We Make Mud

Girl

Us brothers, we love the sound of that word girl so much that one day, out of nowhere, we start calling everything we see, Girl. Let’s go, Girl, we say, to each other. Let’s go down to the girl, one of us brothers will go to the other, and to the river is where we go. Let’s catch us some girl, the other brother will then say to this, and we’ll grab us our fishing poles and a muddy bucket of worms and into the river us brothers fish. Girl sure is girly, one of us will point this out, pointing with a finger at the muddy river flowing past our feet. After a while, after we fill our buckets up with a whole mess of girl, one of us brothers will say, Sister, I’m hungry. Let’s go fry us up some girl. Like this, us brothers, we go back and forth between us, girl this and girl that, until it is raining girls and girl. The moon in the sky is girl. The sky and the mud is girl. It’s us girls walking round this girl town with girl dripping from our lips, girl this and girl that, until bottles and buckets and rusty trucks and trains, until hammers and fish heads and bent-back nails — all of these things come rushing up to us brothers, all of them drawn to us by the sound that those four letters make: G-I-R-L. But girl the way that girl was meant to be spelled: with twelve r’s, thirteen u’s, and twenty-thousand l’s at the end of girl, stretching across the earth.