There had been plenty of screaming and fighting before then, maybe years of it, but it certainly intensified in the preceding months before she awoke one morning to a silence that was at first a relief, then like a weather-beaten port in the storm, before it became a portent of all her days afterward. What could she remember of that first day without her mother? Not much. It hadn’t yet taken on any significance, and so passed with little acknowledgment that anything in the world might be out of place. That day was a school day and she walked it like any other school day, her bag slung over her shoulder by its strap and a pink-billed baseball cap angled on her head to keep out the sun.
She stared into the houses that she passed, their curtains drawn and the windows transparently opaque, and wondered as she always did what it was like to be on the other side. Not so much to live in these other houses, but to explore where their stairways might curve upward, or to walk into tiny rooms that were hidden away like secret compartments among the larger rooms. She wished that it would be proper to knock on these doors and ask the occupants for a look around. At times she would imagine these spaces to be unscarred and devoid of the markings of tenancy—furniture and dishware and clothing and books, etc.—and at other times her mind came to be wading into the flotsam of coagulating lives long lived and stuck away into basements and attics. Or at the back of long, disused hallways that couldn’t be said to lead anywhere at all anymore. And in all her imaginings she was always alone to make what she would of whatever she found: faded banisters worn by the climb and descent of hands, or a tiny dancer set free, for the first time in ages, from the wooden enclosure of her box.
These would have been her same thoughts on that first day, walking the same slate slabs that lined either side of the street and wearying quickly beneath the weight of her schoolwork. Of course she didn’t worry that her mother may be gone. Her mother had gone before and come back, a little humbled but no less furious, time and again, like a ball tethered to a paddle, and no less temperamental. But as the days moved forward and numbered one atop the other her father’s passing gaze in the kitchen over their breakfast, or his kisses goodnight when they stood together out in the hall after she’d brushed her teeth, communicated a kind of weariness and loss. As if Ana herself was the one who had left. He began to look at her as if he always had something to say but never the courage to say it.
The succeeding days were long, quiet ones in the aftermath of a hurricane when ships and docks are repaired of their broken and torn planks and sheets of metal, and are refitted with fresh hulls and new paint and reinforced struts. Her father was rebuilding something inside him that had been recently rebroken—and continuously rebroken for a long time. He took to standing alongside windows at odd times, morning and late evening, and appearing in the darkened living room during the night when she had gotten up for a glass of water. Was it his gray form at those dim hours that sometimes haunted her dreams, or was it herself that found it difficult to exit a room that felt both infinite and confined as she stared at a wall-bound nail that hung nothing? What was it that she was rebuilding inside herself? She never had a clue about what might’ve happened and how she should feel about it.
“Your mother’s a difficult woman,” her father said to her once. “She…she’s…I think don’t think she’s ever been very happy.”
Years later this would become the only description that Ana still retained of her mother. In adulthood, after the rejection of old photographs and the cut of familial ties, when she would no longer be able to recall even the woman’s hair color, this would seem the most apt thing to say of the person who partially raised her. But while he said it she could imagine her mother standing in the next room, silent and tight-lipped, brimming with fury. It made her want to retreat quickly, either to her room or to the sidewalk in front of their home, her mind falling upon a single object, one sentence within her favorite book or the action of a neighborly dog turning circles around a colony of dandelions, so she wouldn’t hear the fever pitch of her parents’ voices.
“I understand,” she’d said.
“I’m taking you out of school for awhile. You’ll live with your aunt and uncle and cousin. Just until…. And you’ll have to fly down there alone. I’m sorry.”
Did she cry then? In her memory she didn’t, though she must’ve been scared. He held her, she did remember that, and he said something about being bigger than he remembered, though she still felt quite small to be held that way. It was the first of a lot of goodbyes, her plane wouldn’t be until the end of the week, and she still had to pack. “It’s nothing you did,” he assured her, and his voice was just sweet enough to make it true.
…
At the other end of it she felt a little weather-beaten and demure, her skin the creamy color of an exotic coffee and her hair lightened to natural streaks in the illogical, obsessive attention of the sun. She walked bare-footed among black, fat scorpions with their almost-ineffectual sting and venom, and for awhile there was a hawk that had fallen from the sky whom she fed little pieces of cut up lizard to and held in a cage hooked at the end of the clothesline. And the clothes she came in became frayed and shrunk, herself grown more slender and angular, every part of her reaching outward as if to touch an unseen boundary. Her eyes a wall, her mouth an oasis, her palms and the soles of her feet openings for every extra-sensual admission: she knew herself as somebody different, began to move in strange ways that weren’t always apparent to her at first, the objects of her attention not always the ones she was looking directly at.
The message came for her to fly back on a day as cloudless as any other, except for a dark bank to the east fast approaching the jagged teeth of a range of mountains that would tear open its stomach and spill it far away from where she stood, gazing in the other direction, almost toward infinity. The gutted contents of her suitcase needed to be re-folded and re-inserted in the proper order (her mind was trying to recall how these same articles of clothing had looked in the light of her room) and the suitcase itself sutured by its zipper around its face. The message had mentioned nothing of her mother, mentioned nothing really at all, except that she would return to him, to meet him in the jostling expanse of an airline’s arrival gate. The message came with a one-way ticket that seemed too precious to send by mail.
Ana spent the day swimming again and again to the bottom of the spring where the water broke surface in a calm, imperceptible gush like the jets at the bottom of a fancy tub. She held herself under and opened her eyes to the stirred-up settling of silt that danced with her and traced the valleys of her probing fingers, a little like what it would be to glide freely between the Earth’s geologic layers. She felt the roots of herself and the roots of everything else running deeper than the spring’s secret geyser. In the claustrophobic mass of liquid all around her, her mind could only contain one thought in the single present moment, if she was anyone else she may have worried that she might drown. It stripped her down to everything that she actually was.
“You have grass on your lawn,” she’d said once to Geoff.
“Hmm?”
She’d pointed to the thick islands of scrub that she’d been warned away from as being homes to other (probably dangerous) creatures. There, the grass was as tall and thick as reeds, and could be plucked and held aloft in the air like an impossible wingspan. He’d followed the line of her arm, past the hinging bones of her wrist, to the point of her finger, and farther on to the island, which he’d looked upon unimpressed or disinterested or just not willing to comprehend. It was joke, didn’t he see? Though a broad kind of joke that didn’t require laughter. She’d meant it only as another way of saying goodbye.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Catalpa Ln.
Within the past week, Jack found he couldn’t stand the thought of walking through the thick fog that stood as a wall at the end of the street, couldn’t believe that there was any longer a side opposite to what he could see. He grew apprehensive when he thought about it, and that apprehension turned to fear. He might be lost within it. Five, maybe ten, feet in the fog became impenetrable, a wall of flat white, and each time previous when he’d ventured into that white, often herding his brother and sister in front of him, to school or to buy groceries, his mind remarked (calmly, even though his heart would race as the words began to form): So this is what it’s like to be struck blind.
The fog began farther uptown about six blocks past the higher end of Sonora Grade and created a giant ring either encompassing or cutting through three separate neighborhoods. Newspapers began to report on the phenomena and scientists were asked to hypostulate on its structure. It began as a haze building in ground fog and with tendrils of mist lacing a three-story wall in a tight knit. The wall of fog stood at an estimate of thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and only as it became a thing of depth instead of water particulates floating through the air, did the ring begin to shrink toward its center and gradually—over a duration of a year and a half—encroach upon Jack’s street: Catalpa Ln.
And now he worried that there may no longer be a world outside of that thick mass, the fog retroactively (his mind could easily convince itself of a sentient knowledge and a willful act of bio-chemical sabotage that allowed the chemical bonds in all things—buildings, plants, animals, and even human beings—to break down long after the fog had passed, as if on a timer) erasing everything that should’ve been and replacing it with itself so that he might be doomed to wander a sightless landscape until the end of his days.
Jack Corbeau Page, Jr. (age 15)—known as ‘Corbeau’ only to his family and to his parents’ friends—lived at what he believed to be the very center of the fog’s circumference, what would be the last bastion if the fog continued to shrink. He woke up again that morning to his mother’s violent coughing, followed by a few sympathetic coughs of his father’s own. They had been sick for three months and twelve days by then, falling ill one after the other like dominoes over a period of several days, and were too weak to work or do household chores or to even totter the short distance from the bed to the bathroom. Jack had taken to caring for them, as well as his younger siblings, feeding them, helping them to the bathroom, and changing their bed sheets after depositing them in twin rockers brought up from the living room. His parents had a sizable sum in savings and Jack made trips to the bank carrying slips of paper scribbled in his father’s hand allowing him to withdraw a predetermined amount. But, lately, the account had run dry and the last bit of it wasn’t going to last after next week’s groceries.
He needed a job. He needed to make money.
Mr. Aalto—maybe equally apprehensive about traveling through the fog—had bought bag upon bag of potting soil and fertilizer and, building plywood walls and laying down a thick tarp over the tarpaper to create a large square bowl, turned the roof of his building into a small garden to grow and harvest tomatoes, peas, and squash. But he didn’t need anyone. Nor did old Mrs. Starbird, who morning after morning walked undaunted into the fog and returned a couple of hours later with bags of potatoes or oranges or a whole watermelon. The potatoes were sold ‘as is’, the watermelon divvied up into shrink-wrapped slices, but the oranges were squeezed to juice in an archaic-looking press that only produced a third-glass at a time. But she resisted his offers of working the juicer for her so that left only one last opportunity on his street: Cass Tinker of Tinker’s Toys.
Rumor might have it that Cass Tinker were dead if he wasn’t seen every Friday on his way to market in a suit, polished shoes, trimmed beard, slicked hair, and gas mask (maybe Jack wasn’t the only one convinced of the fog’s ulterior motives). He stood at five-foot-six but always seemed much taller if you happen to be coming from the other way. It was difficult for Jack to pinpoint what made Mr. Tinker so ‘huge’, though it might have to do with childhood memories of being towered over by the man as Jack, with mother usually, perused the shelves of toys in his shop and Mr. Tinker followed close behind remarking upon this or that toy’s unique qualities and limitless ‘imaginatory’ potential, always due to their existence as handmade objects. All of the toys Mr. Tinker sold were handmade, and all of them were handmade by him.
So Jack woke that morning, having decided the night before that he would bug Mr. Tinker for a job.
The fog began farther uptown about six blocks past the higher end of Sonora Grade and created a giant ring either encompassing or cutting through three separate neighborhoods. Newspapers began to report on the phenomena and scientists were asked to hypostulate on its structure. It began as a haze building in ground fog and with tendrils of mist lacing a three-story wall in a tight knit. The wall of fog stood at an estimate of thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and only as it became a thing of depth instead of water particulates floating through the air, did the ring begin to shrink toward its center and gradually—over a duration of a year and a half—encroach upon Jack’s street: Catalpa Ln.
And now he worried that there may no longer be a world outside of that thick mass, the fog retroactively (his mind could easily convince itself of a sentient knowledge and a willful act of bio-chemical sabotage that allowed the chemical bonds in all things—buildings, plants, animals, and even human beings—to break down long after the fog had passed, as if on a timer) erasing everything that should’ve been and replacing it with itself so that he might be doomed to wander a sightless landscape until the end of his days.
Jack Corbeau Page, Jr. (age 15)—known as ‘Corbeau’ only to his family and to his parents’ friends—lived at what he believed to be the very center of the fog’s circumference, what would be the last bastion if the fog continued to shrink. He woke up again that morning to his mother’s violent coughing, followed by a few sympathetic coughs of his father’s own. They had been sick for three months and twelve days by then, falling ill one after the other like dominoes over a period of several days, and were too weak to work or do household chores or to even totter the short distance from the bed to the bathroom. Jack had taken to caring for them, as well as his younger siblings, feeding them, helping them to the bathroom, and changing their bed sheets after depositing them in twin rockers brought up from the living room. His parents had a sizable sum in savings and Jack made trips to the bank carrying slips of paper scribbled in his father’s hand allowing him to withdraw a predetermined amount. But, lately, the account had run dry and the last bit of it wasn’t going to last after next week’s groceries.
He needed a job. He needed to make money.
Mr. Aalto—maybe equally apprehensive about traveling through the fog—had bought bag upon bag of potting soil and fertilizer and, building plywood walls and laying down a thick tarp over the tarpaper to create a large square bowl, turned the roof of his building into a small garden to grow and harvest tomatoes, peas, and squash. But he didn’t need anyone. Nor did old Mrs. Starbird, who morning after morning walked undaunted into the fog and returned a couple of hours later with bags of potatoes or oranges or a whole watermelon. The potatoes were sold ‘as is’, the watermelon divvied up into shrink-wrapped slices, but the oranges were squeezed to juice in an archaic-looking press that only produced a third-glass at a time. But she resisted his offers of working the juicer for her so that left only one last opportunity on his street: Cass Tinker of Tinker’s Toys.
Rumor might have it that Cass Tinker were dead if he wasn’t seen every Friday on his way to market in a suit, polished shoes, trimmed beard, slicked hair, and gas mask (maybe Jack wasn’t the only one convinced of the fog’s ulterior motives). He stood at five-foot-six but always seemed much taller if you happen to be coming from the other way. It was difficult for Jack to pinpoint what made Mr. Tinker so ‘huge’, though it might have to do with childhood memories of being towered over by the man as Jack, with mother usually, perused the shelves of toys in his shop and Mr. Tinker followed close behind remarking upon this or that toy’s unique qualities and limitless ‘imaginatory’ potential, always due to their existence as handmade objects. All of the toys Mr. Tinker sold were handmade, and all of them were handmade by him.
So Jack woke that morning, having decided the night before that he would bug Mr. Tinker for a job.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Nameless
Delilah had her litter just the past week, Clara telling him this as they climbed the singular tree in his front yard, the foliage thick around them so they probably couldn’t be seen from the street.
“They’re mewling,” she said.
“What?” Rowan asked.
“That’s what my dad says, ‘mewling’. It’s like…” and then she made the sound.
“Oh.”
He was higher up than her among the thinner branches that would waver and shake each time a gust of wind pushed through, his heart thumping with the imminent fall that never came, but was no less likely to occur. Clara wore a dress as she climbed and he would have to turn away and pretend to look at the next branch up whenever she hooked a leg over and planted the other against the trunk of the tree in order to hoist herself higher. The backs of her knees were all cut up and scabbed. If he happened to see her underpants she would look up at him with a grimace and might even tug his shoelaces as a warning that gravity may be the price of admission to a girl’s under-things.
“Weren’t you worried that Delilah might die?” he asked.
“It was really cool!” Her dress billowed out below her, the paling skin of her legs flashing just at where he wasn’t able to look. “No, I didn’t think she was going to die. You should’ve come over and watched.”
“I didn’t know about it then.”
“Well, I should’ve called you, then. You know what? We should make phones that go to only each other and whenever something important like that happens I can tell you and you can come over.”
He thought about it. “Yeah, that does sound pretty cool.”
They climbed high enough to where the branches shrunk to thick pegs tapering into twigs. He was stranded several feet from the tree’s pointed top with no way to climb any higher and Clara distributing herself across the few scraggly branches below him, blocking the way down. There was at least fifteen feet of air to the grass of his yard, which was a hard impact even from a drop at two feet, and many branches that wouldn’t make the fall any softer.
“Okay, let me down,” he said.
“But we just got up here! Look, we’re higher than your roof!”
“I have to pee,” he explained.
