When Donna was ten years old and her father was sick, a rabbit offered a cure in exchange for a lock of her hair. But she'd always been afraid of everything. Wide-eyed and skittish and trembling, Donna had run from that rabbit. After two more weeks in the hospital, her father passed.
Kidney failure.
Someone could have donated one, the doctors said, but none were coming in. A stranger with a healthy kidney needed to die, or someone needed to willingly give one up. No one knew that it was Donna's fault. No one knew that Donna had let her father die over a lock of hair.
The medical bills came a month later, and she skipped the creaky step on her way down to the kitchen because she heard her mother crying. Until her father passed, Donna had never known her mother to cry. Now, without him to lean on, Donna’s mother did it all the time: at the grocery store, when putting Donna to bed, in the middle of the night.
"What's wrong?" she asked quietly, sliding up into a chair at the kitchen table.
Her mother wiped her eyes and gathered up the folded papers and envelopes into a single stack, but not before Donna could see all the zeroes.
"Nothing, sweetheart." She reached over and smoothed Donna's hair that way she did. Terribly gentle, even as she was breaking apart. Then she kissed Donna's forehead and got to her feet. "Can't sleep? You want something to eat?"
Her mother opened the fridge, which Donna already knew was empty. White-knuckling the handle, her mother's hand had started to shake. It was the middle of July, and the draft from the fridge was the only reprieve from the muggy summer night.
"I just came down for a glass of water," Donna lied.
She hopped out of her seat, went to get a glass from the cabinet, and filled it from the tap. The water was cloudy with bubbles. Donna hated to drink it when it looked like that—she always worried it was dirty or wrong somehow—but with her mom watching her, she drank the whole glass. When she set it back on the counter, her little lungs gasped for breath.
And then it was done. She had proven that she didn't need anything else, and neither of them needed to confront the empty fridge or the bills that had come due.
"Will you sit down here with me for a while?" Her mother asked, her eyes glassy and staring straight through Donna. Donna nodded, shut the fridge for her mother, and urged her back to the kitchen table. Donna sat on the floor beside her and laid her head on her mother's lap. They sat like this for hours, and Donna pretended not to feel the way her mother cried.
*
Every afternoon when the final school bell rang, the kids in Donna's neighborhood gathered in the wash down the road. Rain had gouged the desert landscape, cutting a sandy scab between the palo verdes and mesquites that broke up the different neighborhoods at the edge of town. When school was out, though, summer downpours flooded the washes. Cats and coyotes alike were swept up and killed in those washes. The washes were seldom ever dry in July.
Donna picked her way through the spiny trails around the neighborhood to head down to it anyway.
That was where she had found the rabbit.
There was no rabbit today, but instead, a rattlesnake waited for her at the edge of the running wash. It was spread flat on a rock, cooling itself, tongue lolling out like a single stick of hay in a farmer's mouth. Forked.
It whipped when she drew near, but it never rattled.
"Are you the rabbit?" she asked.
"Are you the girl?"
Its slitted eyes blinked sideways.
"I want you to fix my father," said Donna. "I'll give you my hair."
"The price has gone up," the snake replied. "You cannot afford him."
"Then my mother. Can you help her?"
The snake's tail twitched and rattled. The sound was hollow and off-beat.
"Give me enough hair to build a nest," the snake said. "And I will help your mother."
Donna pulled a pair of scissors out of the little backpack she brought and cut off her ponytail, throwing it down at the snake. It hissed, and thunder rumbled low in the distance.
"A storm is coming," it told her. "You should go home."
"And my mother?"
"Sing her a song."
The smell of creosote warned her just before the first few droplets of rain smacked her cheeks that the storm was here. Donna did not linger to argue with the snake. She ran home to her mother, who was at first mad as hell about what Donna had done to her hair, but then allowed Donna to lay her head in her mother's lap while the TV droned about flash floods from the monsoon storms and insisted they'd fix it once the news was over.
