionary—covered in kelly green floral fabric and stamped in yellow with the word WORDS when she was eight years old—from its special spot on the shelf and look it up for myself. When I asked after God, Mom said Don’t know, look it up.

We had water glasses engraved with Love and Warmth and Patience because we saw What the Bleep Do We Know?! in the old theater down at Tamarac Square three or four times, and we believed every word, or Mom believed every word, or you take salvation when it’s offered and say Thank You no matter what.

At the neighbor’s house, where Mom dragged me in a sled when it snowed, Mom made me take a No Thank You Bite of every food I claimed not to like. To other moms, she explained: They have to try it to know for sure. I cried a long time over boiled cabbage but learned I do like chicken wings, sweating off the bone, after all. Everything’s a circle is what Mom says when I ask about dying.

At sixteen, we girls poured a splash from every liquor bottle in someone’s grandma’s cabinet into a blue Nalgene from Hell. Tequila and brandy and scotch and gin. In a field at the ranch that night, we slept on crumpled quilts wherever in the sagebrush we fell, and I counted seventeen shooting stars before I was out.

Sarita in the back of Tibet Imports on 6th Avenue in Denver read my star chart like she’s read Mom’s and everyone else’s over the decades, and she made me a mala of black beads, silver thread, to count my 108 prayers.

On solstice, Mom and I go to a studio with mirrors in the front or no mirrors at all. We unroll mats and do 108 salutations of the sun, up then down. Someone else does the counting; for each time we turn our faces to the ceiling, we start again at one. On equinox, we burn a forest green bayberry candle to the socket and sing its song.

Green is the smell of chiles roasting in a rotating cylindrical grate. Cast iron, air thick with char, and corn husk, and hay bale maze. The problem is you can carve a pumpkin an infinite number of ways. There’s always another face for what’s True, another string of orange slime wrapped around a seed. Mom prays Mother-Father God. And then Amen.