headshots

by
Idabel Allen


SMASHWORDS EDITION


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PUBLISHED BY:
Idabel Allen on Smashwords

Headshots
Copyright 2012 by Idabel Allen


All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.


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To Leroy, for making the move.

A big shout out to Amy Fouche Bills for a killer book cover and to Kendy Wazac for her editorial efforts.  Thanks be to Krista Creel and Angela Ripper for their applying a foot to my backside, and to my patron saint in whom I am well pleased.     



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Headshots

Chemical Reaction
On Going Deep
Molasses
Pushing Through
Geography Lesson
Sacrificial Milk

Preview Chapters for:
CURSED!
My Devastatingly Brilliant Campaign to Save the Chigg

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Chemical Reaction

Even with his eyes closed he sensed her movements, soft, cautious in the darkened room.  They were so careful at night not to disturb him as they checked to see if he was still with them.  And he was.  When they leaned close he smelled their work on them, the touch of life and death and medicines and cleaning products lingering on their efficient hands.  Even the male nurses smelled this way, as if the job of caring for the ill had stripped them of their sexes for the greater good of healing.
Healing.  He supposed he was doing that.  That’s what bodies do.  And yet Daniel felt weaker than he ever had in his life.  He was flat on his back, literally.  His every need was being taken care of.  Being a patient took some getting used to.  And he felt their care, their absolute desire to heal him and he was humbled.  To have that type of love in your heart, for even a stranger, astonished him.
In the early morning hours as the timid dawn tiptoed into the dark room, he slipped between dreams, fleeting and unfathomable.  In one he was digging with a spade, the sharp metal piercing the earth’s flesh, uprooting the black soil.  He dug and he dug and he dug, but nothing was uncovered but more dirt.  Then the dream was over, leaving Daniel puzzled for about three heartbeats until he slipped into another dream in which he was playing baseball.  He was wearing his high school uniform but the game was in a large stadium, bigger than anyplace he’d ever played before.  The stands were filled with fans chanting his name, Dan-iel…Dan-iel.    He stepped out of the batter’s box and took it all in.  They were counting on him to hit a grand slam and drive in the winning run. 
But he never saw the pitch.  Something fell or crashed with an outraged clanging of metal in the hallway beyond his closed door.  Daniel’s eyes popped open and his heart pounded fearfully in his chest.  What was that noise?  Where was he?  Why did he hurt so? Why was his right arm bandaged from shoulder to wrist?    
Then he was awake and remembered the screaming ambulance ride the afternoon before.  He’d been rushed through the emergency room on a stretcher, a team of doctors and nurses on each side of him, running through the halls with his body.  He’d been burnt.
The dayshift nurses were not as careful or cautious as their night-time counterparts.  They were a perky bunch, hardy in their duties, not ones to shy from fouled sheets or weeping wounds or burnt flesh.  One nurse, an older woman named Doreen, wore pink scrubs littered with little hopping bunny rabbits.  When she noticed Daniel staring at the rabbits she said, “The little kids like ‘em.  Think they’re funny.”
Daniel froze as if being caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  He said, “My mom’s name is Bunny.  She’s pretty funny too.”
“That right?” the nurse said, pushing his breakfast tray to his bed.  Runny eggs, toast, and two anemic strips of bacon.  “My son’s name is Carl.  Carl Grandberry.  He’s a senior with you at Lincoln High.”    
Daniel nodded, thinking of Carl’s lanky brown body shooting past him on the track, leaving him behind as if he were standing still.  Looking at Doreen, he knew where Carl got his height and the wide, sloping smile he always wore.  Daniel said, “Carl’s alright, I guess,” feigning disinterest, holding back a laugh as Doreen shot him a withering look.
“You bet he is.  And he told me about you catching yourself on fire in chemistry.”  As she spoke she buttered his bread and applied grape jelly.  Then she pointed the plastic knife lined with butter and jelly and crumbs at him and demanded, “Why you want to get all burned up like that with graduation coming up?  Ain’t you got any sense?”  
“It was an accident,” he explained.  “We were getting ready to do an experiment.  I guess I leaned too close to the burner’s flame.  I don’t even know when it happened.  My jacket was on fire all of a sudden.”
Doreen removed the foil lid of his orange juice.  “Carl said you lost it in class.”
“Yeah, I have a habit of freaking out when I’m on fire.”  He reached for his juice with his left arm, aware of the sedated pain pulsing in his other arm.  He didn’t mind the pain really.  There was something comforting, even reliable about it.
“Well, see that you don’t freak out in here.”  She gave him a brief authoritative look as if to show she was not about to let anything happen on her shift.  It was the same kind of look the school secretary gave whenever someone asked to use the phone.  Although she smiled, he sensed she was wary of him but he didn’t understand why.  And then, in a flurry of efficiency she was gone.
His mother, Bunny, arrived shortly after breakfast and stayed with him throughout the day, chirping about the room, making friends with the hospital staff, enjoying herself he thought.  He was not surprised.  That was his mother.  
Other relatives came on that first day, and then the next, but he escaped them all by falling into the heavy cloud of sleep.  By the third day his mother had returned to work, and his hospital life settled into a monotonous routine.  By now he knew that the burns on his arm were serious, but there would be little scarring and he would not need a skin graft.  Antibiotics were pumping throughout his body to prevent infection and the doctor was satisfied that the antibiotics were working.
When he awoke on the third afternoon, Daniel discovered a woman standing over him reading from a manila folder.  When she realized he was awake she adjusted her silver, horn-rimmed glasses that made her triangular face appear quizzical and alert.  She blinked for a moment as if trying to recall why she was there and then said, “Hello.  I’m Dr. Pilsner.”  
Daniel did not say anything.  Fuzzied with sleep and pain medication, everything seemed unreal.  Nothing was sharp or had edges.  Everything felt as if it would dissolve before his eyes.  He was thankful for the bright fluorescent light pressing down on him, holding him in his bed and his bed to the white polished floor.      