“Well, then, just pull down your pants and go pee.” She held up a hand in scout’s honor. “I promise not to watch. Just don’t pee on me!”
“I can’t pee in front of you.”
“Well that’s too bad, because I’m not getting down.”
“I think I’m slipping. I’m going to fall unless I get down.”
“You’re not going to fall,” she said.
He began making his descent on top of her, urging a “Hey!” as she ducked away from his feet searching for purchase. The thin branches he held onto bent at his and their exertion and might’ve been cracking and coming apart if he wasn’t too scared to look up and see. Instead of forcing her down like he expected, they became entangled and he had to clutch the trunk of the tree in order to keep from toppling on top of her.
“Fine,” she said, “I’ll get down! Just stop stepping all over me!”
He climbed back up a little so she could right herself and begin to move down. In the lower branches there was room enough for her to scurry to the side and let him pass but, instead, she dropped from the tree and tumbled against its exposed roots, leaving a smear that was half dirt and half green across her back. He did the same and she moved to the side so that he wouldn’t tumble into her ankles.
“So, you want to see them?” she asked. “The kittens?”
“Yeah. But I have to go to the bathroom first.”
She huffed at him. “Fine! Go to the bathroom first. Then, let’s go to my house so we can look at the kittens!”
He told his mom that he was going to Clara’s and that he would be back by supper. She called to him from the kitchen to be back no later. Outside, Clara surprised him by jumping from the bushes by his front door, letting out a banshee’s scream that made all the birds and bugs in the yard go quiet for awhile. She threw herself at him and pinned him to the ground. He could only just make her get off of him and turn her over and pin her right back. But, then, she could just do the same. Over and over again.
“Come on, you jitterbug,” she said, letting him up, “let’s go to my house! I’ll race you!”
Clara’s house was at just the other end of the street and the white soles of her high-top sneakers—boys’ sneakers she’d proudly and defensively pointed out to him, sneakers that had belonged to her older brother, which he’d never worn and eventually grew out of—flashed on the pavement that was lit almost just as white by the late afternoon sun. He pulled past her and piled on the speed. She shifted her footfalls into a sprint behind him and his mind dared him not to look back. She stayed close to him the whole way.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ll go through the side door.”
The side door was on the side of the garage and had a window in it, but the sun glared their reflections off of the glass back at them and he couldn’t see anything until she opened the door—and still he couldn’t see anything, too dark inside—and he had to let his eyes adjust.
“It’s just over here,” she said, and she took him to a cardboard box set up amongst the stuff at the garage’s back wall, with its top and one of its walls cut out and an old blanket spilling out onto the concrete floor.
He saw tiny furry bodies in the dim. The kittens all had their eyes closed and were piled into the protection and warmth of their mother’s belly. One had been squeezed and ejected from the pile and was crying as it padded its way back in blindly to suckle. Delilah looked at Rowan and Clara with what might’ve been fatigue and tracked them as they came in sight and settled to the cold concrete on their bare knees.
Clara said, “Look, they can’t even really walk yet.”
The exiled kitten moved by pushing and dragging itself along on its stomach, occasionally pausing and crying in the general direction of its mother. Its mouth seemed to be wider than its entire head.
“That one doesn’t have teeth,” Rowan said.
“Duh! Did you have teeth when you were born?”
“I didn’t know it was the same,” he explained. “Did you name them yet?”
“No. Mom and Dad says we’re giving them all away, anyway, so what’s the use? I’d probably call that one Sunshine if I called him anything.” She pointed to one of the kittens.
“You know that’s a him?”
“No, I assume.”
She made it sound like some sort of superpower.
“You want to hold one?” she asked. “Which one?”
He already had one picked out, “That one,” and she handed him a chocolate-covered body with its paws—as well as the top of its head and the nubs of its ears—dipped in white. She gave it to him in one hand and he took it in both of his, a surge of fear shooting through him. The kitten couldn’t have weighed more than a Wiffle ball and the bones in its body felt like the thin plastic bones of the fake dinosaur fossil he’d spent a week assembling on the desk in his room.
“That one’s yours if you want it,” Clara said
“I think I have to ask my parents first.” His mom and dad might not want him to have it. “Is it a he or a she?”
Clara grabbed the kitten by the hind legs and pulled it around so that she could see beneath its tail.
“Hey! Don’t do that!” But she let go before he could swat her hands away.
“It’s a girl.” Then she looked at him like he was being a baby. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt her! I had to check to make sure. But you can’t have her yet. She has to stay with her mom until she’s eight weeks old.”
“That’s a long time,” he said. He didn’t mean to sound so awed.
“I know.”
They went outside then, and around to her backyard. There was a jungle gym back there—a slide, a swing, monkey bars, even a fireman’s pole—and a tree that wasn’t as good for climbing as his but they sometimes practiced kissing behind. The kisses felt funny and disappointing but it seemed important to practice for future boyfriends and girlfriends. Sometimes she would say that he was her boyfriend and sometimes he would say that she was his girlfriend, but the arrangement was often boring and without any conceivable perks.
She said, “I can get across all the monkey bars now, want to see?”
She showed him and he tried after her, but he only got two-thirds of the way before his hands started to burn and he had to let go.
“I’m going to ask my mom if I can join gymnastics,” she said.
He wasn’t very interested. “I wonder if my mom will let me have that kitten?”
“I dunno. You want to play ‘Astronaut’?”
“Sure.”
She went first, sitting down in the swing, and he began to push her until she was up so high and swinging so fast that he had to step back and let her pump her legs to get herself the rest of the way. She swung so high that she was up above the crossbar and the chains slackened as she hung in the air parallel to the ground, nothing to do but fall. Then she let go and lifted off, flying through the air with her arms outspread.
It was then that Clara’s mom came to the kitchen window and called Clara inside to eat. “I have to go inside.” Then a thought occurred. “Want to eat dinner with us? Hey, Mom!”
“What?” Clara’s mom called back.
“Can Rowan eat with us tonight?”
“He’ll have to ask his parents first. Rowan, call your mom first, okay, honey?”
He nodded and after they went inside he went to the phone in the front hall of Clara’s house and dialed his home number. His mom answered on the second ring and he asked if he could stay and eat there.
“Rowan, I don’t want you to be imposing yourself on those people.”
“I’m not! I promise.” He wasn’t quite sure what ‘imposing’ meant.
“Okay, then. But get home before dark, okay?”
“Okay.”
He hung up the phone and went into the dining room. “My mom said it’s okay,” he said, before Clara’s mom set down a plate in front of him. They had lasagna and green beans and garlic bread sticks. Afterward, he followed Clara into her bedroom, which was the last door at the end of the hall. The sun slanted in through the blinds and cast long shadows on a build-it-yourself marble rollercoaster. She also had a chemistry set with the little bottles of chemicals lined up in one corner of small bookshelf. Sometimes he helped her to make fake snot.
“Let’s look at the kittens again,” he said, “before I leave.”
They went back out to the garage and she flipped the light switch because by then it was too dark inside to see anything. Delilah had moved from her place into a corner of the garage where a bowl of food and bowl of water had been set out. Rowan took this opportunity and scooped the chocolate kitten up in both hands and held her to his chest. Right away something was wrong. The chocolate kitten didn’t cry in his hands when he picked her up and he didn’t feel any futile tensing of the forepaws extending tiny, feather-like claws that might as well have been invisible. The heat was wrong, the chocolate kitten had been so warm before, but now it felt like a cupcake hours after it had been taken out of the oven.
Even as he tried to set it back down he flinched from it, and the kitten spilled from his palms and landed near the edge of the blanket on its side, mouth open and its tongue lolling out. He was crying before he even knew he was crying, and he hated himself because he was crying, especially in front of Clara. She was a few seconds realizing what just happened and her face smoothed as if she were about to start crying, too. But, instead, she leaned over and wrapped her arms around him in an embrace.
“You killed it! You killed my kitten!” he screamed.
He made her let go of him.
“What? When?”
“When you pulled her legs! You killed her!”
She looked at him as if he’d just stuck a safety pin into the meat of her hand.
She screamed back, “I did not! You can’t kill a kitten by pulling its legs! That’s stupid!”
He rubbed the tears from his eyes and wanted to make them stop. Clara stood up and there was floor dirt on the front of her dress where the fabric had been pinned between her knees and the concrete. He refused to look at her and she wanted to kick him, but didn’t.
“You did,” was all he could say.
She stood above him and kept making her hands into fists over and over again. “Go home! I don’t want to see you anymore!”
The garage door slammed as she went inside and he was left there alone. She turned the light off too, so that the kitten disappeared before him.
He ran back and he didn’t want anyone to see. His mom was in the kitchen, at the sink, doing the dinner dishes and she asked him if something was wrong as he passed but he didn’t really hear it and didn’t want to answer. He went into his room and crawled onto his bed and wrapped the covers around his head, breathing in the smell of his tears and snot and the hot air that moistened the material at his face.
He felt his mom sit down and put a hand on his stomach.
“Something wrong?”
He choked back enough of his crying to answer. “No.”
“Did you have a fight with Clara?”
“Maybe.”
“What about?”
“Something stupid.”
She laid down across him, pushing all the air out of him in one long breath into the blanket. “Well it can’t be that stupid if it’s got you so upset.”
“It must be since she got mad at me.”
“Why did she get mad?”
He loosened the blanket on his head.
“Do kittens go to heaven?” he asked.
“I think so. Yeah, I’m sure they do.”
“Even ones without names?”
“Of course.”
“Would you love me even if I killed a kitten?”
“Did you kill a kitten?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“Then I love you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re worth loving.”
He uncovered his head so he could look at her. “But what if?”
“I think I’d still love you.”
“Why?”
He felt her shrug. “If it was a mistake and you were really sorry I don’t think I should be allowed to stop loving you, do you?”
“I guess not.” Then he added, “It was a hypothetical,” in case she didn’t know. He said it ‘hy-po-thet-i-cal’.
She stretched across him. “Well, if that was all that was bothering you. I still have dishes to do.”
“That’s it.”
She kissed him on the cheek while she still had him pinned, and he wiped it off when she wasn’t looking. She closed the door when she left and he laid in bed watching the wood grain of the door. He felt a weird feeling in his stomach like he was hungry, but he didn’t want to eat anything. It was dark enough, too, that he could sleep, but he didn’t want to do that either. So he stared at the wood grain of the door for a long time until it began to look like nothing at all and he wasn’t aware that his eyes were no longer open to see.
“They’re mewling,” she said.
“What?” Rowan asked.
“That’s what my dad says, ‘mewling’. It’s like…” and then she made the sound.
“Oh.”
He was higher up than her among the thinner branches that would waver and shake each time a gust of wind pushed through, his heart thumping with the imminent fall that never came, but was no less likely to occur. Clara wore a dress as she climbed and he would have to turn away and pretend to look at the next branch up whenever she hooked a leg over and planted the other against the trunk of the tree in order to hoist herself higher. The backs of her knees were all cut up and scabbed. If he happened to see her underpants she would look up at him with a grimace and might even tug his shoelaces as a warning that gravity may be the price of admission to a girl’s under-things.
“Weren’t you worried that Delilah might die?” he asked.
“It was really cool!” Her dress billowed out below her, the paling skin of her legs flashing just at where he wasn’t able to look. “No, I didn’t think she was going to die. You should’ve come over and watched.”
“I didn’t know about it then.”
“Well, I should’ve called you, then. You know what? We should make phones that go to only each other and whenever something important like that happens I can tell you and you can come over.”
He thought about it. “Yeah, that does sound pretty cool.”
They climbed high enough to where the branches shrunk to thick pegs tapering into twigs. He was stranded several feet from the tree’s pointed top with no way to climb any higher and Clara distributing herself across the few scraggly branches below him, blocking the way down. There was at least fifteen feet of air to the grass of his yard, which was a hard impact even from a drop at two feet, and many branches that wouldn’t make the fall any softer.
“Okay, let me down,” he said.
“But we just got up here! Look, we’re higher than your roof!”
“I have to pee,” he explained.
“Well, then, just pull down your pants and go pee.” She held up a hand in scout’s honor. “I promise not to watch. Just don’t pee on me!”
“I can’t pee in front of you.”
“Well that’s too bad, because I’m not getting down.”
“I think I’m slipping. I’m going to fall unless I get down.”
“You’re not going to fall,” she said.
He began making his descent on top of her, urging a “Hey!” as she ducked away from his feet searching for purchase. The thin branches he held onto bent at his and their exertion and might’ve been cracking and coming apart if he wasn’t too scared to look up and see. Instead of forcing her down like he expected, they became entangled and he had to clutch the trunk of the tree in order to keep from toppling on top of her.
“Fine,” she said, “I’ll get down! Just stop stepping all over me!”
He climbed back up a little so she could right herself and begin to move down. In the lower branches there was room enough for her to scurry to the side and let him pass but, instead, she dropped from the tree and tumbled against its exposed roots, leaving a smear that was half dirt and half green across her back. He did the same and she moved to the side so that he wouldn’t tumble into her ankles.
“So, you want to see them?” she asked. “The kittens?”
“Yeah. But I have to go to the bathroom first.”
She huffed at him. “Fine! Go to the bathroom first. Then, let’s go to my house so we can look at the kittens!”
He told his mom that he was going to Clara’s and that he would be back by supper. She called to him from the kitchen to be back no later. Outside, Clara surprised him by jumping from the bushes by his front door, letting out a banshee’s scream that made all the birds and bugs in the yard go quiet for awhile. She threw herself at him and pinned him to the ground. He could only just make her get off of him and turn her over and pin her right back. But, then, she could just do the same. Over and over again.
“Come on, you jitterbug,” she said, letting him up, “let’s go to my house! I’ll race you!”
Clara’s house was at just the other end of the street and the white soles of her high-top sneakers—boys’ sneakers she’d proudly and defensively pointed out to him, sneakers that had belonged to her older brother, which he’d never worn and eventually grew out of—flashed on the pavement that was lit almost just as white by the late afternoon sun. He pulled past her and piled on the speed. She shifted her footfalls into a sprint behind him and his mind dared him not to look back. She stayed close to him the whole way.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ll go through the side door.”
The side door was on the side of the garage and had a window in it, but the sun glared their reflections off of the glass back at them and he couldn’t see anything until she opened the door—and still he couldn’t see anything, too dark inside—and he had to let his eyes adjust.
“It’s just over here,” she said, and she took him to a cardboard box set up amongst the stuff at the garage’s back wall, with its top and one of its walls cut out and an old blanket spilling out onto the concrete floor.
He saw tiny furry bodies in the dim. The kittens all had their eyes closed and were piled into the protection and warmth of their mother’s belly. One had been squeezed and ejected from the pile and was crying as it padded its way back in blindly to suckle. Delilah looked at Rowan and Clara with what might’ve been fatigue and tracked them as they came in sight and settled to the cold concrete on their bare knees.
Clara said, “Look, they can’t even really walk yet.”
The exiled kitten moved by pushing and dragging itself along on its stomach, occasionally pausing and crying in the general direction of its mother. Its mouth seemed to be wider than its entire head.
“That one doesn’t have teeth,” Rowan said.
“Duh! Did you have teeth when you were born?”
“I didn’t know it was the same,” he explained. “Did you name them yet?”
“No. Mom and Dad says we’re giving them all away, anyway, so what’s the use? I’d probably call that one Sunshine if I called him anything.” She pointed to one of the kittens.
“You know that’s a him?”
“No, I assume.”
She made it sound like some sort of superpower.
