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Click the play button below to listen to Didi Jackson read “Wild.”
When we moved our cat to our new house, the first thing he did was slip up the chimney without doubt or fear after feeling a slight draft of cold air escape from the fireplace’s black mouth. He was looking for a way out. A way home. He scrambled up what we’d thought would become the heart of the house. Nothing could lure him down. No food lifted on cardboard or softly sung ballads. He wedged himself beyond the narrow throat and sat on the smoke shelf, safe in soot and ash. When I was little, we didn’t have a fireplace. Even though it could snow in Florida, no one had flues to clean or creosote to peel from brick, no ash thin as onionskin to watch take wing and fly above flames. I was a sleepwalker through most of those days. A passenger in my own life. I couldn’t look to my family and see myself reflected there. I was born to no one. I was wild. A lawn full of dandelion seed heads, lion’s-tooth, all waiting for breath. And when the water seemed to hiss down by the lake, I knew it was to me it called. You’ll have to do better than that, said the grackle, drinking at the water’s edge, wedged between reeds of cattails. To be wild, that is.