“Mind if I pull up a chair,” she asked, pulling the chair up as she spoke.
Daniel tugged his white sheet up to his chest and then hugged it close.  The other doctors and nurses had not sat down with him.  He said, “Where’s Dr. Nelson?” 
“I’m not sure.”  She sat down and placed the manila folder on her lap.  “I’m the hospital psychologist.  I’d like to ask you a few questions."  
“Why?” he asked, “I’m not crazy.”  He’d never spoken to a shrink before.     
“I never said you were,” she said in a distracted voice, scanning the open folder on her lap.  “I just want so see how you’re feeling, make sure everything is alright.”  Her voice was brisk, northern.  She was definitely not from Tennessee.  
Daniel rubbed the sheet between his thumb and forefinger on his left hand, feeling its soft coolness.  He noticed the way her dark short hair shined against the bright white walls.  He did not mind this.  She was younger than his mother, maybe in her late thirties.  Her arms were tanned and toned in her short-sleeved shirt.  She wore no jewelry.  His mother never left the house without full body armor: necklace, earrings, bracelets, rings.  
Dr. Pilsner closed the folder and offered him her full attention.  Her blue eyes were pale but clear.  She had an intelligent, no-nonsense look about her that made Daniel sit up and pay attention a bit more.  She said, “How are you?”   
“Great.”  Daniel smiled broadly, not minding the directness of her eyes.
“I see,” she answered slowly.  “And your arm?” 
“It hurts, but the pain medicine helps.  It itches too.” He glanced at the bandage. “Feels like I’m growing fish scales under here.” 
She removed the cap from her pen and said, “I guess that’s to be expected.”
“I should expect fish scales?” he asked in mock alarm. 
“No,” she looked up from her notes, puzzled.  “I meant the itching.  That’s to be expected.”  She glanced down at her notes again.  
Daniel suddenly thought of her as a fish, or fishlike: cold, unemotional in her silvery satin shirt and her slick black slacks.  He said, “Are you always this serious?”
“As a heart attack,” she replied as she finished writing.  But when she looked at him there was a spark of unexpressed mischief in her eyes. “Now I’m going to ask you a series of question and I want you to answer as honestly as possible.  If you don’t know the answer just say you don’t know.  Okay?”
“Okay.”  He prepared for another round of questions about diabetes or heart disease in his family.  But those were not the questions she asked, and the ones she did ask caught him off guard.  Is there a history of mental illness in your family?  Are you depressed?  Have you he ever been depressed?  Have you ever thought about suicide?  Do you have trouble controlling your emotions?  Have you ever purposefully hurt yourself?  Have you ever destroyed property?  Hurt animals?  Do you burn things?”  
Daniel answered “no” repeatedly, growing more and more uneasy as she marked his answers in the folder.  Why was she asking him about this junk?  What was going on?
When the questions were exhausted she said, “Sounds like you’re a pretty healthy young man.  No problems with anger, depression.  No family history of mental illness.”  
Daniel let out a long sigh of relief, still trying to decide what to think of her.  This was all new to him, but he could see she was very comfortable asking such personal questions.  This is what she did every day, this was her job and he sensed that she was good at it.  He felt he should trust her, not because she was an adult and a doctor, but because she expected it.
“I want to discuss what happened in class.”  Dr. Pilsner turned a page in the folder and then clicked her pen.  “You were in chemistry…”
He told her about the experiment and about lighting the burner.  “A few seconds later I was on fire.  I guess I just got too close to the flame.”  The pain in his arm intensified as he recalled the fiery blaze rising from his white lab coat.
“What happened after that?”
He thought for a moment.  “I was on fire and then someone pushed me into the emergency shower in class.  It happened kind of fast.” Daniel inhaled quickly and then scratched his nose.  There was an overpowering staleness in the room, in the air, that irritated him.  He couldn’t place it, but it was something he had encountered before, in smaller, more fleeting doses.  He said, “It reeks in here.”
Dr. Pilsner ignored his comment.  “What else happened?”
“What else?  I don’t know.  I might have yelled and stuff.  I mean, one minute I’m fine and the next I’m on fire.”  He lowered his eyes and admitted, “It was kind of weird I guess.  Scary.”      
“I’m sure it was,” she said.  She had a funny look on her face like she was trying to decide how to say something.  When she did speak her voice was a bit flatter, a bit more uncompromising.  
“Your classmates gave a different account of the incident.”  She paused and he knew she was watching for his reaction.  But he did not have one.  He only waited to hear what she had to say.  
“Witnesses said you lifted the burner to your jacket and purposefully caught yourself on fire.  They had to force you into the emergency shower.  If it weren’t for your friends you would have been burnt much worse.”    
“That’s a bunch of bull,” he said with a short laugh.  “I guess they also told you about the time I threw myself in front of a freight-train?  Or the time I belly flopped off the water-tower?  Did they mention anything about self-mutilation?  I like to cut myself like a teenage girl.  Also,”   
“Daniel, this is nothing to joke about.  Harming oneself is,”
“Look, we were doing an experiment.  I accidentally got too close to the burner and my lab coat caught on fire.  That’s all.  I didn’t burn myself on purpose.  That’s crazy.”  
Dr. Pilsner consulted her notes.  “Your friend Adam said you’ve been upset lately.”
Daniel said, “He’s not my friend,” but it didn’t help.  Adam was with him, always:  down at the creek, throwing rocks at the beaver dam, riding bikes to the abandoned house, haunted and forbidden.  Howling down deserted back roads in a rusted-out Firebird, their blood boiling fierce with alcohol in the humid black night.  
“I thought you two were close,” Dr. Pilsner said, flipping through her papers, searching for something.  “You both play baseball for the high school.”  She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.  She said, “But you’re not friends?”
“That’s right,” he answered, seeing Adam on the mound again, blonde hair spilling out of his red cap, ball in glove, glove pressed to chest.  Squatting behind home-plate, Daniel extends two fingers.  Nodding, Adam winds his arm and releases.  The pitch is perfect, inside and low.  The ball lands with a solid thump in Daniel’s glove.  Strike!    