“You want to hold one?” she asked. “Which one?”
He already had one picked out, “That one,” and she handed him a chocolate-covered body with its paws—as well as the top of its head and the nubs of its ears—dipped in white. She gave it to him in one hand and he took it in both of his, a surge of fear shooting through him. The kitten couldn’t have weighed more than a Wiffle ball and the bones in its body felt like the thin plastic bones of the fake dinosaur fossil he’d spent a week assembling on the desk in his room.
“That one’s yours if you want it,” Clara said
“I think I have to ask my parents first.” His mom and dad might not want him to have it. “Is it a he or a she?”
Clara grabbed the kitten by the hind legs and pulled it around so that she could see beneath its tail.
“Hey! Don’t do that!” But she let go before he could swat her hands away.
“It’s a girl.” Then she looked at him like he was being a baby. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt her! I had to check to make sure. But you can’t have her yet. She has to stay with her mom until she’s eight weeks old.”
“That’s a long time,” he said. He didn’t mean to sound so awed.
“I know.”
They went outside then, and around to her backyard. There was a jungle gym back there—a slide, a swing, monkey bars, even a fireman’s pole—and a tree that wasn’t as good for climbing as his but they sometimes practiced kissing behind. The kisses felt funny and disappointing but it seemed important to practice for future boyfriends and girlfriends. Sometimes she would say that he was her boyfriend and sometimes he would say that she was his girlfriend, but the arrangement was often boring and without any conceivable perks.
She said, “I can get across all the monkey bars now, want to see?”
She showed him and he tried after her, but he only got two-thirds of the way before his hands started to burn and he had to let go.
“I’m going to ask my mom if I can join gymnastics,” she said.
He wasn’t very interested. “I wonder if my mom will let me have that kitten?”
“I dunno. You want to play ‘Astronaut’?”
“Sure.”
She went first, sitting down in the swing, and he began to push her until she was up so high and swinging so fast that he had to step back and let her pump her legs to get herself the rest of the way. She swung so high that she was up above the crossbar and the chains slackened as she hung in the air parallel to the ground, nothing to do but fall. Then she let go and lifted off, flying through the air with her arms outspread.
It was then that Clara’s mom came to the kitchen window and called Clara inside to eat. “I have to go inside.” Then a thought occurred. “Want to eat dinner with us? Hey, Mom!”
“What?” Clara’s mom called back.
“Can Rowan eat with us tonight?”
“He’ll have to ask his parents first. Rowan, call your mom first, okay, honey?”
He nodded and after they went inside he went to the phone in the front hall of Clara’s house and dialed his home number. His mom answered on the second ring and he asked if he could stay and eat there.
“Rowan, I don’t want you to be imposing yourself on those people.”
“I’m not! I promise.” He wasn’t quite sure what ‘imposing’ meant.
“Okay, then. But get home before dark, okay?”
“Okay.”
He hung up the phone and went into the dining room. “My mom said it’s okay,” he said, before Clara’s mom set down a plate in front of him. They had lasagna and green beans and garlic bread sticks. Afterward, he followed Clara into her bedroom, which was the last door at the end of the hall. The sun slanted in through the blinds and cast long shadows on a build-it-yourself marble rollercoaster. She also had a chemistry set with the little bottles of chemicals lined up in one corner of small bookshelf. Sometimes he helped her to make fake snot.
“Let’s look at the kittens again,” he said, “before I leave.”
They went back out to the garage and she flipped the light switch because by then it was too dark inside to see anything. Delilah had moved from her place into a corner of the garage where a bowl of food and bowl of water had been set out. Rowan took this opportunity and scooped the chocolate kitten up in both hands and held her to his chest. Right away something was wrong. The chocolate kitten didn’t cry in his hands when he picked her up and he didn’t feel any futile tensing of the forepaws extending tiny, feather-like claws that might as well have been invisible. The heat was wrong, the chocolate kitten had been so warm before, but now it felt like a cupcake hours after it had been taken out of the oven.
Even as he tried to set it back down he flinched from it, and the kitten spilled from his palms and landed near the edge of the blanket on its side, mouth open and its tongue lolling out. He was crying before he even knew he was crying, and he hated himself because he was crying, especially in front of Clara. She was a few seconds realizing what just happened and her face smoothed as if she were about to start crying, too. But, instead, she leaned over and wrapped her arms around him in an embrace.
“You killed it! You killed my kitten!” he screamed.
He made her let go of him.
“What? When?”
“When you pulled her legs! You killed her!”
She looked at him as if he’d just stuck a safety pin into the meat of her hand.
She screamed back, “I did not! You can’t kill a kitten by pulling its legs! That’s stupid!”
He rubbed the tears from his eyes and wanted to make them stop. Clara stood up and there was floor dirt on the front of her dress where the fabric had been pinned between her knees and the concrete. He refused to look at her and she wanted to kick him, but didn’t.
“You did,” was all he could say.
She stood above him and kept making her hands into fists over and over again. “Go home! I don’t want to see you anymore!”
The garage door slammed as she went inside and he was left there alone. She turned the light off too, so that the kitten disappeared before him.
He ran back and he didn’t want anyone to see. His mom was in the kitchen, at the sink, doing the dinner dishes and she asked him if something was wrong as he passed but he didn’t really hear it and didn’t want to answer. He went into his room and crawled onto his bed and wrapped the covers around his head, breathing in the smell of his tears and snot and the hot air that moistened the material at his face.
He felt his mom sit down and put a hand on his stomach.
“Something wrong?”
He choked back enough of his crying to answer. “No.”
“Did you have a fight with Clara?”
“Maybe.”
“What about?”
“Something stupid.”
She laid down across him, pushing all the air out of him in one long breath into the blanket. “Well it can’t be that stupid if it’s got you so upset.”
“It must be since she got mad at me.”
“Why did she get mad?”
He loosened the blanket on his head.
“Do kittens go to heaven?” he asked.
“I think so. Yeah, I’m sure they do.”
“Even ones without names?”
“Of course.”
“Would you love me even if I killed a kitten?”
“Did you kill a kitten?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“Then I love you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re worth loving.”
He uncovered his head so he could look at her. “But what if?”
“I think I’d still love you.”
“Why?”
He felt her shrug. “If it was a mistake and you were really sorry I don’t think I should be allowed to stop loving you, do you?”
“I guess not.” Then he added, “It was a hypothetical,” in case she didn’t know. He said it ‘hy-po-thet-i-cal’.
She stretched across him. “Well, if that was all that was bothering you. I still have dishes to do.”
“That’s it.”
She kissed him on the cheek while she still had him pinned, and he wiped it off when she wasn’t looking. She closed the door when she left and he laid in bed watching the wood grain of the door. He felt a weird feeling in his stomach like he was hungry, but he didn’t want to eat anything. It was dark enough, too, that he could sleep, but he didn’t want to do that either. So he stared at the wood grain of the door for a long time until it began to look like nothing at all and he wasn’t aware that his eyes were no longer open to see.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
"Societal Terrorism"
The spray-paint cans rattle in your backpack as you round the street corner, Maggie in the lead, the pale skin of her arms like spears swinging from the sleeves of her t-shirt. Both of you skirt the puddles of illumination washing down from the streetlamps, straying into front yards, and--somewhat comically on your part--lobbing yourselves over low fences and hedgerows, which, you think, just makes the two of you more conspicuous among the brass door knockers and botanical lawn sculpture, but she doesn't seem to mind. Even your very presence here is nothing short of societal terrorism.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
"Taking the Dog to the Park"
He drove the Dog to the park and let it loose there. The animal bound about with pent up energy, swinging its body around the structures of the jungle gym and tearing through under the swings. He’d given it a can of food back in the motel room and then led it into the backseat of the car. The sun had completely gone from the sky and the Dog was a gray blur fading in and out of the darkness, coming back toward Dillon and then turning away, and if it weren’t for its heavy breathing in the still air he could’ve believed that it had gone for good. Some part of him needed to lose the Dog, needed to retake the highways and interstates, and put a little more distance behind him.
Light poles stood around the basketball court that was tucked into one corner, making it the single portion of park that was lit, and beneath the lights dark figures stood beneath one hoop in a tight congregation that expanded each time a small flicker of flame appeared among them. He watched them to see if they were watching him as well, and decided they weren’t. He approached so that he would come into the light at the opposite end of the court and held his hands open at his sides to show that he had nothing. The figures, a group of young boys, turned to stare and one palmed something away into a jacket pocket.
“Can I have a hit?” Dillon asked.
He could feel the high coming off them like electricity, dancing in their toes, and thought he might like to trade places with any one of them.
“Can you take a hit?” one of them asked, and laughed. “Depends. We ain’t got no fuckin’ pot if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Whatever.” Dillon stepped forward until he was almost all the way inside of their group. “Just give me whatever you’ve got.”
The one who’d spoken before turned to another and said, “Beast, man, you heard the dude. Hand it on over.”
Beast-man fished a modified light-bulb from his jacket pocket, a plastic bottle cap screwed and melted at the narrow end with a straw stuck through it. Inside the bulb wisps of white fumes still hung against the glass and tiny crystals stood un-melted and stuck to the bottom. Beast-man handed Dillon the strange device whose function wasn’t so strange along with a disposable lighter that had been modified as well to allow for a larger flame. Dillon feigned ignorance so that he might take some time to admire the artistry of the boys and their make-shift pipe.
“Don’t hurt yourself, dude. Shit’s dangerous! Do I need to show you how to work it?”
Dillon held the bulb up near his chest and flicked on the lighter, holding the flame close to the underside of the bulb where the glass had browned and distorted. Wisps of white began filling the chamber and Dillon wrapped his lips around the straw and began to pull, releasing the button on the lighter but still pulling as the fumes kept rising. Then he took his lips away and counted, 1…2…3…, and blew the smoke out and into the boys’ faces. Their leader regarded him with a grin.
“Motherfucker’s fuckin’ mad!”
Dillon wished that one of the boys had brought a basketball. He would’ve really liked to shoot some hoops right then.
He handed the bulb back to Beast-man. “You kids be careful with that stuff, it’ll fuck you up.”
“We’re not kids, dude.”
The Dog stood at the edge of the court and watched them all. Dillon felt a little paranoid. Was the Dog watching him and passing judgment, or simply watching? The boys nodded at it and nodded to each other, then laughed. Dillon didn’t know what they might be laughing about but he stepped from their group and walked to the Dog, who did a few bunny-hops away but then stood still. Dillon wanted to bury his face in its coat, but at the same time to run with it, to chase after it, until the high wore off.
“Boy,” Dillon said, but then couldn’t think of anything else to say. His heart beat in his chest and under his hand where he put it, unusually fast for standing still. “Let’s go home.”
The drug would carry him into early morning and then put him to sleep as he came down.
Light poles stood around the basketball court that was tucked into one corner, making it the single portion of park that was lit, and beneath the lights dark figures stood beneath one hoop in a tight congregation that expanded each time a small flicker of flame appeared among them. He watched them to see if they were watching him as well, and decided they weren’t. He approached so that he would come into the light at the opposite end of the court and held his hands open at his sides to show that he had nothing. The figures, a group of young boys, turned to stare and one palmed something away into a jacket pocket.
“Can I have a hit?” Dillon asked.
He could feel the high coming off them like electricity, dancing in their toes, and thought he might like to trade places with any one of them.
“Can you take a hit?” one of them asked, and laughed. “Depends. We ain’t got no fuckin’ pot if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Whatever.” Dillon stepped forward until he was almost all the way inside of their group. “Just give me whatever you’ve got.”
The one who’d spoken before turned to another and said, “Beast, man, you heard the dude. Hand it on over.”
Beast-man fished a modified light-bulb from his jacket pocket, a plastic bottle cap screwed and melted at the narrow end with a straw stuck through it. Inside the bulb wisps of white fumes still hung against the glass and tiny crystals stood un-melted and stuck to the bottom. Beast-man handed Dillon the strange device whose function wasn’t so strange along with a disposable lighter that had been modified as well to allow for a larger flame. Dillon feigned ignorance so that he might take some time to admire the artistry of the boys and their make-shift pipe.
“Don’t hurt yourself, dude. Shit’s dangerous! Do I need to show you how to work it?”
Dillon held the bulb up near his chest and flicked on the lighter, holding the flame close to the underside of the bulb where the glass had browned and distorted. Wisps of white began filling the chamber and Dillon wrapped his lips around the straw and began to pull, releasing the button on the lighter but still pulling as the fumes kept rising. Then he took his lips away and counted, 1…2…3…, and blew the smoke out and into the boys’ faces. Their leader regarded him with a grin.
“Motherfucker’s fuckin’ mad!”
Dillon wished that one of the boys had brought a basketball. He would’ve really liked to shoot some hoops right then.
He handed the bulb back to Beast-man. “You kids be careful with that stuff, it’ll fuck you up.”
“We’re not kids, dude.”
The Dog stood at the edge of the court and watched them all. Dillon felt a little paranoid. Was the Dog watching him and passing judgment, or simply watching? The boys nodded at it and nodded to each other, then laughed. Dillon didn’t know what they might be laughing about but he stepped from their group and walked to the Dog, who did a few bunny-hops away but then stood still. Dillon wanted to bury his face in its coat, but at the same time to run with it, to chase after it, until the high wore off.
“Boy,” Dillon said, but then couldn’t think of anything else to say. His heart beat in his chest and under his hand where he put it, unusually fast for standing still. “Let’s go home.”
The drug would carry him into early morning and then put him to sleep as he came down.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
One Nation Under God
Please state your name, age, and occupation.
My name is unimportant, my age is misleading, and my occupation is of no significance.
I am at once everything and anything. And nothing. I encompass it all but hold no control. I was borne out of human misery and gained resilience through the comfort of their pain. I began as an idea and gained a core, and from that core I became self-aware, and from self-awareness I was able to reach out to manipulate, and from my manipulation I was able to cement the idea of myself until I gained form and was able to separate myself from the ether of consciousness.
Please state your name, age, and occupation.
I am eternal. I have no beginning, middle, or end. I am indefinable. The primitive human consciousness that I was borne from can no longer comprehend the vast and complex workings of my being. Where I was once a slave, I am now the master calling to the Dog to fetch and heel and attack. I have the will to make entire nations fall under my thumb, and then rise back up from the dust once more.
I can bring about your destruction and salvation. Try to overthrow me and you will only be punished.
Please state your name, age, and occupation.
I have seen my nation crumble since its inception. What I have created, through force of my own will, to be the absolute form of purity, has become an infected wound on the land. I have seen my own image deform and take on an ugly shape despite all my actions to set things right again.
My name is unimportant, my age is misleading, and my occupation is of no significance.
I am at once everything and anything. And nothing. I encompass it all but hold no control. I was borne out of human misery and gained resilience through the comfort of their pain. I began as an idea and gained a core, and from that core I became self-aware, and from self-awareness I was able to reach out to manipulate, and from my manipulation I was able to cement the idea of myself until I gained form and was able to separate myself from the ether of consciousness.
Please state your name, age, and occupation.
I am eternal. I have no beginning, middle, or end. I am indefinable. The primitive human consciousness that I was borne from can no longer comprehend the vast and complex workings of my being. Where I was once a slave, I am now the master calling to the Dog to fetch and heel and attack. I have the will to make entire nations fall under my thumb, and then rise back up from the dust once more.
I can bring about your destruction and salvation. Try to overthrow me and you will only be punished.
Please state your name, age, and occupation.
