SSM 2011: "By Light We Knew Our Names" by Anne Valente, from HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW 48

Anne Valente's "By Light We Knew Our Names" (published in the new issue of Hayden's Ferry Review) begins in the long light of northern Alaska's summer, in a small town called Willow, "north of Anchorage, abandoned by miners seeking gold, leaving lines of sons behind, only occasional daughters, only us." The narrator begins:

Through summer, we waited... We waited through June, through July, when the sun ripped a white fissure from tree line to sky, a sky that burned all day and all night, turning away from us for only moments, four hours, five, settled into its own sleep. The days were long then, stretched wide and full of light, but for us, full of only bruises. Full of slaps, across sunburned cheeks when flowers weren't watered, when dishes sat and scummed. Full of cuts from broken bottles, held against our throats until we gasped Yes, take my money, just take it and go. Full of scratches from the exposed metal of pick-up flatbeds, latticing the backs of our thighs, hands held across our mouths to catch and crush the word no. They were long days, spilling light, so much light it shadowed every hurt.

We waited through split lips, through whistles from car windows, through bribes brokered at the movie theater, Free tickets for a hand job. We waited through failed lifeguard applications, through mocking glances at our muscles—Those biceps can't save anyone—through gazes that moved from arms to breasts, through allowances paid to our brothers, the extra change flipped our way, Go buy yourself a Seventeen. We waited until Wren came late to the bluffs, one night in August, carrying a six-pack in one hand, the other covering her mouth where blood spilled between her fingers. She landed her beer hard on our picnic table, removed her hand, slapped a wet, red handprint against the wood, said Enough. 

Wren says, "We would wait, so quiet they'd never notice us gone, until we could learn to fight, for self-defense, for release," and so it's on these bluffs that the narrator and her three friends meet in the evenings, after "the men of Willow at last [leave them] alone, [creeping] inside to corner taverns or living room couches," where they wait together for fall to come, for winter, its longer, darker nights. In the meantime, each of the girls has to navigate the male dangers of Willow, and those dangers are legion: For Wren, it's her father, who beats her and steals her paychecks, locking them in a small safe he keeps in his car; for Tee, it's her boyfriend Brett, the "dark bruises" he leaves upon her body; for Kestrel, it's "her brother, his carload of derelicts... her brother pinning her back by the elbows, taking dollar bills from his friends after they'd slid a hand beneath her shirt."

Teal, Valente's narrator, living in "what felt like the only home without a man in all of Willow," claims at first to have it better than the others, with "no monstrous fathers in my house after mothers finally left, no brothers selling me to their friends, and no boyfriends holding me beneath the weight of them." Still, there are two men who have come to define much of her life in Willow: the absent father she's never known, never even had detailed by her mother, despite "years and years of asking... who he was, where he'd gone and why," and also her mother's co-worker and perhaps-boyfriend Jim Henshaw, one time "exposing himself from [his] car," saying, "Who's gonna believe you, no daddy around?" before sending her "home an hour late, pine needles piercing my jacket, back roads mired in bramble."

By September, Willow is "swallowed... in dark just past the school's afternoon bell," and the girls head for the bluffs again, "clothes black enough to hold us against night while the auroras bloomed before us, wavering curtains of emerald, bright enough to sustain our way without flashlights." There the girls take turns holding a pillow up like a punching bag so that the others can hit it, Tee, punching, "Wren holding the edges tight, footing staggered across the uneven surface of rock until Tee finally had enough." Then it's Wren's turn, then Kestrel's:

I looked at Kestrel, who stood there by the picnic table, shoulders hunched, curled in to protect what was hers, constantly taken. I clutched the other pillow Wren brought, resting heavy on the picnic table, and stood before Kestrel, pillow held against my breastbone, arms steeled and ready for the first tremored blow. Kestrel raised her eyes to mine, and behind her the auroras wavered like brushstrokes, alighting glints of her hair and for a moment, casting her face in indelible sorrow. Her eyes moved down to the pillow and fixed there, seeing what I imagined was more than thread counts, more than cotton. Then she punched, both hands clenched rigid, she punched so hard I felt what force was in her move through me, a kinetic quake, all the light she held inside her, some separate sun no one saw, eclipsed.

The girls continue to be set upon by the men of the town, especially those closest to their lives, their brothers and boyfriends and fathers, and together the girls continue to escalate their violence upon the bluffs, trading punches, swinging a bat Wren brings from home against their maple tree, "bark splintering from root, chips bursting, revealing sap." As she teaches Kestrel how to calm herself, to practice her swing, to gain control, she says, "It isn't enough to just be angry, to vent our wrongs. We need to be calculated, prepared." Teal narrates:

As the northern lights flared above us, I looked at her and thought release, practice, slow build of muscle to fight if needed, self-defense. But through the cadence of her voice, and the way her jaw settled in a thin line, clenched, I wondered for the first time whether the plan held an if for her, or only the tenor of when.

Valente excels throughout this story at ratcheting up the tension through a combination of techniques: First, she continues to fill in the town of Willow, showing us how close the girls are to each other, even though they are often unable to help each other, as in this first explanation of Teal's proximity to Wren:

Wren lived across the street from me, ever since memory allowed either of us to know one another, and through the open windows of my bedroom I heard her screaming sometimes, through the fixed stillness of summer air when every window shuttered open to let in what stale breeze flowed, our town too far north for air conditioning. I heard her screaming at her father, his roaring voice consuming hers in return, a lobbied match of aggression that splintered through my windows while I tried to sleep, punctuated at times by the sound of broken glass, dishes thrown, and sometimes, the piercing thud of fists.