"This is boring," Donna complained. They turned off the TV because the cable had expired and they had no other channels. Then her mother put on the radio instead. They hummed along with Garth Brooks, and her mother taught her how to dance to it. Three hop-steps forward, one hop-step back. Twirl. Dip. Sometimes the pattern changed, and Donna could never predict it, so they stopped and went to fix Donna's hair.
They put a big chair in the middle of the kitchen and wrapped a towel around Donna's shoulders. Then her mother took the kitchen scissors and went to work fixing the mess Donna had made.
"Did another kid tell you to do this?"
"No," Donna said.
"You're a damn fool."
Martina McBride came on. Donna knew all the words to this one, and she started to sing. Her mother was trimming her bangs—"While we're at it," she'd said—so Donna kept her eyes shut. Tiny fine hairs stuck to her wet, chapped lips, caught on her open mouth, but that wasn't what stopped her. She stopped because her mother gasped and dropped the good kitchen shears.
Donna opened her eyes.
The towel around her shoulders had turned gold, and so had the chair, and so had the shears. Solid, all the way through.
"Donna Marie, what did you do?" Her mother clutched her face in both hands. "Oh, sweetheart. Come on. Help me with this."
They spent the rest of the evening trying to get the towel off from around Donna's shoulders. It had to be lifted overhead, and it was terribly heavy, and when it was off, Donna's mother wasn't looking at her with those sad eyes that told her how expensive having a child all on her own on top of her late husband's medical bills was. In fact, Donna's mother wasn't looking at her at all.
She only had eyes for that towel, and that chair, and those kitchen shears.
*
From that moment, 'Donna will take care of it' became the answer to everything.
Her mother kept the shears and sold all the rest, even though they got a call the next day that said the hospital bills had been paid off. Then she used the money to buy herself and Donna new clothes and stock the fridge with more fruit and vegetables and meats than they could ever eat at once. Then she took the rest of the money to the casino and left Donna to make dinner.
When she came home, she helped herself to the salad that Donna had made and passed no comment on the cuts in her thumbs and fingers. The ones that Donna had cleaned up on her own.
"There are no band-aids left," Donna said. "We ran out. Can you buy some?"
"I would, sweetheart, but..."
"But what?"
"The money's all gone. Someone stole it from me." An idea lit in her mother's face then. Rapture, spontaneous enlightenment. She looked up at Donna and cupped her face in her hands and said, "Maybe if you just sing again."
"What if it doesn't work?"
"Come on, sweetheart. Just give it a try."
At her coaxing, Donna went over to turn on the radio. George Jones played. Donna only knew some of the words, but she tried. Her mother helped her sing along, feeding her the words, but nothing turned to gold. Nothing happened at all.
Not on that song, nor “Achy Breaky Heart,” which played next after a flash flood warning and which Donna knew by heart.
Although Donna expected this to upset her mother, instead she had burst into tears,—again—clutched Donna to her chest, and said, "You took care of us. We needed a miracle and you took care of us. You don't know how good that feels, with your dad gone. Being able to depend on somebody else for a change."
*
They started needing a lot of miracles then. The air conditioning went out the last week of the monsoon, and the humidity made the heat just too much for either of them. They were sprawled out in her mother's bed, stripped to their tank-tops and underwear with all the windows open because the storm hadn't come in yet.
"Could have used some of that gold money," her mother mused, watching the ceiling fan rotate overhead. "If it hadn't been stolen." She reached out for her shirt over the edge of the bed, fumbled for a pack of cigarettes in it. She lit one, took a drag, and said, "You always had such a pretty voice. How come you don't sing anymore?"
In truth, Donna was afraid of what it would do. She was afraid of what it had already done to her mother, who had not been back to work since that haircut, and who had never missed a day of work in her life before that. The food in the fridge had all rotted, but in this heat, nobody could be hungry anyway. But what about when they were?
What about when more than the cable went out?