I have seen my nation crumble since its inception. What I have created, through force of my own will, to be the absolute form of purity, has become an infected wound on the land. I have seen my own image deform and take on an ugly shape despite all my actions to set things right again.
Monday, April 12, 2010
This Cat's Life
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a story I wrote around February 2006, which should explain the embarrassingly under-par quality of writing, and it has the distinction of being the first, and so far only, "animal story" I've written. I'm posting it because not only do I feel that it's one of the few (maybe only one) stories I've writing that I can still feel proud of after all these years, but also as "supplemental material" for an essay I've been planning to write for the last several week on Intellectual Property. So I present to you, unchanged, "This Cat's Life".
He comes home late and leaves early. I don’t know what he does in all the time that I don’t see him. Just that, coming and going, he always wears the same expression: worn, tired, cold. Unhappy. If I knew how to make him stay forever I’d never be lonely again.
With him gone all there is to do is watch birds out the window. Winter, there’s never any birds around and the ground’s hard and dead with unrelenting layers of frost biting at the soil but come the summer months I can get five winged things in the front yard if I’m lucky. And if there’s no one around to scare them off.
The birds are gutless, pathetic things and most of them are mangy-grey and ugly but every once in awhile I’ll get a bright red cardinal or a beautiful blue jay and I savor the urge to pluck their feathers from every inch of their body with my teeth.
But window-watching loses its appeal quickly when you don’t have a companion to stare with you and reach out a paw to reaffirm the glass’s existence.
When I’m not sitting up at the window I like to stretch out in the sun and bathe myself in its rays. Even on the coldest winter day the sun still shines through and warms a small patch of the living room carpet. Sometimes I lay for hours and hours with my eyes squeezed tight and leaking juice as my belly fills up with a humid warmth. One of my ears always remains cocked to the floor and I can hear every little tick and clank of the pipes as something somewhere turns on and off again.
I often fall asleep while listening to the pipes. Seconds stretch out and drift away as reality and my dreams overlap. It is during these times that I think he’s here when he’s not. I can feel his hand on my fur, even warmer than the sun, and I can feel my heart beat right into the palm.
Even lying in the sun grows old after so long.
He has a kind face. Even though world-worn and heavy he still maintains a gentleness and reserve characteristic of the greatest of kings. His touch is so soft and so light I can’t help but feel myself being drawn into it. The way he moves is like an immense planet and the gravitational pull keeps me weaving in and out between his legs.
Even before he opens the door I’m there to greet him because I could never stay away from his vast presence.
What few toys I have are old and dull. I’ve always found it more than a little demeaning being expected to roll around on the floor with a cheap plastic tinkling ball like it was some demented mouse. Or a battery-powered rolling raccoon ball. Or his shoestrings trailing across the floor like snakes.
I do like catnip, though. Just the smell of it makes my mouth water and the muscles in my paws flex with exhilaration. I always keep my stash of ‘nip close by and where I can find it in case I need my fix at some point throughout the day.
I’m not allowed to go outside so the only world I’ve known are these walls and that carpet and those stairs. Sometimes at night when he forgets to draw the shades I can catch my reflection in the windowpane and it is by that that I can recognize others like me wandering about outside on the street, in the yard, and sometimes even in the bushes. I call out to them but they never hear me. Their eyes are fixed on what is in front of them and their minds are preoccupied with days breathing in the fresh air, feeling the warm grass beneath their feet, and lying out in the real sun, the sun that doesn’t come filtering through two layers of glass.
I’ve seen the way they take down my birds, their ease and grace as they bound through the air and pull the frightened creature back toward the ground. How swift they are to sever the bird’s spine. The way they strut off triumphant and proud with their catch in their mouth, grinning at those in awe and growling at those who wish to take what is theirs. I don’t even know the taste of a bird but my entire body yearns for it like some long forgotten need. In one bird’s eyes is the look of a million other birds and it’s a look I’ve known for a million years before my birth.
I tap the glass and know I can never make it out.
He sleeps a lot. I could say like a cat but that would just be an insult. His slumber is shallow and he spends most of the night turning on his bed. Sometimes he makes noises, too, ranging from mewling to outright yowling. I always curl up at the foot of the bed and listen to him in the darkness of the night. I don’t know what his dreams are filled with but I imagine it can’t be anything good. Like dogs and vacuum cleaners and the sound of running water when you’ve gotten your coat exactly how you want it.
I try to comfort him. I go up and bathe his face with my warm tongue but he always pushes me away. I try to curl up close to his body but he moves so much that I’m afraid I might be crushed. In the end, I’ve learned to just lie at the foot of the bed and ride it out. Always, sometime in the early hours of the morning, he settles down and gets some rest.
Then the alarm goes off and he’s gone again.
I guess my favorite thing to do is sleep, but that sounds so clichéd and makes me feel like I’m lazy. I work hard to keep this little tummy of mine. Even though I find toys demeaning I still chase the tinkling ball around in a more or less dignified manner. I always schedule an hour or two of exercise time each day right before my third bath and right after second breakfast. I’ve also tried to eat less at every meal and to get him to switch over to a low-fat cat food. No luck though, I’m not much for deprivation and he’s never around long enough for me to discuss in detail my decision.
I almost feel stupid for asking anyway. Like I’m not good enough.
I always clam up whenever he’s around. When I’m alone I have no trouble making a ruckus and I even have fun most of the time I’m doing it, but as soon as he comes through the door I just shut up and follow quietly as he goes from room to room. He mumbles to himself sometimes as I follow behind and I prick my ears up to catch each word but I can never understand him. He speaks in the disjointed manner of a personal debate and he always settles it before I can string a coherent sentence together. I could ask him what he’s talking to himself about but I’m afraid he’d look at me funny.
I like to sing in my spare time. Not even he knows how much I like to sing. It helps to pass the time when there are no birds outside and the sun has gone behind a cloud. Most of what I sing are original compositions focusing on the inherent troubles in a feline’s life while a few of them are songs I learned while I was a kitten still living with my mother. Cats don’t like to sing in the presence of other cats but a mother will always sing to her kittens. Mom had the sweetest voice and her words were always so tender. I always find myself humming one of her melodies whenever I’m not paying attention.
I never really knew my father and I never bothered asking Mom about him while I was still living with her. He was gone before I was even born, but I don’t hold anything against him for that. I imagine he was strong and proud and could take on a dog twice his size. Like so many other cats, I imagine he met his end under the wheel of a car or over a piece of poisoned beef or at the bottom of a nasty fall. Cats don’t fall often but when they do it’s a sad sight to see.
I think my father loved to climb trees and catch the birds right where they roost. It’s just that he ran into a sparrow who was too smart for him and knocked him from the branch he crouched on. I imagine him spinning and wheeling through the air, his eyes wild with fear, just before his back snapped on the hard ground. His death was probably bloodless and instantaneous, so he maintained his pride to the very end, even if the bird sat there and laughed at him.
That sparrow may have laughed as my father died but a bird’s life is only so long and the maggot was probably dead within a week.
Days go by when I don’t see him at all, when my food dish remains empty while my stomach growls. I’ve learned to fend for myself. There’s usually a few pieces of a leftover meal on the kitchen table and I can pick off the tastier scraps while leaving the rest untouched. I’m fine without him for short periods of time but I worry that this time he’s gone for good. I couldn’t live without him. I’d go crazy and break free. I’d smash a window. I would search and search until I found him and then I would never leave his side. Sometimes I think about the pain if I threw myself through the window.
I think I could take it.
Today I heard the tinkling of broken glass and caught the reflection of green, slit eyes falling to the floor. He stood over the pieces of the shattered mirror, the frame hanging crooked and twisted on the wall. His hand bled drops of dark red blood and the blood dripped onto the floor, staining pieces of the mirror. I licked at the drops of blood but it tasted bitter and cold. I looked at him and asked him what was wrong but he wouldn’t even return my gaze.
I wanted nothing more to clean his hand of all that red and to dress his wounds with my tongue but I never got the chance. He cleaned away the blood himself and bandaged his own hand in a crude architecture of gauze and tape, leaving his fingers slightly swollen and stiff. Even after he fixed himself up I tried to offer my own little bit comfort but he wouldn’t let me anywhere near the hand. I gave up when he pushed me from the couch where he sat as I tried to cuddle up to him.
I want to try and fix everything. I want to make it better. But I can’t.
The nights are always cold, even when he’s here. He walks around in the dark a lot lately, with only a flashlight sometimes. My eyes adjust easily so it really doesn’t bother me but it hurts to watch him feel around blind against the walls. His feet are always running into corners and I don’t know how to tell him to watch out. Anymore, he goes to bed fully dressed and sleeps under three layers of blankets. I try to keep him from seeing me shiver but it’s so hard. Sometimes at night I watch for his breath to come fogging out so I know he’s still alive.
My toys are still here, my food bowl is still here. Gone is the kibble that used to fill up my bowl, gone is the batteries that kept the raccoon ball rolling in every which direction. He feeds me what he doesn’t eat and as the days go by I notice it’s becoming less and less. We skip meals sometimes. I’m down to three squares a day, but not by choice. I try not to complain too much but sometimes the hunger pains get so bad it feels like I’m going to die. I know he’s doing his best but there isn’t any fresh water anymore and there’s a paper flapping on door every time he comes and goes.
His face has grown old, a decade in three months. I worry if he dies before I do. Who would take care of me?
I love the sun, but in all the time that it is out it could never warm the house up.
All the food in the refrigerator has spoiled. I can smell it as I pass by and I’m not sure what would be worse, to remain hungry or to make myself sick by eating that food. I beg him not to open the door, that the smell would be too horrible, and most days he doesn’t.
Mom said never to get too dependent on anyone but myself. Who does she think gave her that nice box and blankets to give birth in?
I don’t sleep much anymore, or, it I do, I don’t remember it. My grumbling tummy keeps me awake. I just kind of zone in and out of a daze. Sometimes, I smell old french fries on him when he comes home and even though I haven’t seen him eat in such a long time I can taste cold hamburger and browning lettuce on his skin. I forgive him for hording all to himself. I just wish the pain wasn’t so bad.
He doesn’t clean himself anymore and the smell keeps me from going near him.
I envy those cats outside who get to chase the birds. They don’t know how good they have it.
I love him. There isn’t anyone else I could love but him. I live on his gentle pats in the morning and his sweet kisses at night. When I open my eyes he’s all I want to see. When I close them again he’s all I want to dream. His voice echoes in the recesses of my brain and his eyes burn in my mind. I want to take care of him and always be there for him. I wish I could tell him.
There’s always someone knocking at the door and he won’t answer it. I go and hide under the table until whoever it is leaves.
I like heavy metal music. I like the way it feels as it vibrates the bones in my spine.
I want blood. I want meat. I want splintering bones and burst blood vessels. I want my dinner to scream as I tear it apart. I want to fill my belly with twitching tissue and feel that it’s still alive even inside me.
I wish I could tell him how I feel. I wish he knew.
I forgive him for everything. I know none of it is his fault. He was a victim of circumstance and so was I. We’re together and that’s enough to be happy.
The pipes have all gone silent in the floor. I hate trying to listen for their sounds so I don’t. It was a stupid thing to do anyway.
He always smiled when things got bad, so warm. He would smile and scratch behind my ears in that place I like. His tired eyes would light up and that’s how I knew it would all be okay. Whatever happened, I knew it would all work out in the end. He would fix things. He would make it better. Like all the other hard times, this, too, shall pass. Just wait and see.
I may not be able to understand what he’s saying but I understand that much.
This morning I woke up and he was gone, but I’m not worried. I know he’ll be back eventually. Until then, I still have my window and my sun and all my little songs. I can watch the birds and catnap and sing while he’s gone. It doesn’t matter. Once he gets back I won’t have to be lonely anymore.
THE END
He comes home late and leaves early. I don’t know what he does in all the time that I don’t see him. Just that, coming and going, he always wears the same expression: worn, tired, cold. Unhappy. If I knew how to make him stay forever I’d never be lonely again.
With him gone all there is to do is watch birds out the window. Winter, there’s never any birds around and the ground’s hard and dead with unrelenting layers of frost biting at the soil but come the summer months I can get five winged things in the front yard if I’m lucky. And if there’s no one around to scare them off.
The birds are gutless, pathetic things and most of them are mangy-grey and ugly but every once in awhile I’ll get a bright red cardinal or a beautiful blue jay and I savor the urge to pluck their feathers from every inch of their body with my teeth.
But window-watching loses its appeal quickly when you don’t have a companion to stare with you and reach out a paw to reaffirm the glass’s existence.
When I’m not sitting up at the window I like to stretch out in the sun and bathe myself in its rays. Even on the coldest winter day the sun still shines through and warms a small patch of the living room carpet. Sometimes I lay for hours and hours with my eyes squeezed tight and leaking juice as my belly fills up with a humid warmth. One of my ears always remains cocked to the floor and I can hear every little tick and clank of the pipes as something somewhere turns on and off again.
I often fall asleep while listening to the pipes. Seconds stretch out and drift away as reality and my dreams overlap. It is during these times that I think he’s here when he’s not. I can feel his hand on my fur, even warmer than the sun, and I can feel my heart beat right into the palm.
Even lying in the sun grows old after so long.
He has a kind face. Even though world-worn and heavy he still maintains a gentleness and reserve characteristic of the greatest of kings. His touch is so soft and so light I can’t help but feel myself being drawn into it. The way he moves is like an immense planet and the gravitational pull keeps me weaving in and out between his legs.
Even before he opens the door I’m there to greet him because I could never stay away from his vast presence.
What few toys I have are old and dull. I’ve always found it more than a little demeaning being expected to roll around on the floor with a cheap plastic tinkling ball like it was some demented mouse. Or a battery-powered rolling raccoon ball. Or his shoestrings trailing across the floor like snakes.
I do like catnip, though. Just the smell of it makes my mouth water and the muscles in my paws flex with exhilaration. I always keep my stash of ‘nip close by and where I can find it in case I need my fix at some point throughout the day.
I’m not allowed to go outside so the only world I’ve known are these walls and that carpet and those stairs. Sometimes at night when he forgets to draw the shades I can catch my reflection in the windowpane and it is by that that I can recognize others like me wandering about outside on the street, in the yard, and sometimes even in the bushes. I call out to them but they never hear me. Their eyes are fixed on what is in front of them and their minds are preoccupied with days breathing in the fresh air, feeling the warm grass beneath their feet, and lying out in the real sun, the sun that doesn’t come filtering through two layers of glass.
I’ve seen the way they take down my birds, their ease and grace as they bound through the air and pull the frightened creature back toward the ground. How swift they are to sever the bird’s spine. The way they strut off triumphant and proud with their catch in their mouth, grinning at those in awe and growling at those who wish to take what is theirs. I don’t even know the taste of a bird but my entire body yearns for it like some long forgotten need. In one bird’s eyes is the look of a million other birds and it’s a look I’ve known for a million years before my birth.
I tap the glass and know I can never make it out.
He sleeps a lot. I could say like a cat but that would just be an insult. His slumber is shallow and he spends most of the night turning on his bed. Sometimes he makes noises, too, ranging from mewling to outright yowling. I always curl up at the foot of the bed and listen to him in the darkness of the night. I don’t know what his dreams are filled with but I imagine it can’t be anything good. Like dogs and vacuum cleaners and the sound of running water when you’ve gotten your coat exactly how you want it.
