The Sound A Girl Makes in Open Country
by Ari Cordovero
In my family, silence was a survival skill that lived in the dry heat of the American Southwest, in rooms where sound traveled too fast, and men woke like weather. I learned young—the way a body learns to taste rain.
I was five or six, knee split open on the concrete, blood bright. I ran in, crying. On the couch, my grandfather snapped awake. Stop. Just that. A blade of a word. My throat closed like a door slammed by wind. My grandmother rushed in with a washcloth, murmuring comfort, but the lesson had already rooted: Do not invite the storm. Later, I would learn he carried Vietnam in his sleep, whole rooms burning behind his eyelids. But then I only knew that girls who made noise changed the air.
My mother loved me in the way exhausted women do. Two jobs. Walmart, then Burger King. She’d come home smelling like cardboard and fryer oil, handing me a cold lemon-lime can slick with condensation. “Got you something,” she’d say. I’d smile, practice not asking for more. My wanting learned to shrink.
At thirteen, the world taught me my body was an interruption. “Please,” my teacher said, meaning the boy who shook his desk with his lust. “Cover up.” Years later, the man I loved would watch me dress, gentle as a lock. “Maybe something higher,” he’d say. “It just shows you’re not single.” I wanted peace more than myself. I left skirts in corners like they had misbehaved.
Then my daughter arrived. She cries like weather, too. Whole, unapologetic. When her face scrunches, two instincts rise: hush her, let her live. I choose the second. Every time, I choose the second. Her cry fills the room, and nothing tightens. Not the walls. Not the air. Not me.
Sometimes, I pick up my teenage cousin from her fast-food job. An older man lingers in the doorway, pretending not to watch her. She slides into the car and rolls her eyes. “Some weirdo.” In the backseat, my daughter fusses. My cousin turns, soft, gives her the pacifier. The sound eases.
A script glitches.
Girls once learned to quiet themselves here. Now a sixteen-year-old names danger. A baby makes noise and stays. And I—who learned early how to disappear—hold both of them and let the sound remain in the world.
BIO
Ari Cordovero is a writer from Colorado whose work examines lineage, intimacy, and the quiet things we inherit without meaning to. Her writing appears in Pictura Journal and Blood + Honey. She is currently at work on a book-length memoir-in-essays. She lives in the mountains with her daughter, Goose, where she is learning to find holiness in simple things and make sense of the strange, tender terrain of early motherhood.
WHY I WRITE
I started writing when I was pregnant and brokenhearted, two funny things that aren't meant to accompany one another but often do. Writing became the place where I could put grief, confusion, longing, and fear before I knew how to speak them aloud.
What began as a way to survive became a way to understand. Through writing, I started tracing the deeper patterns in my life—love, abandonment, girlhood, motherhood, inheritance, silence. It gave shape to what felt shapeless.
I write because sometimes the truth arrives before the language does. Writing is how I go back for it, back for myself.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Instagram @aricordovero