“Adam stated you’ve been acting strange ever since Christmas.  Stand-offish,” she said.  “He mentioned episodes of forgetfulness, even blacking out at least once.”
“Well, yeah, once.  Our team played a tournament at the University of Tennessee.  We snuck into a frat party.  They had about ten kegs of beer and a pogo stick competition.”  Daniel couldn’t help but grin.  “I blacked out, but so did Adam.”  
“Pogo stick?” Dr. Pilsner arched an eyebrow.  “That must have been some party.”
“It was.”
“I’m just trying to figure out,” she said, tapping the end of her pen on the folder, “why you quit the team your senior year?  Don’t you want to play college ball?”
Daniel removed the sheet from his left leg and pointed at his knee.  “See those scars? I was in a car crash a few months ago.  No big deal except this knee’s shot now.  I’m a catcher.  Can’t catch with a busted knee.”  He covered his leg quickly as that dull metallic buzz sounded softly in his ears as it did whenever he thought of the crash.  
“That must have been devastating.” Dr. Pilsner’s face softened.  “My son catches too.  Little League.  It would break his heart if he couldn’t play anymore.”
“It’s not so bad,” he said, wishing she would leave now, right now.  “I’ve picked up other hobbies, like collecting dead bugs.”
She adjusted her glasses and said, “Why do you feel the need to joke about this?”
“Who said I’m joking?”  Dr. Pilsner stared at Daniel until he finally said in a tired voice, “Alright, so I’m joking.”
“I thought as much,” she said.
“Look, I used to play baseball and now I don’t.  But that doesn’t mean I want to hurt myself.  It just means I can’t play baseball.  That’s all.  Adam’s kind of,” Daniel thought of what he wanted to say, “melodramatic.  A male drama queen.”
“Drama queen,” Dr.  Pilsner said skeptically.  “That brings us to girls.  According to witnesses you called out a girl’s name when you caught fire.”
“Oh, yeah.  I hollered Valerie’s name.  For help.  She was at the table in front of me.”  She filled his mind, thick chestnut hair curling about a heart-shaped face, soft, pale freckled skin and round hazel eyes that made you lose sense of everything else.  And her scent, honeysuckle and tanning lotion, oh God it was…it was…  
“The report says you caught yourself on fire after Valerie looked at you.”  
“That’s just stupid.  Why would I do something like that?  It doesn’t make sense.”   
She said, “You’re right, it doesn’t.  This Valerie, how well do you know her?”
Daniel studied his teeth-ravaged fingernails.  He said, “We’ve been friends since third grade,” seeing her again, naked and trembling on the wet grass in centerfield, glowing ghostly white beneath the frosty moon and the spilling stars, her heart racing against his, her hazel eyes open to his.   
“Were you two intimate?”  
The question took a few seconds to reach him and when it did it startled him. “What?  No,” he lied, “we never…” his words trailed off.  His eyes swept through the colorless room, searching for something, but for what he was uncertain.  He sniffed and frowned.  
Dr. Pilsner leaned forward.  “Is something wrong?”
“Geeze, it really stinks in here!  Like a lint trap.  I’m sorry but it’s been bugging me for days.”  Daniel scrunched his nose and sniffed again.  “God, this is so familiar.  Know what it smells like?  It smells just like when my dad was in the hospital.  It used to make me want to puke.”  Daniel pulled the neck of his hospital gown over his nose.
Dr. Pilsner inhaled slowly.  “I hadn’t really noticed it before.  But you’re right, I smell it.”  She added apologetically, “I don’t have a good sense of smell.”  
“He was in this hospital, here.  They had all kinds of tubes running in and out of him.”  Clear tubes, red tubes, tubes filled with yellow urine, yellow father urine.  A tube to push air into his chest, another tube to suck mucous from his lungs.    
“Why was he in the hospital?” she asked, pen poised to write again.  
“Pneumonia.  I was only ten so they didn’t let me in the room until he got really bad.  They kept him in a coma to fight the infection.”  Daniel’s voice drifted lightly from him “He never woke when I visited.”  
Then he was there again, in that room, watching his father’s chest rise and fall as the machine pumped oxygen into him.  There wasn’t much he remembered about those visits except the still whiteness of the room and his silent prayers for his father.  And that smell, that noxious blend of infection and decay.      
Dr. Pilsner sighed.  “Pneumonia’s tough.  Your dad, he,”
“Died,” Daniel answered in a bright, shiny voice, blinking in the white walls.
Dr. Pilsner’s looked at him carefully.  “You don’t sound very sad or upset.”
“It was a long time ago.  What can I say?  He’s gone.”  
“How would you describe your relationship with your father?  Were you close?”
He thought about it. “Yeah.  We were close. I missed him when he was gone.”
“And now?”
His door opened and Doreen entered the room carrying a vomit green plastic tub of fresh bandages.  He groaned.  “And now it’s time for my bandage to be changed.”
“So it is,” Dr. Pilsner said.  “Well, I think I have everything I need for now.  You get yourself better, alright?”  She closed her folder and stood.  “We’ll talk again soon.” 
When she reached the door he said, “It was an accident.  I promise.  I’m not…I wouldn’t do that.  It was just that damned lab coat, always hassling me.  I hated it!”  He smiled to show Dr. Pilsner that he was joking, even though he really felt like crying.  He didn’t want to be in that hospital, that same hospital where his dad died.  He didn’t want his arm all burnt up.  He wanted to be at school or behind home plate.  He wanted, oh God how he wanted, to lie in the centerfield grass with Valerie, in the night, together, alone, safe.
“Coat hassling you?  What kind of nonsense are you talking now?”  Doreen fussed as Dr. Pilsner left the room.  “You just keep still now and don’t hassle me and we’ll get along just fine.”
Daniel succumbed to her care, relinquishing his bandaged arm as if it were no more part of him than a battered sneaker.  His thoughts were in the classroom and he replayed the events in his head.  He remembered setting up the burner, lighting it.  He had turned to check the notes in his notebook.  And then someone said something, called his name maybe.  When he looked up his arm was engulfed in flames.  He looked to Valerie and called to her for help.  Remembering it now was like remembering a dream, the way her eyes widened and her mouth fell open slightly.  The way the color drained from her cheeks.  She called his name and the sound of it filled him with such bursting love.  He had wanted to tell her it was okay, he was okay.  But then hands were on him, rough, violent, pushing him until he was under the shower and the cold water drenched his fire.

