SOON AFTER THE TOWERS CAME, my baby brother was born deformed. His left ear is crimped shut like a bat’s wing. His blue eyes float in tears. The seizures come weekly, spasms of gnashed gums and bloody froth. Chubby limbs jerk and tap against the floor. His cries are stunted gargles in a drowning mouth. Dad rarely holds his only son, hardly even looks at him. He maneuvers as if my brother were a hole he could fall into.
We let this happen.
The fracking rig is an industrial spire at the back of our property line, about a quarter mile from our trailer. At night, its twenty-foot flame enchants the orange horizon, a fire’s dance, a hellish light that is no light. We get a check for $900 every month. Mom cashes it quickly, ashamed to have it in her home. The land is ours. It’s still ours. We sold the mineral rights, but that wasn’t all they took.
The earth trembles beneath us, hydraulic blasting, deep groans in the subterranean dark. Chemicals strip away shale, seep into the aquifers, contaminate the soil, and extract natural gas to feed our nation. Our water is clouded brown, has a sulfurous stink. Sometimes, we can set it on fire. Sometimes, when we shower, we get rashes that last for days. We all cough sore. Our eyes burn. Expulsions of radon and methane mist the hills surrounding town.
The experts tell us fracking is safe. It says so in the local paper now, just like it did five years before they came, preparing us, convincing us. Their reassurances promised wealth and security for the forgotten Ohio Valley. Now they explain that these unfortunate occurrences are part of a complex natural cycle, coincidental timing. They have studies to support them, reports, empirical findings laid out nicely in graphs and flowcharts. They fund their own truth.
Stonewall is just over twelve months old. His body is pale and bruised. He sleeps off the kitchen, where the sun can still reach. Pillows line the crib for his protection. When the seizures come, his head thunders, and red spit pours from lips that can’t speak. His eyes roll back white as spider sacks. Beneath his skin they seem to crawl, hatch, creep within him until his scalp sizzles quiet. We have to let it run its course, and then we are all there to coo and comfort, promise him that everything is okay. But everything is not okay. I always stay close and hold him to me and pet his soft blond scalp, like the tender underbelly of a squirrel. He cries and does not understand the pain, cannot understand us. He knows no language. Alone and afraid, what must he think is happening to him, has been done to him? We have no answers. We failed to protect him. After he returns, his hands squirm and search for something to hold on to, his lost eyes stare up at me, his big sister, as if he’s just witnessed something horrible beneath the world.