The Hill by Arielle McManus
Editorial intern Laura Billow on today’s bonus story: “The Hill” is a piece that, once you read it, you can’t seem to stop thinking about. Even if owning a moat filled with alligators isn't your thing, this piece will still get you invested with its interesting twist on the metaphor “the hill I die on.”
The Hill
We are standing in front of our house. It’s a beautiful house—painted in a light blue color and complete with a wraparound porch—and I feel proud to own it, though neither of us is sure how this house came to be ours, only that it is, and God, how good it feels to be able to write your name on something and call it your own, undeniably and unequivocally. We’re digging a moat around the house, filling it with water and alligators, and I worry for a moment: is it alligators that swim in freshwater, or is that crocodiles? Just in the way that I don’t know where this house came from, I also don’t know why we are building a moat around it, only that it feels important and necessary, as if something is coming for us, and that this is how I can ward it off. Across the street, someone is erecting a skyscraper, tall and black, modular and menacing. The skyscraper works like a dresser, with each of the units sliding into the foundation like drawers. While we’re sitting inside at the island—we sprang for the Italian statuario marble, how nice—and drinking milk tea, all of the unit drawers slide out of the dresser building, one by one, all around our house, clouding out all the sunlight except for one small sliver. Through it, I can see one drawer unit still floating in the sky. Through it, I can see all of my alligators have been crushed. This is something that I did not prepare for. The hill I die on will be the one where I insist on a target for my finger pointing. You. You killed my alligators.
Arielle McManus is a writer, learning as she goes and writing one liners from a tiny, sunlit room in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published by a variety of literary publications including Literary North and Entropy Magazine. She is a creative writing student at Wesleyan University, a submission reader for Electric Literature, and the manager of a Brooklyn-based photography studio. More of her work can be found on her site at ariellemcmanus.com.