Two days later Daniel sat in a small consultation room with a generic wood coffee table and a box of tissue sitting useless on one corner.  On the colorless wall there was only a cheap circular clock ticking away the irretrievable minutes of life.  In one corner, an Easter lily was dying a death of indifference.  No one would notice.  No one would care.  
His mother sat next to him on the edge of her seat perched like some flamboyant bird ready for flight.  Her shirt was too bold, an explosion of tropical colors with fruity names: papaya, mango, and kiwi.  Her lips were the color of passion fruit, her skin bronzed and oiled.  Although his mother was small, she made the room feel busy, crowded.  
Dr. Pilsner sat across from him reading the manila folder in her hands labeled ‘Daniel Berman’.  He studied her hands which were tiny like a child’s, but dry and wrinkled like an old woman’s.  She did not take care of her skin, this doctor, and Daniel decided her attention must be fixed on other things.  But what?  Assisting with lobotomies?  Administering electric-shock therapy?  There was no telling.
“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Berman,” Dr. Pilsner began.  “Looks like Daniel’s ready to be released from the hospital.”
“Yes, we spoke with Dr. Nelson this morning,” his mother answered, smiling.  “I’m so glad.  I just want to get him back home.”  She patted Daniel’s bandaged arm lightly.  Her deep orange nail polish made him suddenly feel queasy and he had to turn from her to the blank, white wall.    
“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Dr. Pilsner said, visibly dampening Daniel’s mother’s enthusiasm.  “We don’t feel Daniel is ready for home just yet.”
Daniel opened his mouth, but before he could say anything his mother exploded, “What are you talking about? He’s ready to be released.  The doctor said so.”
“Released from this hospital, yes, but not to your care.”  Dr. Pilsner spoke as if she were trying to calm an injured animal on the verge of attacking.  “Not just yet.  Daniel is being transferred to a mental health facility.”
“I don’t understand,” his mother said, twisting the gold bracelet on her wrist.  
“A nuthouse?”  Daniel said softly.  “But.  I mean,”  
 “Daniel, I know you’ve told us this was an accident,” Dr. Pilsner began.  “But your classmates insist the fire was intentional.  Because you tried to harm yourself, state law requires that you undergo a full psychiatric evaluation.  So when you leave here tomorrow you will be going to Manor Hill.”  Daniel and his mother stared at Dr. Berman who added, “We believe this incident was a cry for help.”
“But it was an accident,” Daniel exclaimed in frustration, turning to his mother who grabbed a tissue from the box and twisted it in her hand.    
“I should have known this would happen,” she said, her small voice growing larger with each word.  “I should have had him checked out.  But I didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t know.  His father had just died and I thought he was just upset.  And I was so alone, scared really.”  Her eyes beseeched Dr. Pilsner to believe her.
Dr. Pilsner encouraged her with a nod.  “We talked a little about his father’s illness.”
“It was right before Christmas.  His father collapsed one night in the bathroom.  We thought it was the flu, but he couldn’t shake it.  And he was always very healthy.”  Her voice broke when she added, “The ambulance took him away and he never came home again.”
Dr. Pilsner made a note in her folder and then said, “Mrs. Berman,”
“Oh please, call me Bunny,” she laughed, touching the frosted tips of her golden hair with her manicured fingers.  “That’s what everyone calls me.  Like I’m some old floppy rabbit or something.”  
Daniel felt himself falling inside, falling and falling and falling at the sound of his mother’s voice.  He’d heard this all his life.  Bunny the floppy old rabbit.  And there was no stopping her, no shutting her up.  He closed his eyes and focused on the dull metallic sound that was so clear in his ears.  Mental facility…
“Well… Bunny,” Dr. Pilsner began uncertainly, “losing a loved one is never easy.”
Bunny sighed.  “It’s just so sad.  I’m all Daniel has and I’m not as young as I used to be.  Of course not everyone thinks I’m that old.  Would you believe I’ve had three invitations for dinner this week to help take my mind off Daniel’s accident?”
Dr. Pilsner stared at Bunny blankly for a second before saying, “You said you should have known this would happen.  After his father’s death.  What did you mean?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel watched his mother look down at the wadded tissue in her hand. “Well,” she began in a hesitant voice.  “It wasn’t really anything.  Just he cut his hands in the kitchen.  An accident you know.  Fell on some glass.”
Dr. Berman looked at Daniel.  He shrugged reluctantly into the conversation.  “I was running in the kitchen and fell into a window.  I must’ve tripped.”
“A window?”  Dr. Pilsner looked puzzled.  “You broke the window?”
“Oh yes, he did.” Bunny gave Daniel a reproachful look.  “And let me tell you that was one expensive window.”  
“You must have been running pretty fast,” Dr. Pilsner noted.  “Why?”   
“What does that matter?” Bunny asked, flaring up, filling the room with her multi-colored emotion.  Tension circuited her body, electrifying the stale air.  “It was after his father’s funeral.  He was upset.”  
Daniel stared at the white walls, wishing his mother and the doctor would go away.  He just wanted to be alone.  Dr. Pilsner asked him something but she sounded as if she were under water.  Then her hand was warm on his knee.  When he looked at her she said, “Were you running because your father died?”
He said, “I guess so,” but then shook his head.  “No.  It wasn’t.  I don’t know.  It seemed like,”
“That’s enough!” Bunny slapped her thigh.  “You’re tormenting him.  Hasn’t he,” 
“I haven’t thought about this in a long time.”  Daniel’s voice rose from him tenuously, cutting through his mother’s words.  “I remember they put my father in a hole, the grave.  We tossed some flowers on him and they covered him with dirt.  And that was it, he was gone.”  
He was gone.  Daniel still couldn’t get over just how final his father’s death was.  There wasn’t any three strikes and you’re out rule.  There weren’t any rules with death.  Death happened no matter what you said or did, it happened no matter how good, or how strong a father was.  And his father had been good and strong.  He had been Daniel’s compass pointing the way to manhood.  When he was gone, the compass was gone.  Daniel was lost.
Dr. Pilsner said, “And then, after the funeral?  
“Huh?” Daniel said, lost in his thoughts.  “Oh, afterwards we went back to our house and had a party.”
“A party?  Do you mean a wake, or a gathering?” Dr. Pilsner asked.
“What I mean,” he said in a low voice lost in remembrance, “is a party.”  He thought, what I mean is people, everyone we knew, together in the house, with lots of food, and drinks.  What I mean is people crying and fussing, yet some laughing, enjoying the free day off work.  It was like they didn’t even care that he was dead, unbreathing, unmoving beneath the earth, hidden from all, lost to me forever.  
“I remember my aunts, pulling at me, finding me everywhere I hid, pushing food at me, pulling at my sweater, telling me how sorry they were, asking me how I felt as if they didn’t know how I felt, as if they couldn’t guess at what I was feeling or imagine it themselves.  Pushing and pulling on me, trying to, trying to…”
“I’m not going to sit here and let you do this to him.”  Bunny was on her feet, towering over Dr. Pilsner and stabbing the air before the doctor’s surprised face with her long, orange fingernail.  “My son does not belong in a nuthouse with a bunch of crazies.  I’m not going to stand for another second of this…this interrogation!”  
But Daniel’s voice held her in place.  “I had to get away from them, I mean, my aunts.  They were relentless, wouldn’t leave me alone.  So I went to the laundry room.  But…” Daniel shook his head violently.   
“It’s alright, Daniel.  It’s alright, you’re okay,” Dr. Pilsner said in a soothing voice, ignoring Bunny’s overpowering presence.  She stood over the doctor, tense, not breathing as if waiting for something.  
He said breathlessly, “I went in the laundry room.  To hide.  But you were there,” he stared up at his mother with incredulous eyes.  “With a man, a stranger, I’d never seen him before.  But he was no stranger to you.  I mean, you were holding each other, in that way you know, embracing as Daddy lay in the grave.  I looked at you but I couldn’t say anything.”  
Daniel paused because there was more to it.  Then he remembered seeing his mother with that man and how he’d suddenly wanted to be with his father, to warm him, to keep him company, to not let him be buried alone in that dark grave.  
His voice broke when he said, “I didn’t know what to do so I ran into the kitchen and smashed my arms through the glass window.”  
Once more he felt his arms go through the sun-filled glass, felt the new sharp edges rip deep into his pale boy’s flesh; saw his red, red blood running down onto his mother’s yellow roses, staining them.  
“Shut up,” his mother said in a low guttural voice.  “Just shut up!  I’m so goddamned sick of your whining.  Always whining about your daddy.  Well let me tell you about your father.  He was a lying cheat, taking up with every new intern in the office.  You want to drag up the past?  Well how about last Christmas when that little girl told you she was in love with your friend Adam.  She told you to stop bothering her and what did you do?  Wrapped that new truck I bought you for Christmas around an oak tree and tore up your knee.  Pretty smart huh?  Lost your baseball scholarship and any future playing ball.  And that little girl still doesn’t want you anywhere near her.  Bet you didn’t tell the doctor about that did you?”
Dr. Pilsner said, “Mrs. Berman.”
“I told you to call me Bunny!”
“Okay, Bunny,” Dr. Pilsner said in a careful voice.  “There’s no need to get upset.  Just take a deep breath.”
“No doctor, I’ve taken enough breaths.  I’ve sat by long enough.  Maybe if I’d said something or done something earlier Daniel wouldn’t be lighting himself on fire.”  She turned to him and said, “Which, by the way, was a real class act.”
“They were messing around!” Daniel shouted, feeling his blood rushing through every part of his body, boiling and churning.  “He had his hand up the back of Valerie’s shirt right there, like I couldn’t see.”
Dr. Pilsner said, “Who had his hand?”
“Adam!  Adam had his f-f-fucking hand there and she didn’t even care.  She liked it.  Valerie fucking liked it.  I could see that she did.”  He looked at Dr. Pilsner to see if she understood.  He felt his mother there, above him, but he couldn’t look at her.
Dr. Pilsner said, “You were angry.”
“Angry?”  He started laughing but then stopped abruptly.  He hid his face in his hands and said, “No, no no… I wasn’t angry.  No.”
“If you weren’t angry why’d you catch yourself on fire?” his mother demanded.
“It was an accident,” he answered in a quiet voice not meant for his mother, or the doctor, but for himself because he could not believe what they said, could not accept it.  “I didn’t…I couldn’t.  Not that.  That’s crazy.”
“Now think,” Dr. Pilsner said leaning forward, drawing his eyes to hers.  “You got Valerie’s attention, remember.  You got her attention and then you ran your arm through the burner’s flame.  You caught yourself on fire.”
Daniel pulled his bandaged arm to his chest, rocking softly as tears dropped hot on his face and he whispered, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” 
Then he saw himself, in class, Adam and Valerie at the table before him, their backs to him, Adam’s hand up the back of her shirt and it was too much, too much.   Holding the flame of his burner to his arm, he’d called her name, once.  When she turned to him all he knew were her deep hazel eyes on him, seeing him, only him.  And she was all he saw or knew.  He did not feel the fire engulfing his arm, did not feel hands on him, pushing him to the shower, did not hear the cries and shouts about him.  All he knew were her eyes, as he’d known them before, in the outfield, in the grass, beneath him and a billion stars.  
And that was all there ever was or ever would be.


