By Elle Fournier
The site was chosen because of its isolation and because of the abundance of water
Zach Cook, Nuclear Legacy
from the Columbia River, which could be used as a coolant for the reactor…B Reactor
produced plutonium that was used in a test explosion at White Sands, New Mexico,
and in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
The sun falls behind our mountain
like a child colors an Easter egg;
he splatters red and yellow vinegar
on mother’s favorite dress,
leaves only silica to sparkle.
When we were smaller
we thought it might be uranium
glittering in the sand—
or tips of spider legs, still with life
left to grasp our bombing-range soil,
weaving threads of talc
between private underground pools,
snagging the 60,000 apparitions
that dangle from delicate spools.
Beneath paltry abundance,
a spindly swingset under desert noon,
every morning we dug, raw-handed
and Fruity Pebble fresh, scooping down
until the sand was wet and cool.
Once, we dug so low we stood
tip-toed, bottom-stranded—
waiting to hear mother whisper
in father’s ear; the muffled
cry of airplanes we counted two
by two; the murmurs of a patient
monsoon. No one had told us
what the water knew—
how to weave graveyards
into rope ladder,
to press pursed lips
against earth, to suck away
every drop.
Elle Fournier is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate in English Rhetoric and Composition. She grew up in the shrub steppe of Washington state.