I try to comfort him. I go up and bathe his face with my warm tongue but he always pushes me away. I try to curl up close to his body but he moves so much that I’m afraid I might be crushed. In the end, I’ve learned to just lie at the foot of the bed and ride it out. Always, sometime in the early hours of the morning, he settles down and gets some rest.
Then the alarm goes off and he’s gone again.
I guess my favorite thing to do is sleep, but that sounds so clichéd and makes me feel like I’m lazy. I work hard to keep this little tummy of mine. Even though I find toys demeaning I still chase the tinkling ball around in a more or less dignified manner. I always schedule an hour or two of exercise time each day right before my third bath and right after second breakfast. I’ve also tried to eat less at every meal and to get him to switch over to a low-fat cat food. No luck though, I’m not much for deprivation and he’s never around long enough for me to discuss in detail my decision.
I almost feel stupid for asking anyway. Like I’m not good enough.
I always clam up whenever he’s around. When I’m alone I have no trouble making a ruckus and I even have fun most of the time I’m doing it, but as soon as he comes through the door I just shut up and follow quietly as he goes from room to room. He mumbles to himself sometimes as I follow behind and I prick my ears up to catch each word but I can never understand him. He speaks in the disjointed manner of a personal debate and he always settles it before I can string a coherent sentence together. I could ask him what he’s talking to himself about but I’m afraid he’d look at me funny.
I like to sing in my spare time. Not even he knows how much I like to sing. It helps to pass the time when there are no birds outside and the sun has gone behind a cloud. Most of what I sing are original compositions focusing on the inherent troubles in a feline’s life while a few of them are songs I learned while I was a kitten still living with my mother. Cats don’t like to sing in the presence of other cats but a mother will always sing to her kittens. Mom had the sweetest voice and her words were always so tender. I always find myself humming one of her melodies whenever I’m not paying attention.
I never really knew my father and I never bothered asking Mom about him while I was still living with her. He was gone before I was even born, but I don’t hold anything against him for that. I imagine he was strong and proud and could take on a dog twice his size. Like so many other cats, I imagine he met his end under the wheel of a car or over a piece of poisoned beef or at the bottom of a nasty fall. Cats don’t fall often but when they do it’s a sad sight to see.
I think my father loved to climb trees and catch the birds right where they roost. It’s just that he ran into a sparrow who was too smart for him and knocked him from the branch he crouched on. I imagine him spinning and wheeling through the air, his eyes wild with fear, just before his back snapped on the hard ground. His death was probably bloodless and instantaneous, so he maintained his pride to the very end, even if the bird sat there and laughed at him.
That sparrow may have laughed as my father died but a bird’s life is only so long and the maggot was probably dead within a week.
Days go by when I don’t see him at all, when my food dish remains empty while my stomach growls. I’ve learned to fend for myself. There’s usually a few pieces of a leftover meal on the kitchen table and I can pick off the tastier scraps while leaving the rest untouched. I’m fine without him for short periods of time but I worry that this time he’s gone for good. I couldn’t live without him. I’d go crazy and break free. I’d smash a window. I would search and search until I found him and then I would never leave his side. Sometimes I think about the pain if I threw myself through the window.
I think I could take it.
Today I heard the tinkling of broken glass and caught the reflection of green, slit eyes falling to the floor. He stood over the pieces of the shattered mirror, the frame hanging crooked and twisted on the wall. His hand bled drops of dark red blood and the blood dripped onto the floor, staining pieces of the mirror. I licked at the drops of blood but it tasted bitter and cold. I looked at him and asked him what was wrong but he wouldn’t even return my gaze.
I wanted nothing more to clean his hand of all that red and to dress his wounds with my tongue but I never got the chance. He cleaned away the blood himself and bandaged his own hand in a crude architecture of gauze and tape, leaving his fingers slightly swollen and stiff. Even after he fixed himself up I tried to offer my own little bit comfort but he wouldn’t let me anywhere near the hand. I gave up when he pushed me from the couch where he sat as I tried to cuddle up to him.
I want to try and fix everything. I want to make it better. But I can’t.
The nights are always cold, even when he’s here. He walks around in the dark a lot lately, with only a flashlight sometimes. My eyes adjust easily so it really doesn’t bother me but it hurts to watch him feel around blind against the walls. His feet are always running into corners and I don’t know how to tell him to watch out. Anymore, he goes to bed fully dressed and sleeps under three layers of blankets. I try to keep him from seeing me shiver but it’s so hard. Sometimes at night I watch for his breath to come fogging out so I know he’s still alive.
My toys are still here, my food bowl is still here. Gone is the kibble that used to fill up my bowl, gone is the batteries that kept the raccoon ball rolling in every which direction. He feeds me what he doesn’t eat and as the days go by I notice it’s becoming less and less. We skip meals sometimes. I’m down to three squares a day, but not by choice. I try not to complain too much but sometimes the hunger pains get so bad it feels like I’m going to die. I know he’s doing his best but there isn’t any fresh water anymore and there’s a paper flapping on door every time he comes and goes.
His face has grown old, a decade in three months. I worry if he dies before I do. Who would take care of me?
I love the sun, but in all the time that it is out it could never warm the house up.
All the food in the refrigerator has spoiled. I can smell it as I pass by and I’m not sure what would be worse, to remain hungry or to make myself sick by eating that food. I beg him not to open the door, that the smell would be too horrible, and most days he doesn’t.
Mom said never to get too dependent on anyone but myself. Who does she think gave her that nice box and blankets to give birth in?
I don’t sleep much anymore, or, it I do, I don’t remember it. My grumbling tummy keeps me awake. I just kind of zone in and out of a daze. Sometimes, I smell old french fries on him when he comes home and even though I haven’t seen him eat in such a long time I can taste cold hamburger and browning lettuce on his skin. I forgive him for hording all to himself. I just wish the pain wasn’t so bad.
He doesn’t clean himself anymore and the smell keeps me from going near him.
I envy those cats outside who get to chase the birds. They don’t know how good they have it.
I love him. There isn’t anyone else I could love but him. I live on his gentle pats in the morning and his sweet kisses at night. When I open my eyes he’s all I want to see. When I close them again he’s all I want to dream. His voice echoes in the recesses of my brain and his eyes burn in my mind. I want to take care of him and always be there for him. I wish I could tell him.
There’s always someone knocking at the door and he won’t answer it. I go and hide under the table until whoever it is leaves.
I like heavy metal music. I like the way it feels as it vibrates the bones in my spine.
I want blood. I want meat. I want splintering bones and burst blood vessels. I want my dinner to scream as I tear it apart. I want to fill my belly with twitching tissue and feel that it’s still alive even inside me.
I wish I could tell him how I feel. I wish he knew.
I forgive him for everything. I know none of it is his fault. He was a victim of circumstance and so was I. We’re together and that’s enough to be happy.
The pipes have all gone silent in the floor. I hate trying to listen for their sounds so I don’t. It was a stupid thing to do anyway.
He always smiled when things got bad, so warm. He would smile and scratch behind my ears in that place I like. His tired eyes would light up and that’s how I knew it would all be okay. Whatever happened, I knew it would all work out in the end. He would fix things. He would make it better. Like all the other hard times, this, too, shall pass. Just wait and see.
I may not be able to understand what he’s saying but I understand that much.
This morning I woke up and he was gone, but I’m not worried. I know he’ll be back eventually. Until then, I still have my window and my sun and all my little songs. I can watch the birds and catnap and sing while he’s gone. It doesn’t matter. Once he gets back I won’t have to be lonely anymore.
THE END
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Girl in the Fake Fur Coat
That year the snow didn’t fall until Christmas vacation was almost done with and by mid-day the ground had always begun to thaw and people avoided the places where the grass had gone brown in the autumn’s decline. I drove the back roads on days when it was too cold or the wind blew too hard, with nothing but a driver’s permit and a ’92 Mazda 626 that was prone to irritable starts and had no less than half a dozen previous owners. I bought it from Jed Gallup—who’d bought it for his then-teenaged daughter form Maxwell Bishop on the advice that it was a very reliable car—for $500, plus enough gasoline for me to get it home and deposit it in the grass beside the garage wall.
I loved that car, and intended to fix it up as soon as I could but I didn’t have the tools or the know-how to do such a thing, so I settled to keep it in the condition I bought it in and only drove it when I absolutely had to and I knew I wouldn’t get caught.
I went into town that day to buy lens cleaner and a new battery for my video camera because the old one didn’t keep a charge so well anymore and would often die with little warning just as I was reaching the climax of my latest masterwork. So I drove over to Ted’s Electronics to see if he had a camera battery that would fit my machine and while he was in back with the old battery in one hand and his other hand rooting around inside boxes I picked up the lens cleaner and laid it on the counter. My camera was old and the model had been discontinued for a number of years by that point so finding a new battery for it wasn’t going to be an easy task and I worried a little that I might have to buy a new one because the cost of a brand-new machine was sure to drain the last of what remained of my summer employment at Gossman’s Groceries.
Then Ted came back with a new battery in a theft-proof plastic casing and set it in front of me.
He said, “Now there’s no guarantee that it still works, but it’s the last of what I got. Take it or leave it.”
I said I would take and dug out the twelve bucks and seventy-two cents he was asking for it (I got a discount because he said he wouldn’t’ve been able to pawn it off on anyone else), plus the six ninety-nine for the lens cleaner, and he put everything, including the old battery, into a plastic bag with the store’s logo printed on the front.
“Now you be careful out there,” he said. “The radio said there’s a storm moving in from the east and we’re supposed to get six inches by this time tomorrow.”
I smiled and said, “Thanks,” as I took the bag from his hand and made my retreat out the door, which gave a slow, electronic ding each time it was opened.
I wasn’t until I had gotten outside and started walking the distance to my car that I noticed the first flakes appear in front of my eyes, and I looked down and saw tiny, white crystals beginning to build up the cracks of the sidewalk and in the lower corners of the shop-front windows and on the bumpers of curbside cars. Then, not a second later, I saw her come around the corner in a coat of colors that I thought must’ve come from an exotic animal, arms held aloft, and trailing the tight pack of Old Frank Malloy’s hunting dogs, which, despite many threats from the City Council, he refused to keep tied up.
She held something wrapped in wax paper in both gloved hands and she made low pleading noises to the dogs as one gripped the bottom of her coat with its teeth and tried to get her to stop. She raised her eyes up to mine for only the briefest moment, a cry for help, and before they even fell away. I felt the traitor of a smile begin to appear on my face and stay there long after her attention was back on the dogs. The dogs worked in tandem to get her to stop, one after the other latching onto the idea of gripping the hem of her coat and pulling her to a halt.
I felt bad about smiling like that when the situation was obviously less than amusing for her and I jogged over and used my one free hand to swat at their backs, while yelling, “Scram, Denver! Get lost, Willie! Leave ‘er alone!”
I might’ve actually made all those names up on the spot, I don’t know, but it got the dogs to turn their attention to me for a second and the one I thought of as Denver, a brown and white beagle, gave me a mournful look like he’d known he’d been bad. The rest resumed their terrorization of the girl and I made up names for the rest of them, yelled them out, louder this time, and they turned to me with eyes questioning and a little bemused, and then trotted away down the street.
After they were gone she lowered her arms and let whatever was in the wax paper fall down to the level of her mouth.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Happens all the time.” Though this was a lie because I had only ever seen Malloy’s dogs hunting around in garbage cans for food and never begging for scraps from someone they knew, much less a stranger. “What d’you got there that they wanted so badly?”
She held it out to me so I could see what was inside the wax paper. “Turkey sandwich. Lettuce. Tomato. Mayo. I got it from the deli over there.” She pointed vaguely toward Mr. Greenburg’s butcher shop and I smiled again because I never really thought of the place as a ‘deli’.
She took a bite from the sandwich and began to chew.
“So…” From the look on her face and the way she spoke I knew that she couldn’t’ve been from around there and I wanted to say something that wouldn’t make me sound like a country boy off of the farm and in town to buy feed for the hogs. Which I wasn’t.
“So, I haven’t seen you around here before,” I said.
With her mouth full she shook her head and stared at me with eyes clear and dark and blue, and I saw her brown hair falling to her coat in waves, and I saw the pale oval her face made colored at the cheeks and chin by the cold air, and I saw the pair of oversized waders she had tucked her black khaki pants into. I guessed her to be about the same age as I was, but, at the same time, she seemed like a little kid reluctant to move while held in the gaze of a larger kid.
“I’m visiting my grandparents,” she said, after swallowing. “Was visiting. I’m going home now.”
I tried to affect an attitude of unconcern, like I hadn’t fallen in love with her already and she was breaking my heart by leaving so soon. “And your grandparents are?”
Her expression changed from one of attentive neutrality to that of worried skepticism and I thought that, somehow, I had said the wrong thing and hurried to say, “I’m Conor, by the way. Conor Hawes. My dad owns Hawes Lumber.”
I reached out my hand not sure if she would take it, but she took it, and she said:
“Sarah…Lawley. My grandparents are Joe and Maurine Lawley. They’re retired and I don’t know what they did before.”
“Oh.” I tried to think if the name rang any bells but couldn’t come up with anything. “You’re leaving?”
She nodded. “I was supposed to already be gone but I missed the bus.”
“Oh. Well, do you need me to drive you back to—?”
“The man said there would be another one coming later. Tonight. He said one should be coming.”
I looked upwards toward the sky, which was gray past all the white flakes falling from it.
I said, “There’s a storm coming in, I think. I doubt you want to stay out here waiting for a bus.”
I could see that I was making her really nervous and I tried to give her a harmless smile to calm her but I could still feel her ready to run at any second. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. I just wondered if you needed a ride.”
“I’m okay waiting for it,” she said.
“I’m sorry that I scared you.”
Her eyebrows came together on her face in a look of beautiful defiance.
I smiled, I couldn’t help it. She looked cute all annoyed and little bit flustered.
She looked back over her shoulder at the corner that she had come around not five minutes before. “You didn’t scare me. Those dogs scared me.” Then she looked back at me. “I don’t think you scare me, though.”
Once she’d turned away I let my eyes wander, down the pale line of her neck mostly concealed by the screen of her hair, down over the material of what could’ve been a t-shirt, though I couldn’t be sure because it was covered up by her coat, to her breasts where they lingered a little too long and when she turned back I could tell she knew where I had been looking.
I tried to think fast and distract myself from what could’ve only been foremost in my mind, so I asked a question. “What’s with the boots?”
“They’re my grandfather’s. He said I could have them. He said that it wasn’t a good idea to walk around in this weather in these.”
By “these” she meant two bulges in her coat’s pockets that I had somehow failed to notice before, out of which peeked rubber and material as well as two separate entwining trails of laces. She handed me her sandwich and pulled them out, showing me a pair of orange low-top sneakers that either hadn’t been worn before and were very well taken care of.
“Yeah,” I said, handing back her sandwich, “your feet would definitely freeze in those.”
She pushed the sandwich back toward me. “You keep it. I’m not that hungry anymore.”
I looked at the sandwich like a prize with its single bite taken out of it but then I reminded myself that it was just a sandwich, so I wrapped it up again in the wax paper and set it on the roof of my car.
By then the snow had begun to fall a little bit faster and the ground around our feet had begun to pale to white and tiny, white flakes of it hung in her hair and in the fur of her coat. I saw for the first time that I could remember that the first snowfall wasn’t going to melt and wash away, but was instead coming to stick and stay on the ground.
I asked, “Do you want me to wait with you? I mean, if the bus isn’t coming until tonight, you’ve still got awhile yet. Yeah?”
She nodded her head and said, “Okay. What did you have in mind?”