* * * * *



On Going Deep

On Dogs  
That’s a damn shame.  Dog like that with all his ribs poking out.  If that was my dog…  But it ain’t.  I ain’t had a dog in years, its hard enough taking getting my own self fed.  But shoot, if he was mine, I wouldn’t let his damn ribs poke out.  I’d find him something to eat.
His name is Barrel so I say, “Barrel, how ‘bout you and me head up to Chicago and shack up at Brenda’s place.  How you think she like that?  Shit.  She’d kicked my ass that’s what.”  This makes me laugh but then the chocolate lab is all scrunched up against the brick wall like he’s afraid I’ll kick him.  Like he’s afraid to be touched.  Shit.  That damn dog ought to know.
I tug on Barrel’s chain until he turns those miserable, brown eyes on me.  I say, “When things settle down at home I’ll take you back with me.  And if Brenda don’t like it she can go to hell.  What’s she gonna do?  Call the police on my ass again?  Shit.  If I had you I’d say run on Brenda, run on down to that lesbian Trina.  That’s right.  Do what you’re gonna do ‘cause I got a dog and don’t need your drunk-ass, drill-sergeant shit.”
Brenda is my old lady and the reason I’m down in Memphis.  She gave me the boot last week out the clear blue.  And there wasn’t no damn reason for it, only she’s got issues.  Shit, we all got issues.  So I just took my ass down to my sister’s house in Tennessee.  Hell, let Brenda have her space.  Let her run on down to Trina if she wants.  I tell her, “Go on now, have at it,” like it don’t bother me none.  And maybe it don’t.    
I look out over Teresa’s backyard at the flowers all red, pink, purple and blue.  The grass is greener than any I’ve ever seen and the swimming pool water looks as clean and blue as window cleaner.  Teresa done good, she done real good.  I see all this and know Barrel ain’t ever going anywhere with me. Not even when he ain’t being cared for proper.  I could do better for him and that’s a damn shame.  Shouldn’t be that way is all.
Crouching down in my ragged jeans I hold my hand out to Barrel.  “Come on now, it’s just Ray.”  But he won’t come to me.  Damn Mark anyway.  Why’s he want this dog for if he’s just gonna neglect it?  I asked Teresa what we’re gonna do ‘bout this dog, but she says we’re gonna do nothing.  Now how’s that?  Mark don’t deserve this dog and she knows it.  But Teresa ain’t got it in her to say no to that prince of a son.
Still I know it just ain’t right for a dog not to have anyone to love him or care for him.  I’d care for him.  I’d hide him inside my coat on the bus.  I seen someone do that once.  He had one of them chew-wawa dogs just tucked up in a coat with his face popping out.  Right there on the bus.  Ain’t that something?  I’d like to do that.
Barrel is looking at me, wanting me to rescue him.  He needs someone to help him.  I see it, but what can I do?  Shit.  I shrug with a heavy sigh and hang my head. “I know boy. I know, I know, I know.”   When I stand up I’m all lightheaded.  Ain’t no-one around, just me and him.  I clasp my hands together and wonder, “What we gonna do?”

