What’s Wrong With Sienna?

You can probably imagine a husband-not-baby say he’s hungry, and the woman-his-wife Sienna hurry and scurry, her hands and fingers and wrists getting busy with kneads and whisks, mammaries leaking, while the baby-from-him sleeps, because Sienna must be efficient like-cattle-like-poultry, like her-mother-Nannima, and all the women-like-her-married-at-seventeen, like Nannima said to her on the wedding day, You need to be as busy as a whirring fan, a good wife to the husband-not-lamb in the decade of the drought, for he reared those lambs on the grasslands-not-green, and those would die before they found butchers, a lucky chance to be wed and fecund, in case there was hailstorm-but-no-rain like all these years, and hunger deaths. Millet flatbreads hot off the fire, not-crisp-not-white spread with pickled radish, while the dry-as-anything not-warm-not-cold wind howls, the baby cries out awake-asleep-unsure, miserable in its damp cot, and a lonely jackal lurks somewhere under the Khejris not-yet-not-wild and waits to take a kill on the single hapless goat tied there outside, in the forlorn yard, and the husband-not-hungry slides-in a singular mandatory question-like-it’s-an-answer between chews, Did you? pointing to the breads, meaning Did you eat?, which is as close to caring-as-in-loving as a man could get, Sienna knows, for she’s seen men as brother-as-father-as-this. When the man-father-husband leaves, the door-pane still swinging, like counting the passing of years-not-wants-not-warmth, she sits by the clay oven, listens to the locusts reaching for the dead crop fields around, listens to her breaths not-moans-now-never, grabs the baby like a pillow-not-him, eases herself and baby like pair of ragdolls, and cuddles the baby until it has found what it seeks in its mouth, and this-girl-woman-mother is not-Sienna, because she has escaped someplace-else, no-not-this, in imagined-leaps-of-wishful-fantasy like-everyday-not-never.