My husband cracks ribcages for a living. In his scrubs. His thick-soled shoes for the hard floors.

Do they split like the twigs our son collected in the bosque when he was little, I ask. Jabbed at the frogs?  

No, too quiet, he says, too soft. Not that susurrant. 

Like the muted startle of six a.m. stars smattered across a lightening sky? I wonder. When I awaken too early and the household is asleep, everything I’ve staked myself to all these years. And I fling wide the balcony doors wondering if the world will still be there when I open again—like there’s a magical door back to who I might’ve been if I hadn’t needed the reassurance of motherhood.

A decade and a half whooshed by in tamping down fevers and a rumpus of clanging pots and pans like every New Year of my girlhood, only this time I played the part of soother, whisperer of bedtime stories, digger of backyard ruts, to plant all the fears I collected, water with my salt, hope grew to something of sustenance, of succor. For when I was gone. 

I’m not ready. Not yet. 

My sweet friend whom I met in adulthood yet lent me her childhood nickname, gave me permission to call her what people who’d known her for ages did, that kind of kind, came to find me on campus yesterday before my class. I’d been beating myself up again. But I sat under a tree I’d like to believe is a maple, for it reminds me somehow of childhood. A song I’ve misremembered, all that mondegreen, as is my way now through this fugue of exhaustion and chronic illness. 

When she told me our students have been getting what she knew I’d bring—what they’ve needed, this program, my spirit—I confided that I’ve been feeling like such a failure. 

She’s noticed that about me, she said.

That I tend to hold so tightly all the ways I’m falling short instead of enjoying what’s going so right, so right now. 

She walked me to class like an old-school beau, which made me feel special. Like I deserved to have doors opened for me, like I deserved a warm embrace before I slice open my chest and lay what’s been beating [in] me all these years on the table, for observation. 

It’s not supposed to be like that, I’ve been told. There are other ways to go about living. 

Other ways than cracking ribcages? I ask my husband. I mean, does it ever work. 

Even if they return, which they seldom do, it’s sometimes only for a few hours. A handful of days. 

He’s grown to loathe the sound of breaking bread. My incessant popping knuckles. A nervous tic. 

When they come in, he in his kindness or his fear, offers up the clear, sweet relief of the DNR. 

And what of my brittle cavity, I ask when he lumbers sleepily down the dawn-dark stairs and chances upon me in the room of my own that’s only mine minutes more, before my beautiful daughter with her sleep-coiled curls comes to claim her homeschool space on the vintage-inspired couch I thought she’d like, the pull-out desk? What of the muscle, the cartilage, the popcorn wrapping that encases what I tear out, searching for tidbits I can flash? What of my ribcage, in other words, on display?

I jest. 

He’s still asleep. 

I’m alone, save the murmurations of snoring. 

There may be other ways than this constant breaking. 

But it’s New Year’s every time I do, in here, you know? Flinging doors and screaming, I’m alive! I made it! Look what we’ve made it, whooshing, through.

There are other decades a body might need its mother, I remind myself. My children. Mine. 

Resuscitate. Scrappy stars before the orangesicle unslits above the Sandias. That bright bulb. Blinking.

I stuff my heart back in and quick-stitch, like my mother with a needle between her lips, threading the eye with what she pulled out of her purse, sewing me back together wherever I’ve come undone, a tear at the knee, grass-stained, a popped button. 

Is it more of a popping, I ask. A crackle. Burning logs in a fire? A clicking? Here I make a sound with my tongue. 

He’s padding around the kitchen now. The kids will follow. Lunches to be made. Breakfast. Do we have time for hot or have the minutes whooshed? 

I’m holding it tight, right now, a moment longer. If I let go, I have to believe, it’ll hold. The stitches will hold.

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Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices, she is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three novels, most recently River Woman, River Demon, chosen for Amazon’s Book Club, as a National Together We Read Library Pick, and featured on CBS Mornings. It also won a Silver Medal for the International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, among many others. The 2023 Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at The University of New Mexico, Givhan lives in Albuquerque with her family.