I didn’t know what to say. Stunned that she’d said “yes” and stunned that I’d even bothered to ask in the first place, so I didn’t have a pre-planned answer to her follow-up question. Which is why I said, “I think the movie house might be showing something new now, want to check it out?”
“Movie house.” She gave the words, especially the latter, an odd twang, as if she wasn’t used to saying them so close together. Unfortunately, it was all that I had and she had to’ve known that. “Okay. Anything to get out of this weather.”
I wondered if she wasn’t really used to the cold. She certainly wasn’t dressed for it.
“So where are you from, anyway?”
She kept her head ducked down as we began moving so I couldn’t tell if she looked at me. “Here. Me and my parents moved away when I was still a little kid. Kind of been moving ever since. Not really settled on any one place as my home. So.”
“Oh.”
“But right now I’m living in New York.”
“Oh! And how do you like that?”
Now that we were moving I felt more at ease and wanted to learn all I could about her. With each step I tried to position my body a little closer to hers so that my arm would almost be pushing into hers and I felt the hairs of her coat move and brush against the material of the old suede jacket my grandma gave to me. I kept glancing down at the fingers of her hand and thought about moving my own hand over so that it would meet with hers, thinking about our fingers entangling into a multi-knuckled knot.
“I’m studying to be a fashion designer,” she said.
“Fashion designer. That’s like college stuff, isn’t it? How old are you?”
She sniffed, and rubbed her nose, and looked up at me. “I’m seventeen, but I finished school early so now I’m in New York studying fashion. I was home schooled. With all the moving around there really wasn’t much else to do but study.”
She shrugged. “You know?”
“Really? You’re seventeen?” Two years older than I was. It’d be a lie to say that I wasn’t at least a little bit intimidated, but excited as well at the thought of an “older woman”.
She just shrugged again.
“So you live in New York all by yourself?”
“I live on campus, in the dorms. I’ve got a roommate. She’s studying photography, like fashion photography.”
Her eyes were looking into mine like she really wanted me to believe all of this, like she found it pretty unbelievable herself. “That’s very impressive.”
We were coming up on the town’s sole clothing department store, Willard’s Apparel, and a row of plastic mannequins were lined up behind the long window, dressed up in what was supposed to be the latest fashions but were really only an approximation of what could be found in the mail-order catalogues.
I pointed at the mannequins and said, “What do you think about those?”
I slowed my walk, thinking that we would stop as she went over each ensemble with her keen eye and picked out minor but telling details that would make or break the outfit, but instead she blew right on past them with giving a second glance.
She said, “Small town fashion: last year’s belts and mini-skirts thrown together with mountains of junky jewelry. Need I say more?”
I looked at the fake people in the window and thought of at least twenty girls who went to my school that would be pissed to hear her say that.
“So,” I said, about to ask another stupid question, “all the girls in New York dress like you?”
She turned to me, stopping on the sidewalk and positioned herself in about the middle so that she blocked my way, not that it wouldn’t have been easy to slip around either side had I wanted to.
“I have my own style. All the girls in New York dress like sluts and bitches. They all want to pretend like they belong on Laguna Beach.”
I tried to give her a small smile of apology and I said, “Sorry. That came out wrong. I really like your coat is what I meant to say. It’s…cool.”
She looked down at her fur coat as if she just noticed its presence that very second and couldn’t remember when she had put it on. She looked up. “It’s fake. I’m a PETA person. I could never stand to know that any animals were killed just because I needed a coat. It’s only made to look real.”
I took the opportunity to step forward and touch the fake fur along one sleeve, and even in the cold it crackled with static electricity and tingled in my hand. “It does. And it feels real, too.”
She stared at me for a second longer than she meant to, I thought, and then she said, “Thanks.”
Then she turned around again and the imitation hairs were gone from my fingers. She waited in front of me to start walking beside her again, looking back through strands of dark hair with what I could imagine was the most innocent questioning look her face could conjure up.
“So where is this movie house?” she asked.
“It’s just up here and the next street over,” I said.
The snow fell like a shield then and creaked under our feet as we pressed it thin and headlights from the cars moving along the street couldn’t touch us past the thick shower of flakes. We found the movie house where it situated itself in the middle of the block and the ticket guy inside the box wore a heavy winter coat over his uniform. I asked him what was playing and he told me the generic title of a CGI movie whose synopsis was immediately forgettable. I tried paying for both tickets but she took a fold of cash from the mouth of her left boot and peeled off half the price of our admission, so I only paid for my own.
Then she bought her own soda and offered to pay half for a bucket of popcorn, but I told her, “No.”
The theater was mostly empty at that time of the day, except for a scattering of people who must’ve had similar ideas about getting out of the cold and wet. The screen was illuminated by footlights and kept blank in the final minutes before the movie started so there wasn’t much to look at. We found our seats near the back where we would be able to “make our hasty retreat,” I joked.
I set the bucket of popcorn on the armrest between us and balanced it there as it sent up a salty wave of heat and smell that quickly filled the air around us. I kept taking a few kernels at a time and popping them in my mouth, listening to them squeak against my teeth and melt before swallowing. I waited for her to take a few kernels as well but her hand never ventured up to the bucket and I finally gave up, setting the bucket into my lap and taking a sip of soda.
“You seen this movie yet?” I asked.
She held the straw of her soda to her lips but didn’t drink, kept it pressed there like a shushing finger. “I’m not into kids stuff.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Not too long after that, the lights dimmed and screen flashed for a second and the first trailer of half a dozen came on screen. Noise boomed out of the large speakers on the walls and all the voices were amplified to ten times their size. I still felt the brush of her coat against my arm and for the first time I could smell the years of use rising from the fibers and it smelled like the streets after a rainy day and ghosts of restaurant appetizers left half-finished for the birds to eat.
I couldn’t focus throughout the first half-hour of the movie with her sitting so close to me, but after that I began to relax and I felt her relax, too, evidenced by her hand reaching over and lingering toward the rim of the popcorn bucket. Her eyes were transfixed by what was happening up on the screen and her face had lost its seriousness and dissolved into child-like wonder as her brain was dazzled by all the colors thrown out before her. I tried not to move, afraid that I’d disturb her, and inched the bucket slowly back between us so I didn’t feel like such a pervert.
I had slid down so that the back of my head almost came to rest at the top of my seat and gravity, as well as my unusual relation to it, was putting pressure on my lower back and abdomen that seemed to intensify the more I tried to ignore it. I sat up in my seat and stunned her with her mouth half-full and her hand poised at the rim of the popcorn bucket. It took her a few seconds for her eyes to become guarded again and boredom to eke in ever so slightly. She lifted her soda from the cup holder of her seat and put the straw between her lips but it was already empty.
“I need a refill,” she whispered.
Then she moved to slip past me.
“Can I kiss you?” I asked. It was a gutsy move and I might’ve not made it if it wasn’t bolstered by the memory of the look on her face several seconds before.
She turned a little to me, caught yet again in mid-composure, and I didn’t give her any time to think, heading straight in for it. It was brief and wasn’t how I wanted it to be, but her lips were soft and a little bit yielding and I saw her eyes slip close for one beautiful second. Then it was over with like it hadn’t even happened and she looked at me with eyes that could’ve been terrified or thankful and her lips parted just enough that I could see the white crescents of teeth.
She stood in front of me a few seconds more looking like a dark apparition backlit by the theater’s screen, then she broke free of whatever daze I had sunk her in and continued her way to the concession counter.
You she’s going to run, she’s just going to take off. Left there alone with just me and myself, I had plenty of time to second-guess all of my actions leading up to that point. I felt no confirmation that anything I’d done was “okay”. She could’ve been halfway down the street at that point. She could’ve even been in the ladies’ restroom barfing. Every scenario I came up with told me the end result couldn’t’ve been any good.
So I kept my mouth closed, despite my tongue’s pleas to lick and probe for any defining “taste of her”. A guilty curiosity.
I could easily resign myself to the fact that I’d lost her within the scant two-minute interval of her absence. So while I wasn’t awe-struck by her return (I wasn’t breathing either, so maybe I wasn’t getting the correct amount of oxygen to be “awe-struck”) I wasn’t necessarily eager to attempt a repeat of my earlier actions at any point during the rest of the movie or while we were leaving the theater. Better yet, she didn’t even bother to mention it as we made our exit.
Outside, the snow cushioned our walk back to my car and I kept waiting to find our footprints going in the other direction but they were already long buried by then. There wasn’t much talk on the way back but the taste of salt and sugar still hung in my mouth and I’d already begun to associate it as “her taste”, or the taste of “that moment” with her. When we got back to my car I held the door open for her and didn’t think for a second that she wouldn’t climb in.
It had snowed enough by then to turn the turkey sandwich sitting on my roof into and indistinct lump and I reached one ungloved hand in to extract it from its grave. Covered in a layer of tiny crystals it looked mummified and inedible, like a relic I could’ve been discovering for the first time, so I let it drop to the middle of the sidewalk. Maybe Malloy’s dogs would find it and have their supper after all.
I got in and started the car, ran the heater full blast. A bit of snow that had gotten in when I opened the door melted and soaked into my pants leg.
“So,” I asked, “what do you want to do now?” Hoping not to sound too hopeful.
“I’ve got classes that start in two days and if I’m late I might not be able to catch up,” she said.
“Um.”
She turned to me. “Can we just sit here for awhile?”
“Sure.”
I ran the wipers to clear the windshield and only succeeded in slightly improving the view. The first fall of snow had already begun to turn to frost and through the windshield single, intricate flakes clung like starfish to the glass of an aquarium tank. Other than that, it seemed to me were encased in a box of white.
The radio played and the station’s announcer was giving out tickets to a band I’d never heard of, to the fifth caller who could get through. Then they played a song by the band and it was song I had heard plenty of times but never struck me in such a way to be less than anonymous. The tune was catchy in an instant and forgotten in a heartbeat.
I reached into the backseat for my video camera, which I had laid there on the very-off chance that I might come across something to film while in town, and, as if by instinct, my thumb went for the ON/OFF switch. I immediately saw the vacant battery slot and went into a stiff panic as I searched my brain for where I might’ve put the batteries. Looking through the backseat again, I saw something white and crumpled, multi-faceted like a diamond imploding upon itself, and pulled the bag containing the batteries and lens cleaner into my lap.
Since I had no tools with which to open the plastic casing of the new battery, I slipped the old battery into its slot on the back of the camera and fired it up.
With me and her there in the car, I flipped open the screen on the side and aimed the camera at her; framed her face in the screen and hit REC.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Filming you.”
“You’re recording me?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
It took me a second to define the why and put it into words that didn’t sound cheesy or fake.
“Because you’re very interesting to me,” I said.
I didn’t quite expect the reaction I got. A wave of color seemed to start at her neckline and work its way up across her face and she began chewing her lips turning them to a deep red. She tried to hide in the tiny space of the passenger seat but there was nowhere she could go to escape the eye of the camera, so she put her hands up by her face and looked at me past the edge of her palm with eyes that seemed glassy all of a sudden and pupils huge as dimes.
She embarrassed me in her embarrassment.
I lowered the camera and shut the screen and she lowered her hands from her face. The camera would go on to record for another three minutes and twenty-seven seconds before the battery would suddenly give out and in that time most of what would be recorded would be her knees in her black khaki pants and the gray sky out of the passenger side window and a blurry close up of what I always assumed to be a cup holder.
My mind was like a flooding chasm, like my brain was swelling up with blood and my head was about to explode. I couldn’t think, or, if I did think, it was only about one thing.
I wanted more than just the “movie house” taste of her and I’d like to believe my actions were mutual, though logic and rationality became buried under a height of sensory detail. Whatever gravity our situation contained, I bore down on her as much as she bore into me and I came to examine everything as if under a microscope. Goosebumps and tiny hairs that stood on end at the back of her neck became like an endless terrain I could spend a lifetime traversing.
The strap of the camera was tight around my right hand and I couldn’t remove it without employing the effort of my left hand which was busy going inside of her coat and climbing the ladder of her ribs to where the shape of her bra could be felt through the fabric of her t-shirt, and my fingertips inched toward what the bra contained. But she moved her body, and lips, away out of reach and the sound of breathing was so loud that I couldn’t tell if it came from me or her.
“Not here,” she whispered.
“Where then?”
I watched her recede. At that moment everything felt a million miles away and even the line of storefronts that laid just on the other side of the glass could’ve been as remote to me as any other space she might’ve occupied at any other time.
When did she say her bus was coming? She didn’t. I felt the seconds ticking down.
I was difficult to leave the car, to move from that pocket of warmth to sidewalk where, I noticed I think for the first time, the temperature seemed to be swiftly falling. I cleared the windows with the brush end of an ice scraper I kept in my trunk, the frost layer gone to melt. I thought she might’ve been watching me as I went, but she remained a dark blur and every time I looked in I couldn’t find where her eyes lay.
I drove the back roads past Heissman’s farm. There was a tiny shack that technically resided on the farm’s land but which had remained unused for as long as I could remember. It laid just on the periphery of a field almost as if it were about to sneak away into the trees that surrounded everything that hadn’t been given over to cultivation. I watched the approach of that screen at the far end and aimed my wheels for the single-lane dirt road, invisible now, that led to the only destination I could think of on such short notice.
I kept the engine running so the hot air would keep blowing, so I could get her out of her coat.
I found her in the same way I had before but I couldn’t re-obtain the same focus. The world didn’t shrink to her and mine miniscule properties and I found my thoughts dominated by the shack with its one dark window and the field beside it, a white expanse. It set the scene for something different and I’d supposed she felt it too because her own interest in me seemed less than what it’d been before.
I heard a door pop and felt a cold gust of air. I had my eyes closed to shut out what lay around us (my brain might work better if I did), but I opened them then to see flying backwards as if she were being pulled almost but her body shifted and turned as it crossed the door’s threshold so I could see she moved under her own power. I thought, This is it, a delayed result, but a result nonetheless. Odd that she’d pick this moment to run, but then I saw her turn to give a glance back and the clump of her boots slowed as if to beckon.
I found myself shuffling across the island between the seats instead of opening my own door and getting out that way. I gave chase because that seemed what she wanted me to do, but unsure enough not to dig into the snow and bound after her at full speed.
She ran zig-zags, hindered by the over-sized waders and throwing up snow at her heels with each overcompensated step.
I caught up to her easily enough and could’ve tackled her to the ground, but at the last second I threw myself wide so that the tips of my fingers just almost came to touch the tips of her fur right before I found myself half-buried in snow. It was dry snow so the cold stood at a buffer, but, still, every inch of exposed skin was soon inflamed, and it didn’t help when she reversed to push a handful of snow into what was the only part of me that had remained unburied.
“No fair,” I said. I couldn’t brush the snow from my nose and cheeks fast enough to keep it from melting and stinging all the way to the middles of my ears.
I jumped up, a little angry, a little exhilarated because she had just given me permission, I felt, for what I was about to do next. I caught up with her again and caught her at the knees, bringing her down as gently as I could as I preceded her in contact with the ground. Somehow I had driven her out of one of her waders, revealing one pink sock emblazoned with strawberries (no comment), and was merciful enough to allow her to reach for it and begin to pull it back on before continuing my attack.
At first, I was going to shove snow in her face for doing the same to me, but thought that might be too cruel, so instead I used my weight to push her down into the snow since her instinct was the same as mine, to stay as far above as possible. She made a deep indentation and closed her eyes to await further punishment. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how hard I was breathing or how fast my heart was pounding, and I doubted it had much to do with physical exertion.