On Brothers 
“I gotta be getting my tail back home, that’s what I’m saying.  I got things to do.  Business to take care of.  Can’t be holing up in Memphis all year.  It’s a nice vacation and all, but shit.”  
I shift the plastic bag to my other hand and keep on walking with my head down.  My boots are two sizes too big so I watch my steps.  I don’t want to bust my leg on a loose rock and get stuck here.  I got to get back home, got business to take care once Brenda settles her ass back down and can stop throwing shit at my head.    
“Too bad I ain’t got a little truck to carry me back home.  Had me a truck, I wouldn’t be hoofing it to the grocery every morning that’s for damn sure.”
Then I hear someone slowing down behind me, a vehicle with a low growling purr.  Then a sporty silver car pulls up next to me and stops.  I jerk back off the road and stare with my eyes wide. “Whaaaaaaaa?”  What I mean is, ‘what mother-uh-uh is this?’
“Ray, that you?”  It was Teresa’s ex, Carlton.  
“Yeah, yeah, yeah man.”  My eyes jump back and forth.  I hold my paper bag tight under my arm ‘cause Carlton’s flat eyes are eating away at it.  That’s how Carlton is, always looking to trip you up, to take what’s yours.  He ain’t a big man, but him sitting in that growling car with his black sunglasses and his manicured nails makes me feel small.  And Carlton likes making me feel small, always has.  
“You’re out early.  Need a ride?  I’m heading into work.”  Carlton’s looking down at me like we ain’t even been brothers for near forty years.  And him sitting in that sports car that ain’t even American when I ain’t got nothing but a pair of second-hand work boots on my feet.  Now ain’t I his brother-in-law?  Seem like a successful man like him could throw me a bone now and then.  How’s he going let me have nothing when he’s got everything?  It just ain’t right.    
“Maybe next time.”  I shuffle my feet and say, “Just out picking up a few things from the grocery.  Stretch these old bones.  We ain’t young-bloods no more, know what I mean?”  
But he don’t know what I mean.  Carlton was born rich, his daddy and his granddaddy were lawyers.  He ain’t never known how cold it gets when that thick fog rolls in from the lake at night and there ain’t no-one and no-where to go to.  He ain’t never woke up on a park bench or under an overpass, stiff and aching with just a sheet of newspapers for cover.  Hell, Carlton ain’t known a lean moment since he come up.  Now he gonna give me a ride?  Just roll on forward Carlton, roll on.  I don’t need nothing from you. 
“Come on, get in,” Carlton orders like he was my daddy.  But hell, he ain’t my daddy.  Shit.  My old man would’ve grabbed a handful of Carlton’s thick gray hair and jerked him through the window for leaving Teresa like that.  Then the old man would’ve danced a jig on Carlton’s liver.  My old man didn’t play and I ain’t playing either, not with Carlton.               
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I’ll catch you later.”  I place my hand on the package under my arm and then nod up the road.  “I’m almost to Teresa’s.  Go ahead and go on.”  Go on up to your downtown lawyer office and stick it to someone else.  I ain’t studying Carlton today.      
 “You sure?  Won’t take a minute.”  Carlton glances in the rearview mirror, already looking to leave.  Then he goes on and leaves me on the side of the road like I was some worthless piece of trash he done tossed out the window.  But that’s alright, I don’t need him.  I just need me a little truck.  But shit, he ain’t even considering me or that little truck.  Like a little truck was anything to him.
At Teresa’s house I put my beer in the refrigerator, then carry one with me to the television and turn on a John Wayne movie.  It was that western, the one where he’s a sheriff.  Can’t remember the name, but he’s one bad mother.  People think they bad nowadays.  Think they could mess with the Duke.  But that ain’t nothing but asking for trouble.  Shit.  I done had trouble.  I ain’t asking for more.      
“Oh hell, Duke, hell.  Give it to ‘em.  That’s right, that’s right.”   I rock back in Teresa’s rocking chair and Carlton slips from me.  I see Barrel lying outside breathing easy in the sun and I breathe easy in my chair with my beer and the Duke.  

On Elvis 
“Hey Uncle Ray, who’s the biggest musician to come out of Memphis and…”
Golden boy Mark is sitting on the couch messing with me.  He knows I know the answer.  But that’s alright.  I know what he’s about.  I take a drink, belch and then put my hand to my ear. “What’s that?”  
When he repeats his question I cock my head and roll my hand for him to continue.  “Alright, come on, come on, lay it on me.  Don’t hold back now.”  Mark’s a good kid, a smart-ass, but he’s eighteen and that’s alright.  He’s stayed with Teresa when his parents split.  Mark don’t know how good he’s got it sitting there working hard at looking ragged in his mall clothes and his spiky hair.  Looking ragged is the one thing I ain’t never had to work hard at.  Shit.       
Mark says, “And has sold million of records and…?” smiling that slick smile at me like I don’t know what he’s doing.  He’s like Carlton, thinks he’s smarter than everybody else.  Shit.  I know a little something too.  I know.
I sit forward in my rocking chair and nod my head expectantly.  “Come on now, don’t leave me hanging.  I can handle it Mark, I can handle it. Come on, roll with it.”  
“And dresses real nice and is real good looking?”
“Ah hell, Mark, wasn’t nobody more handsome than Elvis.”  I feel my face get hot.  “Why you think they call him the King?  Can’t nobody top him.”  
Mark shakes his head, “Nope.  Not Elvis.  Justin Timberlake.” 
“Whaaaaaaa?”   I fall back into my chair, clutch my hands over my heart and demand, “Who the hell is Justin Timberland?”
“Timberlake,” Mark corrects like he knows something just because he’s got him a brand new four-wheel drive truck and a job answering telephones after school at Carlton’s office.  Shit.  He don’t know nothing, not yet.  Give him a few more years, that smirk’ll be off his face for sure.  That’s all he needs, little time, little experience.  Then his blonde head’ll know the flow, he’ll know. 
I turn to Teresa.  “T, you hear the shi—hear what’s coming out your son’s mouth?”  She smiles on the soft leather couch in her red and white jogging suit, just home from playing tennis at her club.  Her hair’s still soft with a coppery shine while mine is the color and feel of a wire brush.  Her skin’s still smooth and tan.  She looks twenty years younger than me instead of eight years older and pushing sixty.  How’d that happen is what I want to know?    
“He’s messing with you, Ray.”  Teresa stretches her legs out on the glass-topped coffee table next to three large books with pictures of angels on the cover.  I like looking at those books while she’s nursing at the hospital.  There’s one angel that looks just like Mama with dark curling hair and a sad smile that’s too far away even in the picture.  That’s my favorite.  
T adds, “You know Elvis is the real answer.”  
“That’s Mr. Presley to you, Mark,” I say lighting a cigarette.  “Your mama ever tell you I met him?”  I waggle three fingers in the air.  “Three times.  And he spoke to me once.”  I look to T for backup and she nods.
But Mark just grins and flaps his hand dismissively.  “Yeah right.”
T blows smoke delicately from her mouth just like that time when she was thirteen and Daddy caught her smoking behind that church on Highland.  She didn’t smoke for a long time after that.  Or talk or eat.  It hurt too much.  T says, “Three times, Mark.”
But Mark has to keep on.  “Didn’t you used to follow him around all the time at night and pretend to be his bodyguard and karate partner?  Didn’t you get thrown in jail?”
“There’s that, there’s that.  But I was only busted once, that time down on Vance.” I shift my eyes to T for a second and say, “He’s a little too young for all that.  But you know what I’m talking ‘bout.”  She’s inspecting her manicured nails.  They’re red too. 
Then I lean forward in my seat until I’m about out of it and jab my cigarette at Mark.  “Know who Brenda likes?  Ever hear of Mekallica?  Brenda loves that band.  Mekallica.”  Then something pops in my head and I say, “By the way T, Brenda call yet?”
T thinks for a second.  When she says, “Not that I know of,” I notice there ain’t nothing black and rotting in her mouth.  It’s all straight white pearls in there.  Mark too.
“If she calls let me know.  I got some business to discuss with her.  Now that other one, the man,” I hold my arm out to T and snap my fingers repeatedly.  “You know, the man in the big office…  The Man, T, the Man.”
T and Mark look at each other confused until T’s face opens up.  “The president?”
I settle back in my chair.  “That’s the one.  He calls, tell that son of a b,” I remember Mark is in the room so I say, “Tell him I ain’t taking his call.  Just Brenda.”
We laugh because I’m funny.  That’s why Brenda likes my ass, I make her laugh.  Long as we don’t drink too much it’s good like that.  But when Brenda and I hit it hard, things get rough.  Too many things come up from the past.  It don’t even matter that old shit happened long before we met.  We just turn on each other when we ought to be helping the other out.
Only my ass is sick of always having to fight about things we did or done wrong.  Or had done wrong to us.  I know there ain’t a damn thing I can do about the past except keep it in the past.  Only, I ain’t ever figured out how do to that.  Shit.  Brenda ain’t either.    
So I play along with Mark, let him think he’s slicking me, pretend everything’s all fun and games, keep T laughing while I’m here ‘cause she hasn’t figured it out either.  With all her clubs and her church group shit and her new downtown townhouse overlooking the river, Teresa still got that same scared rabbit look in her eyes from when she was little.   