With each new detail of the town, the story becomes more claustrophobic, its more fraught, and as Valente adds detail she also takes away more and more light, casting a constantly heavier cloak of over the town, reducing the air to constant night, the girls to dark-clothed boxers, breathing in the black. Artificial lights disappear from around the bluffs—"Nights that long, no one goes out... No flashlights, no headlights"—and Valente replaces them with more and more sky-flung auroras, their "shades, their seasons, their steady growth past equinox," creating a gorgeous and surreal image of these girls upon the dark bluffs, striking each other and their tree with fists and bat and switchblade as "beauty burst and blooming overhead, haloing [their] town."

The last source of tension—and ultimately the most powerful—is the constant, burning danger she puts her four girls in. Hardly a meeting at the bluffs isn't accompanied by the evidence of some new attack on the girls, some new shame or remade face, "still bruised, patched black faded slowly to muted yellow":

The days grew shorter, nights longer. And yet the days felt still stretched, even without light, all the hollers and whistles and barks filling the dark spaces the sun left behind, all our walks home, every walk to work. At the car wash, before her dad even made it to her paychecks, Wren suffered catcalls, her hands sliding sponges across hoods while boys shouted from backseat windows, You can wash my hood anytime, mocked and high-fived, tried to tuck meager tips into the waistband of her jeans. Kestrel avoided the bleachers after school, tried the shortcut through woods, and was cornered in the library bathroom instead, during study hall, locked in by Todd Marcus, her brother's best friend. He pinned her to the wall, slithered a hand down her pants. Threw five dollars against the tiled floor, once he'd had enough.

After Wren's father beats her again for hiding a pay raise from him, for keeping "some small cache for herself hidden between mattress and box spring," she arrives at the bluff to carve "a target into a maple tree... A silhouette, arms and legs, full height, taller than any of us." Wren attacks the silhouette with her knife, exhuasting herself against this image of her father—of her father, and all the other men too—before asking the other girls a question: "What did you want to be? What did you want, before all this, before you knew what we know?"

The girls answers are simple, general fantasies, the stuff of childhood, adolescence turning into adulthood: "to be an astronaut"; "to open a... hairdressing shop"; "A house... Two dogs, maybe a cat... to share that with someone who loved me."

Furious, Wren says, "If I just had the money, I'd leave this fucking place behind," and it's only Teal that doesn't answer:

Tee nodded, Kestrel smiled with sorrow. And me, I watched the hard-packed ground, a question I'd never considered, if Willow had ever left me space to dream, to wish, or if I'd only had it so much better, my mother and me, no need for animal instinct, the inborn desire to flee.

Immediately after this exchange, the story offers the only one full scene between Teal and her mother, the two of them enjoying a strangely festive meal, the mother giggling "like she was fourteen," claiming she "just wanted a nice dinner with her daughter." Teal, still thinking of the conversation on the bluff, narrates:

She looked up at me, face smooth of lines, and the joy there broke my heart a little, to crack the silence, to pull her from the refuge of pleasure, so small.

What did you want? I asked... When you were a little girl. What did you want to be?

Her fork stopped twirling, and she set it down. She swallowed. A sadness wavered across her features, but when she looked up at me, I saw only a smile.

I wanted you, Teal... In the end, you're my baby girl. That's all that matters.

What follows this conversation into the dark hours of the story's ending is best left unspoiled, but by this point of the story Valente has tensioned all the elements of the story to breaking, without granting even the slightest release: the girls are battered, bruised, violated, but still mostly whole, still strong as long as they are in each other's company, the bonds between them holding tough despite the constant attacks from all sides. Silhouetted against the auroras, the girls fight the phantoms of their very-real oppressors, banding together to lash out with fist and bat and blade against that which they cannot fight off forever, not as long as they stay in Willow.

Even if they do stay—and this is of course part of what this story has always been about—even then there is the sense throughout the story that their fellowship cannot protect them forever: the year is getting darker, and if the girls are getting stronger in the dark, then so are the shadows, which have not disappeared without the sun—they've just become harder to see.

At the end, faced at last with the choice that has always been waiting in the story's undercurrents, Teal feels some form of the titular light burning through her as she decides not who she is going to be, but who she is, claiming herself against and amongst "all of Willow, boiling burn, the smell of pine, the flash of solar storm, bands streaked from sky to ground where at the end stood my mother, four walls, her hand on my hand." The odds have been against Teal and Wren and Tee and Kestrel the entire story, and perhaps if they were all named after birds, they might be able to fly away together. But Teal's mother—tellingly, the only adult woman in the story—remains just as powerful bonded to Teal as her friends have been, and so—more than any of the others, who have only these ugly men surrounding them—she is constrained, perhaps kept bonded against escape, and as the story approaches its final moments this entrapment emerges as part of Valente's achievement here: this is a story that completes its plot arc without ever releasing its tension. There is a climax and denouement and all the traditional ends of the story, but nothing deflates in the reader as they occur: If anything, the tension continues to build, as both options and illusions are taken off the table one by one, until at last Teal stands alone against the night, the quiet town all around her, with its "unlit streets, darkened roads, everyone asleep," and still the dawn is so far away, kept outside the reach of the story's final sentences, its lasting last moment, an unexpelled breath sure to catch in every reader's throat.

Read the story: "By Light We Knew Our Names" by Anne Valente, from Hayden's Ferry Review 48 (full text available online)