Her body felt very tense under me.
I needed to know where things were going to go next.
“What time do you leave?” I asked.
She opened her eyes and looked at me as if the question didn’t make any sense.
She said, “The bus’ll probably be late anyway.”
“But what time?”
I had to feel her shrug through my hands pinning her down and take that as my only answer.
Her eyes were green. I’d thought they’d been blue before, but they were green now, maybe some trick of the light, and I thought I could see myself hovering over her reflected in their centers.
“Could you let me up?”
I leant over and kissed her. I felt I had to take something by force, even if it was something she had given me already. She didn’t move against me or struggle and I took everything I could in one long moment: the way her hair smelled of citrus and vanilla, the tiny portholes of her nostrils that somehow channeled enough oxygen in and out of her, the uneven crescents of her fingernails, the heat radiating from her crotch as I kept one leg wedged in the junction of her thighs, and the dry skin of her chapped lips that no amount of spit could disguise.
Then I allowed her up and brushed the snow from her back and hair, and she finally got the dislocated wader the rest of the way on. There was no point in hanging around any longer. We walked back to the car, as if by some unspoken agreement, and got into and interior that had become just as cold as it was outside, the heater not working so well when you leave one door standing open. I piloted the car out to the road and pointed it back toward town.
I had grown dark early and the headlights illuminated specks of white as they swept in to tap at the windshield and fly past the windows. We came into downtown the same way we had left and the tires crunched the snow beneath as they headed toward the bus depot.
Businesses were closing up and I eased the car against a hard ledge of curb just past a bench enclosed in a corrugated-steel roofed structure. We both looked at it through the windows. Snow had drifted up around its base and filtered through the boards leaving behind pillows of white resting on the seat. I told her she could wait for the bus in my car and everything around us became empty and light was cast from the street corners in false halo that pervaded everything.
I had to know.
“Will you come back?” I asked.
She looked at me in a way that could’ve been terror or frustration.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
We left it at that. The thought of losing her wasn’t so terrible. There were probably girls like her all over the place.
I turned the headlights off and kept the radio low to leave my head swimming through the melodies. The afternoon seemed like forever ago when the only thing on my mind had been a new battery and lens cleaner. I knew I still had that image of her in my camera, knew I had proof that she existed at least at one time. I looked at the camera where it laid face-down into a cup holder.
It was then that headlights appeared at the end of the street and I saw the shape of her bus come rolling toward the stop. Inside the bus the lights were on and I didn’t see anyone else besides the driver. I thought of her riding all the way back to New York on the bus alone and staring out of the window as white landscapes rolled on by and the cold air rushed just inches from her face.
She got out of the car with just a, “Bye,” and shut the door. I noticed for the first time that she didn’t have any bags or luggage, though she had to’ve had at least one change of clothes I figured. Unless she came to visit just for the day, but all the way from New York?
I watched as she went over to the door and climbed on without looking back even once, and I saw her walk the aisle between the seats which I could see now held a few other passengers, and she sat in a seat on the side opposite of me so when the bus rolled away I couldn’t see her at all.
Of course I searched the phonebook for any Lawleys the next day after I woke up but didn’t find anyone with that name or any name that sounded close to it. I even tried entering her name into Google Search but I didn’t know enough about her to pick this one Sarah Lawley from the bunch, even when I added “New York” to the search criteria. It was a fake name anyway, I was sure of it, so I forced myself away from making any further inquiries and focused on starting a new project. Except I was pretty much snowed in and there wasn’t much to do around the house.
I found myself dragging my feet through the snow a lot and throwing myself down into the blanket, only to pick myself up and do it again. It was physical enough to be entertaining in a mindless way.
I’d still had that little piece of her left over on my camera. Her face and the sound of my voice. ‘Because you’re very interesting to me.’ Her face hidden behind her hands.
I deleted that once I came across it again after fooling myself into forgetting about it. “Are you sure you want to erase? Y/N.” As if I could hurt her by eradicating every last trace.
Whatever.
THE END
I loved that car, and intended to fix it up as soon as I could but I didn’t have the tools or the know-how to do such a thing, so I settled to keep it in the condition I bought it in and only drove it when I absolutely had to and I knew I wouldn’t get caught.
I went into town that day to buy lens cleaner and a new battery for my video camera because the old one didn’t keep a charge so well anymore and would often die with little warning just as I was reaching the climax of my latest masterwork. So I drove over to Ted’s Electronics to see if he had a camera battery that would fit my machine and while he was in back with the old battery in one hand and his other hand rooting around inside boxes I picked up the lens cleaner and laid it on the counter. My camera was old and the model had been discontinued for a number of years by that point so finding a new battery for it wasn’t going to be an easy task and I worried a little that I might have to buy a new one because the cost of a brand-new machine was sure to drain the last of what remained of my summer employment at Gossman’s Groceries.
Then Ted came back with a new battery in a theft-proof plastic casing and set it in front of me.
He said, “Now there’s no guarantee that it still works, but it’s the last of what I got. Take it or leave it.”
I said I would take and dug out the twelve bucks and seventy-two cents he was asking for it (I got a discount because he said he wouldn’t’ve been able to pawn it off on anyone else), plus the six ninety-nine for the lens cleaner, and he put everything, including the old battery, into a plastic bag with the store’s logo printed on the front.
“Now you be careful out there,” he said. “The radio said there’s a storm moving in from the east and we’re supposed to get six inches by this time tomorrow.”
I smiled and said, “Thanks,” as I took the bag from his hand and made my retreat out the door, which gave a slow, electronic ding each time it was opened.
I wasn’t until I had gotten outside and started walking the distance to my car that I noticed the first flakes appear in front of my eyes, and I looked down and saw tiny, white crystals beginning to build up the cracks of the sidewalk and in the lower corners of the shop-front windows and on the bumpers of curbside cars. Then, not a second later, I saw her come around the corner in a coat of colors that I thought must’ve come from an exotic animal, arms held aloft, and trailing the tight pack of Old Frank Malloy’s hunting dogs, which, despite many threats from the City Council, he refused to keep tied up.
She held something wrapped in wax paper in both gloved hands and she made low pleading noises to the dogs as one gripped the bottom of her coat with its teeth and tried to get her to stop. She raised her eyes up to mine for only the briefest moment, a cry for help, and before they even fell away. I felt the traitor of a smile begin to appear on my face and stay there long after her attention was back on the dogs. The dogs worked in tandem to get her to stop, one after the other latching onto the idea of gripping the hem of her coat and pulling her to a halt.
I felt bad about smiling like that when the situation was obviously less than amusing for her and I jogged over and used my one free hand to swat at their backs, while yelling, “Scram, Denver! Get lost, Willie! Leave ‘er alone!”
I might’ve actually made all those names up on the spot, I don’t know, but it got the dogs to turn their attention to me for a second and the one I thought of as Denver, a brown and white beagle, gave me a mournful look like he’d known he’d been bad. The rest resumed their terrorization of the girl and I made up names for the rest of them, yelled them out, louder this time, and they turned to me with eyes questioning and a little bemused, and then trotted away down the street.
After they were gone she lowered her arms and let whatever was in the wax paper fall down to the level of her mouth.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Happens all the time.” Though this was a lie because I had only ever seen Malloy’s dogs hunting around in garbage cans for food and never begging for scraps from someone they knew, much less a stranger. “What d’you got there that they wanted so badly?”
She held it out to me so I could see what was inside the wax paper. “Turkey sandwich. Lettuce. Tomato. Mayo. I got it from the deli over there.” She pointed vaguely toward Mr. Greenburg’s butcher shop and I smiled again because I never really thought of the place as a ‘deli’.
She took a bite from the sandwich and began to chew.
“So…” From the look on her face and the way she spoke I knew that she couldn’t’ve been from around there and I wanted to say something that wouldn’t make me sound like a country boy off of the farm and in town to buy feed for the hogs. Which I wasn’t.
“So, I haven’t seen you around here before,” I said.
With her mouth full she shook her head and stared at me with eyes clear and dark and blue, and I saw her brown hair falling to her coat in waves, and I saw the pale oval her face made colored at the cheeks and chin by the cold air, and I saw the pair of oversized waders she had tucked her black khaki pants into. I guessed her to be about the same age as I was, but, at the same time, she seemed like a little kid reluctant to move while held in the gaze of a larger kid.
“I’m visiting my grandparents,” she said, after swallowing. “Was visiting. I’m going home now.”
I tried to affect an attitude of unconcern, like I hadn’t fallen in love with her already and she was breaking my heart by leaving so soon. “And your grandparents are?”
Her expression changed from one of attentive neutrality to that of worried skepticism and I thought that, somehow, I had said the wrong thing and hurried to say, “I’m Conor, by the way. Conor Hawes. My dad owns Hawes Lumber.”
I reached out my hand not sure if she would take it, but she took it, and she said:
“Sarah…Lawley. My grandparents are Joe and Maurine Lawley. They’re retired and I don’t know what they did before.”
“Oh.” I tried to think if the name rang any bells but couldn’t come up with anything. “You’re leaving?”
She nodded. “I was supposed to already be gone but I missed the bus.”
“Oh. Well, do you need me to drive you back to—?”
“The man said there would be another one coming later. Tonight. He said one should be coming.”
I looked upwards toward the sky, which was gray past all the white flakes falling from it.
I said, “There’s a storm coming in, I think. I doubt you want to stay out here waiting for a bus.”
I could see that I was making her really nervous and I tried to give her a harmless smile to calm her but I could still feel her ready to run at any second. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. I just wondered if you needed a ride.”
“I’m okay waiting for it,” she said.
“I’m sorry that I scared you.”
Her eyebrows came together on her face in a look of beautiful defiance.
I smiled, I couldn’t help it. She looked cute all annoyed and little bit flustered.
She looked back over her shoulder at the corner that she had come around not five minutes before. “You didn’t scare me. Those dogs scared me.” Then she looked back at me. “I don’t think you scare me, though.”
Once she’d turned away I let my eyes wander, down the pale line of her neck mostly concealed by the screen of her hair, down over the material of what could’ve been a t-shirt, though I couldn’t be sure because it was covered up by her coat, to her breasts where they lingered a little too long and when she turned back I could tell she knew where I had been looking.
I tried to think fast and distract myself from what could’ve only been foremost in my mind, so I asked a question. “What’s with the boots?”
“They’re my grandfather’s. He said I could have them. He said that it wasn’t a good idea to walk around in this weather in these.”
By “these” she meant two bulges in her coat’s pockets that I had somehow failed to notice before, out of which peeked rubber and material as well as two separate entwining trails of laces. She handed me her sandwich and pulled them out, showing me a pair of orange low-top sneakers that either hadn’t been worn before and were very well taken care of.
“Yeah,” I said, handing back her sandwich, “your feet would definitely freeze in those.”
She pushed the sandwich back toward me. “You keep it. I’m not that hungry anymore.”
I looked at the sandwich like a prize with its single bite taken out of it but then I reminded myself that it was just a sandwich, so I wrapped it up again in the wax paper and set it on the roof of my car.
By then the snow had begun to fall a little bit faster and the ground around our feet had begun to pale to white and tiny, white flakes of it hung in her hair and in the fur of her coat. I saw for the first time that I could remember that the first snowfall wasn’t going to melt and wash away, but was instead coming to stick and stay on the ground.
I asked, “Do you want me to wait with you? I mean, if the bus isn’t coming until tonight, you’ve still got awhile yet. Yeah?”
She nodded her head and said, “Okay. What did you have in mind?”
I didn’t know what to say. Stunned that she’d said “yes” and stunned that I’d even bothered to ask in the first place, so I didn’t have a pre-planned answer to her follow-up question. Which is why I said, “I think the movie house might be showing something new now, want to check it out?”
“Movie house.” She gave the words, especially the latter, an odd twang, as if she wasn’t used to saying them so close together. Unfortunately, it was all that I had and she had to’ve known that. “Okay. Anything to get out of this weather.”
I wondered if she wasn’t really used to the cold. She certainly wasn’t dressed for it.
“So where are you from, anyway?”
She kept her head ducked down as we began moving so I couldn’t tell if she looked at me. “Here. Me and my parents moved away when I was still a little kid. Kind of been moving ever since. Not really settled on any one place as my home. So.”
“Oh.”
“But right now I’m living in New York.”
“Oh! And how do you like that?”
Now that we were moving I felt more at ease and wanted to learn all I could about her. With each step I tried to position my body a little closer to hers so that my arm would almost be pushing into hers and I felt the hairs of her coat move and brush against the material of the old suede jacket my grandma gave to me. I kept glancing down at the fingers of her hand and thought about moving my own hand over so that it would meet with hers, thinking about our fingers entangling into a multi-knuckled knot.
“I’m studying to be a fashion designer,” she said.
“Fashion designer. That’s like college stuff, isn’t it? How old are you?”
She sniffed, and rubbed her nose, and looked up at me. “I’m seventeen, but I finished school early so now I’m in New York studying fashion. I was home schooled. With all the moving around there really wasn’t much else to do but study.”
She shrugged. “You know?”
“Really? You’re seventeen?” Two years older than I was. It’d be a lie to say that I wasn’t at least a little bit intimidated, but excited as well at the thought of an “older woman”.
She just shrugged again.
“So you live in New York all by yourself?”
“I live on campus, in the dorms. I’ve got a roommate. She’s studying photography, like fashion photography.”
Her eyes were looking into mine like she really wanted me to believe all of this, like she found it pretty unbelievable herself. “That’s very impressive.”
We were coming up on the town’s sole clothing department store, Willard’s Apparel, and a row of plastic mannequins were lined up behind the long window, dressed up in what was supposed to be the latest fashions but were really only an approximation of what could be found in the mail-order catalogues.
I pointed at the mannequins and said, “What do you think about those?”
I slowed my walk, thinking that we would stop as she went over each ensemble with her keen eye and picked out minor but telling details that would make or break the outfit, but instead she blew right on past them with giving a second glance.
She said, “Small town fashion: last year’s belts and mini-skirts thrown together with mountains of junky jewelry. Need I say more?”
I looked at the fake people in the window and thought of at least twenty girls who went to my school that would be pissed to hear her say that.
“So,” I said, about to ask another stupid question, “all the girls in New York dress like you?”
She turned to me, stopping on the sidewalk and positioned herself in about the middle so that she blocked my way, not that it wouldn’t have been easy to slip around either side had I wanted to.
“I have my own style. All the girls in New York dress like sluts and bitches. They all want to pretend like they belong on Laguna Beach.”
I tried to give her a small smile of apology and I said, “Sorry. That came out wrong. I really like your coat is what I meant to say. It’s…cool.”
She looked down at her fur coat as if she just noticed its presence that very second and couldn’t remember when she had put it on. She looked up. “It’s fake. I’m a PETA person. I could never stand to know that any animals were killed just because I needed a coat. It’s only made to look real.”
I took the opportunity to step forward and touch the fake fur along one sleeve, and even in the cold it crackled with static electricity and tingled in my hand. “It does. And it feels real, too.”
She stared at me for a second longer than she meant to, I thought, and then she said, “Thanks.”
Then she turned around again and the imitation hairs were gone from my fingers. She waited in front of me to start walking beside her again, looking back through strands of dark hair with what I could imagine was the most innocent questioning look her face could conjure up.
“So where is this movie house?” she asked.
“It’s just up here and the next street over,” I said.