On Texas 
I’m sitting in my chair, watching a dance competition, feeling pretty good with my beer in my hand and Mark has to go and say, “You ever been in the military Uncle Ray?”  
Mark has that smile on his face again, the slick one.      
I take a drink of my tall-boy and say, “Nah, nah… nah.  They wouldn’t have me.  And I wanted in so bad.  Broke my heart.  Things would have been…  I tried five times.  Once in Denver, twice in Tulsa.”   My memory fades so I ask T for help about the other places. 
T says, “I don’t know, Ray.  What about Texas?”
“Oh hell T, I didn’t do nothing in Texas but get the hell out as soon as I could.  Remember when Daddy took me down to Texas after Mama?  Godda,” Mark is looking at me so I say, “Ever tell you about the time Daddy had us sleeping in that field off the main highway with all them hobos?”
T’s head bobs up and down.  She says, “I know about that one,” and smashes her cigarette in a clear, glass ashtray shaped like Florida.
“How we were sleeping in the tall grass and a damn car run off the highway into the field and ran over the man sleeping right next to us.  Killed him dead.”  Just saying it makes me lose all the air in my body.  I take a deep breath then empty about half my beer into my mouth. 
Mark shrugs his thick line-backer shoulders.  “Why were you sleeping in a field?”  
“Whaaaaaa?”  I stop rocking my chair and shoot Mark a stern look.  “You want to go deep, huh?  ‘Cause I can go deep Mark, way deep.  Can’t I, T?  I can go deep.”  
T nods.  She knows, she knows.
“Go deep?” Mark laughs.  “Sounds like a football play.”  That slick smile again, but that’s okay, that’s okay.  
“Oh I got a play, Mark.  Let me lay this on you.”  I take another drink and belch softly.   “After Mama died from the cancer¸ the girls were all grown and scattered to hell.   I was only twelve, the youngest, so I stayed with the old man and slept wherever the hell he said.  You would’ve too.”  T and I looked at each other.  She knows.       
T says, “He got up to two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle for a while.  He was all bull, especially when he drank.” She gives me a wide-eyed look even after all these years.  
I say, “Remember that time he got a little worked up and the cops wouldn’t even come out when Mama called.” 
Mark says, “Why not?”
“Why not?” I nearly shout.  “’Cause they were scared of him.  Shit.  We all were.  He was a big mother-uh-uh.  Big one.  And bad too.   B A D, bad.”  Thinking about Daddy makes my stomach tight and my beer sour in my mouth.  If only Mama had lasted a little longer.  Shit.
“Yeah right.”  Mark flexes his arms and crosses them over his chest.
I turn to T.  “Remember that woman from the Red Cross he married after Mama?  You ever know she had him thrown in jail for thirty days for dislocating her jaw.  Oh no, no, no, T.  She wasn’t having none of that.”
T laughs and says, “What about the other woman he married, the one in Alabama?  What was her name?”
“The other one.”  I scratch my beard and think.  “Hell, I don’t know, Gladys I think.  I was in that reform school down in Houston when he was with her.  You know he never divorced any of them women T?”
Mark says, “Reform school?” like he just heard I was someone’s wife in Alcatraz.  
I say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.  That’s when the old man took off and left me on my own in Texas.  The state picked me up ‘cause I didn’t have anywhere to stay.  Spent my fourteenth birthday digging a ditch.  How you like that, huh?  How you like that?”  
I turn to T.  “And I’ll never forgive those blankety-blank aunts of ours letting me rot like that.  They could have taken me in, Sally or Penny.  But hell no.  Not me.  I had to dig godda… dig ditches out in that sun.”  I look at the boy.  “And let me tell you Mark, that sun was hot.  It was hot, hear me?”
Mark won’t look at me.  Like he’s embarrassed at what’s come out of my mouth.  T’s just nodding her head and I can’t keep my eyes on them.  I look out the glass door and catch Barrel sniffing around his empty food bowl.  
I say, “Mark, you need to feed your dog and get him out off that chain.  He don’t look so good.  He looks kinda…”  I looked at the dog again.  “Hell, I don’t know.  He don’t look good.  You need to do something for him.”
Mark shrugs and says, “I fed him this morning.”  
“No, no, no Mark.  No, no, no.  That dog ain’t had no food since yesterday.  You get on out there and feed him.  Give him something to eat.  It ain’t right.  That dog is depending on you.  What you want him for if you ain’t taking care of him?”
Mark looks at T.  “I fed him this morning.”
T says, “Ray, don’t get so worked up.  The dog’s fine.  It’s alright.”
“But it ain’t alright, T.  It ain’t,” I say, leaning towards the glass door.  “Look at him out there, left all alone. Just look at him.”  
They look but they don’t see what I see because they don’t know what I know.  They don’t know nothing.  
 
