the geography of a blank page by Thanisha Chowdhury (Virginia)

The day she starts tearing roses out of the flowerbed, I take her down to the river to watch the cranes. She asks me why the sky is blue and I tell her to skip a rock across the water. The cranes scatter across the surface, dissolve like seafoam, ash-white, stark against the marshy shore.

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Of course, she tries to seize the ripples, and of course, her hand comes away filled with milky
stones. She asks me how to tell the difference between a live fish and a dead dog and I tell her to
close her fist, look for the ghost of the river in the contours of the cool stone. Eventually, she
peels her fingers open to crabs burrowing into the white meat of her palm. This is how to make
a home, I say. Bullshit, she says. The remnants of sun dripping down the trees, the trees exhaling
into the evening. After dark, we pull weeds from the pits of our elbows and leave them on the
riverbank. By the morning, they’ll have been swallowed whole and spat out somewhere else. The
cranes return to the water with fresh blood in their scarlet brows. It’s a little like starting over, I
​say. She asks me why it matters and I tell her it doesn’t.

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Thanisha Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-American writer from Northern Virginia. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writings Awards and she is the EIC of Paper Crane Journal. When she is not writing, Thanisha enjoys playing the Sims 4 and crocheting frog hats.