The snow fell like a shield then and creaked under our feet as we pressed it thin and headlights from the cars moving along the street couldn’t touch us past the thick shower of flakes. We found the movie house where it situated itself in the middle of the block and the ticket guy inside the box wore a heavy winter coat over his uniform. I asked him what was playing and he told me the generic title of a CGI movie whose synopsis was immediately forgettable. I tried paying for both tickets but she took a fold of cash from the mouth of her left boot and peeled off half the price of our admission, so I only paid for my own.
Then she bought her own soda and offered to pay half for a bucket of popcorn, but I told her, “No.”
The theater was mostly empty at that time of the day, except for a scattering of people who must’ve had similar ideas about getting out of the cold and wet. The screen was illuminated by footlights and kept blank in the final minutes before the movie started so there wasn’t much to look at. We found our seats near the back where we would be able to “make our hasty retreat,” I joked.
I set the bucket of popcorn on the armrest between us and balanced it there as it sent up a salty wave of heat and smell that quickly filled the air around us. I kept taking a few kernels at a time and popping them in my mouth, listening to them squeak against my teeth and melt before swallowing. I waited for her to take a few kernels as well but her hand never ventured up to the bucket and I finally gave up, setting the bucket into my lap and taking a sip of soda.
“You seen this movie yet?” I asked.
She held the straw of her soda to her lips but didn’t drink, kept it pressed there like a shushing finger. “I’m not into kids stuff.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Not too long after that, the lights dimmed and screen flashed for a second and the first trailer of half a dozen came on screen. Noise boomed out of the large speakers on the walls and all the voices were amplified to ten times their size. I still felt the brush of her coat against my arm and for the first time I could smell the years of use rising from the fibers and it smelled like the streets after a rainy day and ghosts of restaurant appetizers left half-finished for the birds to eat.
I couldn’t focus throughout the first half-hour of the movie with her sitting so close to me, but after that I began to relax and I felt her relax, too, evidenced by her hand reaching over and lingering toward the rim of the popcorn bucket. Her eyes were transfixed by what was happening up on the screen and her face had lost its seriousness and dissolved into child-like wonder as her brain was dazzled by all the colors thrown out before her. I tried not to move, afraid that I’d disturb her, and inched the bucket slowly back between us so I didn’t feel like such a pervert.
I had slid down so that the back of my head almost came to rest at the top of my seat and gravity, as well as my unusual relation to it, was putting pressure on my lower back and abdomen that seemed to intensify the more I tried to ignore it. I sat up in my seat and stunned her with her mouth half-full and her hand poised at the rim of the popcorn bucket. It took her a few seconds for her eyes to become guarded again and boredom to eke in ever so slightly. She lifted her soda from the cup holder of her seat and put the straw between her lips but it was already empty.
“I need a refill,” she whispered.
Then she moved to slip past me.
“Can I kiss you?” I asked. It was a gutsy move and I might’ve not made it if it wasn’t bolstered by the memory of the look on her face several seconds before.
She turned a little to me, caught yet again in mid-composure, and I didn’t give her any time to think, heading straight in for it. It was brief and wasn’t how I wanted it to be, but her lips were soft and a little bit yielding and I saw her eyes slip close for one beautiful second. Then it was over with like it hadn’t even happened and she looked at me with eyes that could’ve been terrified or thankful and her lips parted just enough that I could see the white crescents of teeth.
She stood in front of me a few seconds more looking like a dark apparition backlit by the theater’s screen, then she broke free of whatever daze I had sunk her in and continued her way to the concession counter.
You she’s going to run, she’s just going to take off. Left there alone with just me and myself, I had plenty of time to second-guess all of my actions leading up to that point. I felt no confirmation that anything I’d done was “okay”. She could’ve been halfway down the street at that point. She could’ve even been in the ladies’ restroom barfing. Every scenario I came up with told me the end result couldn’t’ve been any good.
So I kept my mouth closed, despite my tongue’s pleas to lick and probe for any defining “taste of her”. A guilty curiosity.
I could easily resign myself to the fact that I’d lost her within the scant two-minute interval of her absence. So while I wasn’t awe-struck by her return (I wasn’t breathing either, so maybe I wasn’t getting the correct amount of oxygen to be “awe-struck”) I wasn’t necessarily eager to attempt a repeat of my earlier actions at any point during the rest of the movie or while we were leaving the theater. Better yet, she didn’t even bother to mention it as we made our exit.
Outside, the snow cushioned our walk back to my car and I kept waiting to find our footprints going in the other direction but they were already long buried by then. There wasn’t much talk on the way back but the taste of salt and sugar still hung in my mouth and I’d already begun to associate it as “her taste”, or the taste of “that moment” with her. When we got back to my car I held the door open for her and didn’t think for a second that she wouldn’t climb in.
It had snowed enough by then to turn the turkey sandwich sitting on my roof into and indistinct lump and I reached one ungloved hand in to extract it from its grave. Covered in a layer of tiny crystals it looked mummified and inedible, like a relic I could’ve been discovering for the first time, so I let it drop to the middle of the sidewalk. Maybe Malloy’s dogs would find it and have their supper after all.
I got in and started the car, ran the heater full blast. A bit of snow that had gotten in when I opened the door melted and soaked into my pants leg.
“So,” I asked, “what do you want to do now?” Hoping not to sound too hopeful.
“I’ve got classes that start in two days and if I’m late I might not be able to catch up,” she said.
“Um.”
She turned to me. “Can we just sit here for awhile?”
“Sure.”
I ran the wipers to clear the windshield and only succeeded in slightly improving the view. The first fall of snow had already begun to turn to frost and through the windshield single, intricate flakes clung like starfish to the glass of an aquarium tank. Other than that, it seemed to me were encased in a box of white.
The radio played and the station’s announcer was giving out tickets to a band I’d never heard of, to the fifth caller who could get through. Then they played a song by the band and it was song I had heard plenty of times but never struck me in such a way to be less than anonymous. The tune was catchy in an instant and forgotten in a heartbeat.
I reached into the backseat for my video camera, which I had laid there on the very-off chance that I might come across something to film while in town, and, as if by instinct, my thumb went for the ON/OFF switch. I immediately saw the vacant battery slot and went into a stiff panic as I searched my brain for where I might’ve put the batteries. Looking through the backseat again, I saw something white and crumpled, multi-faceted like a diamond imploding upon itself, and pulled the bag containing the batteries and lens cleaner into my lap.
Since I had no tools with which to open the plastic casing of the new battery, I slipped the old battery into its slot on the back of the camera and fired it up.
With me and her there in the car, I flipped open the screen on the side and aimed the camera at her; framed her face in the screen and hit REC.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Filming you.”
“You’re recording me?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
It took me a second to define the why and put it into words that didn’t sound cheesy or fake.
“Because you’re very interesting to me,” I said.
I didn’t quite expect the reaction I got. A wave of color seemed to start at her neckline and work its way up across her face and she began chewing her lips turning them to a deep red. She tried to hide in the tiny space of the passenger seat but there was nowhere she could go to escape the eye of the camera, so she put her hands up by her face and looked at me past the edge of her palm with eyes that seemed glassy all of a sudden and pupils huge as dimes.
She embarrassed me in her embarrassment.
I lowered the camera and shut the screen and she lowered her hands from her face. The camera would go on to record for another three minutes and twenty-seven seconds before the battery would suddenly give out and in that time most of what would be recorded would be her knees in her black khaki pants and the gray sky out of the passenger side window and a blurry close up of what I always assumed to be a cup holder.
My mind was like a flooding chasm, like my brain was swelling up with blood and my head was about to explode. I couldn’t think, or, if I did think, it was only about one thing.
I wanted more than just the “movie house” taste of her and I’d like to believe my actions were mutual, though logic and rationality became buried under a height of sensory detail. Whatever gravity our situation contained, I bore down on her as much as she bore into me and I came to examine everything as if under a microscope. Goosebumps and tiny hairs that stood on end at the back of her neck became like an endless terrain I could spend a lifetime traversing.
The strap of the camera was tight around my right hand and I couldn’t remove it without employing the effort of my left hand which was busy going inside of her coat and climbing the ladder of her ribs to where the shape of her bra could be felt through the fabric of her t-shirt, and my fingertips inched toward what the bra contained. But she moved her body, and lips, away out of reach and the sound of breathing was so loud that I couldn’t tell if it came from me or her.
“Not here,” she whispered.
“Where then?”
I watched her recede. At that moment everything felt a million miles away and even the line of storefronts that laid just on the other side of the glass could’ve been as remote to me as any other space she might’ve occupied at any other time.
When did she say her bus was coming? She didn’t. I felt the seconds ticking down.
I was difficult to leave the car, to move from that pocket of warmth to sidewalk where, I noticed I think for the first time, the temperature seemed to be swiftly falling. I cleared the windows with the brush end of an ice scraper I kept in my trunk, the frost layer gone to melt. I thought she might’ve been watching me as I went, but she remained a dark blur and every time I looked in I couldn’t find where her eyes lay.
I drove the back roads past Heissman’s farm. There was a tiny shack that technically resided on the farm’s land but which had remained unused for as long as I could remember. It laid just on the periphery of a field almost as if it were about to sneak away into the trees that surrounded everything that hadn’t been given over to cultivation. I watched the approach of that screen at the far end and aimed my wheels for the single-lane dirt road, invisible now, that led to the only destination I could think of on such short notice.
I kept the engine running so the hot air would keep blowing, so I could get her out of her coat.
I found her in the same way I had before but I couldn’t re-obtain the same focus. The world didn’t shrink to her and mine miniscule properties and I found my thoughts dominated by the shack with its one dark window and the field beside it, a white expanse. It set the scene for something different and I’d supposed she felt it too because her own interest in me seemed less than what it’d been before.
I heard a door pop and felt a cold gust of air. I had my eyes closed to shut out what lay around us (my brain might work better if I did), but I opened them then to see flying backwards as if she were being pulled almost but her body shifted and turned as it crossed the door’s threshold so I could see she moved under her own power. I thought, This is it, a delayed result, but a result nonetheless. Odd that she’d pick this moment to run, but then I saw her turn to give a glance back and the clump of her boots slowed as if to beckon.
I found myself shuffling across the island between the seats instead of opening my own door and getting out that way. I gave chase because that seemed what she wanted me to do, but unsure enough not to dig into the snow and bound after her at full speed.
She ran zig-zags, hindered by the over-sized waders and throwing up snow at her heels with each overcompensated step.
I caught up to her easily enough and could’ve tackled her to the ground, but at the last second I threw myself wide so that the tips of my fingers just almost came to touch the tips of her fur right before I found myself half-buried in snow. It was dry snow so the cold stood at a buffer, but, still, every inch of exposed skin was soon inflamed, and it didn’t help when she reversed to push a handful of snow into what was the only part of me that had remained unburied.
“No fair,” I said. I couldn’t brush the snow from my nose and cheeks fast enough to keep it from melting and stinging all the way to the middles of my ears.
I jumped up, a little angry, a little exhilarated because she had just given me permission, I felt, for what I was about to do next. I caught up with her again and caught her at the knees, bringing her down as gently as I could as I preceded her in contact with the ground. Somehow I had driven her out of one of her waders, revealing one pink sock emblazoned with strawberries (no comment), and was merciful enough to allow her to reach for it and begin to pull it back on before continuing my attack.
At first, I was going to shove snow in her face for doing the same to me, but thought that might be too cruel, so instead I used my weight to push her down into the snow since her instinct was the same as mine, to stay as far above as possible. She made a deep indentation and closed her eyes to await further punishment. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how hard I was breathing or how fast my heart was pounding, and I doubted it had much to do with physical exertion.
Her body felt very tense under me.
I needed to know where things were going to go next.
“What time do you leave?” I asked.
She opened her eyes and looked at me as if the question didn’t make any sense.
She said, “The bus’ll probably be late anyway.”
“But what time?”
I had to feel her shrug through my hands pinning her down and take that as my only answer.
Her eyes were green. I’d thought they’d been blue before, but they were green now, maybe some trick of the light, and I thought I could see myself hovering over her reflected in their centers.
“Could you let me up?”
I leant over and kissed her. I felt I had to take something by force, even if it was something she had given me already. She didn’t move against me or struggle and I took everything I could in one long moment: the way her hair smelled of citrus and vanilla, the tiny portholes of her nostrils that somehow channeled enough oxygen in and out of her, the uneven crescents of her fingernails, the heat radiating from her crotch as I kept one leg wedged in the junction of her thighs, and the dry skin of her chapped lips that no amount of spit could disguise.
Then I allowed her up and brushed the snow from her back and hair, and she finally got the dislocated wader the rest of the way on. There was no point in hanging around any longer. We walked back to the car, as if by some unspoken agreement, and got into and interior that had become just as cold as it was outside, the heater not working so well when you leave one door standing open. I piloted the car out to the road and pointed it back toward town.
I had grown dark early and the headlights illuminated specks of white as they swept in to tap at the windshield and fly past the windows. We came into downtown the same way we had left and the tires crunched the snow beneath as they headed toward the bus depot.
Businesses were closing up and I eased the car against a hard ledge of curb just past a bench enclosed in a corrugated-steel roofed structure. We both looked at it through the windows. Snow had drifted up around its base and filtered through the boards leaving behind pillows of white resting on the seat. I told her she could wait for the bus in my car and everything around us became empty and light was cast from the street corners in false halo that pervaded everything.
I had to know.
“Will you come back?” I asked.
She looked at me in a way that could’ve been terror or frustration.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
We left it at that. The thought of losing her wasn’t so terrible. There were probably girls like her all over the place.
I turned the headlights off and kept the radio low to leave my head swimming through the melodies. The afternoon seemed like forever ago when the only thing on my mind had been a new battery and lens cleaner. I knew I still had that image of her in my camera, knew I had proof that she existed at least at one time. I looked at the camera where it laid face-down into a cup holder.
It was then that headlights appeared at the end of the street and I saw the shape of her bus come rolling toward the stop. Inside the bus the lights were on and I didn’t see anyone else besides the driver. I thought of her riding all the way back to New York on the bus alone and staring out of the window as white landscapes rolled on by and the cold air rushed just inches from her face.
She got out of the car with just a, “Bye,” and shut the door. I noticed for the first time that she didn’t have any bags or luggage, though she had to’ve had at least one change of clothes I figured. Unless she came to visit just for the day, but all the way from New York?
I watched as she went over to the door and climbed on without looking back even once, and I saw her walk the aisle between the seats which I could see now held a few other passengers, and she sat in a seat on the side opposite of me so when the bus rolled away I couldn’t see her at all.
Of course I searched the phonebook for any Lawleys the next day after I woke up but didn’t find anyone with that name or any name that sounded close to it. I even tried entering her name into Google Search but I didn’t know enough about her to pick this one Sarah Lawley from the bunch, even when I added “New York” to the search criteria. It was a fake name anyway, I was sure of it, so I forced myself away from making any further inquiries and focused on starting a new project. Except I was pretty much snowed in and there wasn’t much to do around the house.
I found myself dragging my feet through the snow a lot and throwing myself down into the blanket, only to pick myself up and do it again. It was physical enough to be entertaining in a mindless way.
I’d still had that little piece of her left over on my camera. Her face and the sound of my voice. ‘Because you’re very interesting to me.’ Her face hidden behind her hands.
I deleted that once I came across it again after fooling myself into forgetting about it. “Are you sure you want to erase? Y/N.” As if I could hurt her by eradicating every last trace.
Whatever.
THE END
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