There was a rumor, told to Zelda by her grandmother, that her seven-times great-grandfather was a bastard son of Samuel Mason, but there’s surely been too many bastards born since then to say for certain. When she was younger, it was her favorite thing about herself. She did a presentation on the river pirates of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in her fifth-grade class, and on the playground she liked to play a highwayman—pushing her classmates onto the cracked asphalt and stealing their four-square balls.  

Since then her daddy had gotten locked up in Shawnee and her momma had wandered South to greener pastures. But she always had Johnny. 

When they were seventeen he begged her every day to run away with him. She said no every time, believing that something was out there for her if she could only figure out what it was. If she could go back in time she’s not sure what she would say. 

When she thinks favorably of Johnny, she thinks of college, when they haunted the corners of dive bars with their friends. One such night, compelled by the same restlessness, they ended up outside smoking cigarettes alone. The stars were heavy in the sky, obscured here and there by billowy clouds the color of ash. 

“Let’s go,” Johnny said.

“Go where?” Zelda said.

“Anywhere.”

They were drawn by the long stretch of wet road, as it wound between quiet houses and cemeteries and gas stations. Johnny’s hand was warm and firm in hers, and they ran. Zelda liked the idea of disappearing. She was sure that if she kept going she’d eventually reach the end of the world. But Johnny had to stop and barf in the ditch. Zelda laughed and laughed, and she still remembers the way the crisp autumn air felt on her overheated skin, and the way his eyes gleamed when he finally rallied and ran his long fingers through his messy, sweaty mop of hair.

This same hum in their blood turns them into snarling dogs, carving tracks in the dirt as they pace the far edge of their chain’s reach. If he puts holes in the wall, well, so did his daddy. If she eviscerates him with simmering resentment it’s only because she’s trying to keep things civilized. 

When she comes home from a day that ripped her up inside he might say, “It’s not my fault you’re thirty and work a minimum wage job.” 

In which case, she resists the urge to correct him. She’s a few years shy of thirty and her pay is a few dollars over minimum wage, but Johnny always favors the story over the truth.

“You’re so fucking annoying,” she says instead. 

There is a dark instinct inside her that opposes any act of mercy—it only wants to finish him off once he’s wounded. When he turns red and sputters with rage, she just sneers. He slams the front door behind him and chain-smokes cigarettes in the driveway. Zelda glares at him from the living room window. 

One day, Zelda thinks, she’ll somehow have lots of money and then she’ll buy him every motorcycle he’s ever told her about, and once he finally has all the things that he’s ever wanted, she’ll take a crowbar to every gleam of polished metal. 

“Why do you hate me?” he asks very sincerely when he comes back thirty minutes later.

Zelda takes a calming breath, in which she imagines all the very mean things she could say, but won’t, and eventually he gives up and goes to the bar. She wanders around the house, pets the cat, and gathers up enough change to go to Dairy Queen for a sundae she’ll eat in her car. 

The sunset is beautiful. A murmuration of starlings cuts through the sky.

Sleep is fitful that night. She dreams of the noose and her grandma’s grave and a baby with Johnny’s eyes. Johnny gets home from the bar late and Zelda wakes as his arms come around her and pull her in close. He smells like cigarettes and gasoline.

“I’d rather fight and be together than not have you,” he says, and he sounds almost sober.

“Why are those the only options?” she asks.

“Maybe they aren’t,” he says. 

She thinks on this a while, long enough that Johnny starts to snore behind her. She traces the divots and veins of his arms like it’s a map that will lead her somewhere better. When sleep doesn’t come, she slips from their bed. 

There is a letter that she’s started many times and will never send. When she sits down to write it, this time it says: 

Dear Father,

This is your daughter. You know about the pirates that ruled the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and how they were all sorts of immoral and downright bad? They’d rob and kill people and keep their scalps to soothe some ache inside them. I’m sure Grandma told you the story about how the Harpe brothers would force people to strip naked and then shove them off the cliff at Cave-in-Rock. It was one of those boys that brought our great grandpa’s head in for a reward, which was dumb because he got recognized and hanged at the gallows down somewhere in Mississippi.

Those pirates maybe had lovers. They maybe had children who loved, or wanted to love, them. Maybe those children were sad when their fathers met a bad end. Maybe they grew up to be bad, too. 

Isn’t that the nature of things? Some things move in our blood. A current impossible to resist. 

Maybe one day someone I tried to love will think back kindly on me.

Patience Burton is a writer living in Southern Illinois.