"Too hot to sing," Donna said.
"I wish you would." Her mother dragged at the cigarette. Finally she looked away from the ceiling fan and at Donna, her eyes bright and wild. "Will you?"
Ashamed of herself for withholding such a simple thing, Donna relented. She gave her best off-key rendition of “Strawberry Wine,” and eventually they drifted off. They woke again in the middle of the night to rain coming in the windows, soaking into the carpet.
The wet carpet, at least, had put out her mother's cigarette.
Donna's mother got out of bed to cover the window, bemoaning the flooding all around it. "Shit. I gotta be up early to see if Jim can figure out what's the matter with the swamp cooler. Will you handle this, sweetheart?" She settled back in bed by the time she finished asking.
It needed doing. Donna could not imagine refusing.
So she pulled the towels from the cupboard and sopped up the water from the carpet as best she could. When she ran out of dry towels, she asked her mother what to do. No answer came.
"Mom? You think that's good enough? Can I give it a rest now?"
Looking back, Donna saw she'd already fallen asleep. She would wake up expecting the carpet dried out. Instead of giving up, Donna wrung the soggy towels out, hung some of them over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom, and kept trying until the sun came up.
*
When she returned to the wash, Donna found traces of her bright red hair in a hawk’s nest, and that was how she knew she'd found the right animal. The hawk swooped down to perch a barrel cactus and turned its head to survey her with one beady eye.
"I need you to help my mother again."
"Do you?"
"She asked for my help."
"That does not mean we have to be the ones to give it. You've said ‘No’ to me before."
Donna asked, "Will you take my hair?"
"No," said the hawk. "But I will take your voice."
"If I give it to you, she'll be okay?"
"I will give you the power to give her cool air and food." The hawk picked something out of its scaly foot. Flesh, from a recent kill. "I can't promise anything else."
Trembling, Donna said, "Take it."
And the breath went out of her.
Her knobby knees scraped against the dirt as she doubled over, dazed by the suddenness of it. When she looked up, the hawk was gone. She tried to speak, but the only sound was the rushing of the wash.
Her voice was gone.
At least it meant her mother was saved. She bit back tears as she pushed to stand, but her foot caught on a rock wrong. She staggered towards the wash, and slid down the muddy slope into the rushing waters. Donna tried to scream, but her voice was gone. She would be washed away in the current like those girls on the news. She couldn’t even cry for help.
But the muddy washes had already begun to dry up some, and the water washed her ashore, sputtering dirty water, several miles down the road. She opened her eyes to watch a family of quail scurry across the road. They were running upside down. Or she thought they were, until Donna realized she was actually the one upside down.
Rolling onto her stomach, she wretched a fresh mouthful of rainwater into the dirt. Then she picked herself up and started the long walk home.
*
Donna's mother was delighted to see her. She said nothing of the state of Donna's muddy clothes and hair, only launched into a gleeful proclamation that Donna had brought her another miracle. The air conditioning, she said, had come back on. It blew freezing air over Donna's wet body, and she shivered in silence while her mother continued that she'd gotten the check from the life insurance finally.
"My little miracle worker," she said to Donna, cupping her face. "I knew you would come through." She let her go and went to the radio, flicking it on to the country station. "Go get cleaned up. Then will you make us some dinner? I'm so tired from dealing with the insurance company on the phone."
Donna tried to speak, tried to say, No, I will not make dinner. I almost drowned. But the words wouldn't come. No words would. And shaking her head did nothing because her mother hadn't looked at her—really looked at her—since she'd turned that towel into gold.
All she could think was what she was going to trade next time, and how she could make a deal without a voice.
—————
Tiffany Fritz (she/they) is an MFA candidate in fiction. They completed their bachelor's degree in Secondary English Education at Northern Arizona University. An alum of Futurescapes and Under the Volcano, she specializes in the use of monstrosity in speculative fiction to explore marginalization and trauma.