* * * * *



Molasses



“They sorry.  They ain’t nothin’ but a pair of sorry no ‘counts.”  I stare down the dusty lane where Arliss and Terrance had run.  
Terrance had said, “You best stay with the womenfolk, Molasses,” and Arliss had laughed.  Then they rushed on down the drive, horsing around, pushing each other, stirring up the red dust with their bare feet; Arliss and Terrance when it had always been Arliss and me.  Now I sit on this raggedy porch with flies and gnats buzzing ’round my head like I was some stinkin’ dog while they out running wild like a pair of Injuns.  
But even still, I want to be with them, them boys, even if Terrance is thirteen and Arliss is just past twelve.  Even if I am only almost ten.
“Molasses.  Hmph!”   I stick my chin on my fist, elbow on my knee and search the drive for a sign of them.  “Don’t think I ain’t knowing where you two knuckleheads is going,” I whisper, “‘cause I know.  And I gonna laugh my head off when you gets yours.”    
Still, I’m sure sorry in the gut to be stuck on this porch with the blazing sun sittin’ right on my shoulders and nothing but a dirt yard before me and a couple of chickens pecking ‘round, too stupid to know any better.  Bet them chickens would rather be out with them boys too.  It’s only me and them chickens and this makes me feel low-down and mean so I throw a dirt clod hard as I can and hit that rooster right in the head.  
Still it don’t make me feel none better like it should.
The screen door bangs shut behind me so I whip around.  Mama’s standing there with big pink and blue curlers piled high on her head.  Mama done wrapped a belt around her waist just to hold that big bag of a black dress to her bones.  She so tiny Arliss already has to look down when she speak to him.  I figure I’ll be doing that soon but I don’t like to think on it.  Mama’s face so tired all the time.  It gonna be all the more tired by the time I look down into it.
“Daddy John still at that land.”  Mama stares down that same drive I been watching and say, “He gonna work himself in the ground and then what’s he gonna do, missing church this morning?  Don‘t nothing get by the good Lord‘s eye.  You remember that.”
“Yes’m.”  I look up and see her brown hands poking out her sleeves, raw from the washin’.  “Daddy John really gonna start a saw mill up there?”
“That’s what he say.”
“He gonna work it hisself?  I mean, he ain‘t gonna want me there is he?  What about my chores?  Who gonna feed the animals?”
“If Daddy John need you, you’ll be there.  You gettin’ big Verdie, Daddy gonna need your strength.  Arliss too.”    
“But I want to stay here with you Mama.  I ain’t getting all cut up by some ol’ saw.”    
“Why you frettin’ baby boy?  It’s a blessin’ Daddy John didn’t get sent to fight them Nazis like he wanted.  And it a blessin’ you got a Daddy want to make something of hisself.  Now where‘s Terrance and your brother?”
I point down the drive.  “They down at Mr. Leonard’s, Mama.”
“What they doing down there?”
I shrug.  “I told Arliss not to go but he ain’t listening to me, not since…” Since Terrance come.  I don’t say it but Mama know what I mean.  
“I tol’ you boys to stay out of trouble.”  Mama swats at a fly and says, “I ain’t got time to fool with their nonsense.  Pastor Henry and his wife be here any minute.  I don‘t want them thinking us Miss’ippi folk ain’t got no manners.”
“I been good Mama.  My Sunday clothes clean and all.”  I stand so Mama can look me over.  My black pants all creased down the center, my collar tight and white on my neck.  
“That’s my Verdie,” Mama say, brushing her hand across my knotted hair. “You make a fine pastor one day.  Have all the women swooning over you.”  Mama don’t even have to lean down when she kiss my forehead.  “Now, run on bring them boys home ’fore your Daddy gets back.”
I jump off the porch with that kiss still sitting on me and take off like there was a fire on my heels so Mama can see how fast I am.  Can’t nobody catch me when I get to runnin’, not even Arliss.  Shoot, bet I could run the two miles to Mr. Leonard’s and back again ’fore that new pastor shows his face at the house.       
My bare feet don’t hit the ground long enough to feel the hot gravel in the road or the sharp stalks poking up in Mr. Leonard’s soybean field.  I keep going till I get to the orchard and see them rascals.  And there they are, stealing Mr. Leonard’s pears big as day.  
I holler, “Mama said come home.” 
But they don’t hear me.  They’re running through the orchard, throwing Mr. Leonard’s pears at each other, at the ground, at the air, at nothing.  They take a bite and then toss the pear, wasting it.  And me and them boys knowing the worstest thing anyone could do was waste something.  Especially something that don’t belong to you. 
I‘m close enough now to holler for them again but I hear Terrance’s voice, slow and insolent like he don‘t care about nothing or nobody, saying, “When I get back to the city, I’m gonna steal me a whole bottle of Willie Mac’s corn whiskey and suck it down quick as anything.” 
Arliss lowers the pear in his hand.  “But you’re here.  You can’t go back,”
Terrance whips around and puts his face right up in Arliss’ face.  “I’ll do whatever I goddamn want.  Who your daddy think I am, Paul Bunyons?  Shit.  I ain’t slavin’ for no man at no sawmill.  I’m hitting that rail just as soon as I can.”
I‘m about ten feet away from Arliss but he don‘t even know it.  He say, “Take me Terrance.  I want to go.  Don’t leave me here.”  
Arliss always making me laugh, like now.  I say, “Ain’t nobody gonna drag your sorry carcass around the big city.  Go stealin’ whiskey?  Shoot, everybody knows you too scared to show your face at night, ’fraid old Levonia’s spirit gonna turn you into a swamp turtle.  How you gonna steal anything?”
Arliss sucks in his breath and scrunches up his face like he gonna do something.   Then a rotten pear hits my ear, ‘bout near taking my head off.  My sticky, wet ear is ringing but I can still hear Terrance and Arliss laughing.   Terrance say, “What you gonna do Molasses, run crying to Mama? Wah, wah, wah…”  
Arliss joins him and they make crying sounds to me.  I pick up a stick at my feet and say, “Least my mama ain’t locked up in no Kansas City jail.”  Terrance ain’t liking what I say and starts at me.  I take one look at his face, drop my stick and run behind a tree.  
“Who the ‘fraidy cat now Molasses?” Arliss shouts.  “I ain’t scared of nothing, ’specially old Levonia.  I can do whatever I goddamn want!”  
I step out from behind the tree and look at my brother.  I ain’t believing’ what done come out his mouth.  I see he ain’t believing it either.  Seem like he want to snatch that word right out the air and suck it back in but it too late for that.  
Even Terrance steps back from Arliss and studies him.  They’re the same height, only Terrance is leaner in the body, harder in the mouth and eyes.  “Hell, I don‘t guess it matters none to me if you string along.  Only you can‘t be acting like no country hick.  That shit don‘t fly in the city.”
Arliss don’t do nothing but bob that head up and down.  But I know he ain’t going nowhere.  But then I think, he best not go.  He still got to show me how to shoot his slingshot like he do.  He still got to help me with the chores.  
Then a truck door slams shut sounding like all the gates of Hades closing upon us.  Arliss, Terrance and me turn toward the noise.  Our eyes lock on Daddy John.  The pears slip from them boys’ hands as Daddy John approaches.  My stomach drops to the ground between my dusty feet.
Then Daddy John is with us, just a lookin’ and thinkin’ on what he done come across.  He stands ramrod straight in his khaki pants, his skin dark as a shotgun barrel against the whiteness of his shirt.  Just seeing Daddy John makes my rear-end ache.  It only been five days since he tore me up knocking over a pickle jar at the grocery.  
“You boys helping yourself to Mr. Leonard’s pears?”    
The boys don’t answer but my backside can’t take another whuppin’ so I say, “I ain‘t the one stealin‘from Mr. Leonard.  I been good Daddy.  I been waiting at the house like we ’sposed to.  Mama told me come fetch the boys to visit with the new pastor.”
Daddy John stands before me like a raging bull at the gate, big, black, and dangerous.  He give me that look, his only look, a man’s look, hard and solid.  I don’t breathe or nothing ‘till he say, “That so?”  
“Yessir,” I mumble, not daring to look at his face.  My eyes jump down to his hand, to the stump that used to be his trigger finger before some old mule chomped it off long time ago.  I feel his bulging eyes on me hotter than any sun and I pray the thick lenses of his eyeglasses don’t catch my head on fire.  
Daddy John shifts his eyes to Arliss.  “You know better, right boy?”
“Yessir.”
“Your cousin only been here two days and this the example you settin’?”
It’s plain Arliss don’t want to answer but he ain’t got no choice.  “Yessir.”
“We gonna deal with this at home.  Stealing pears when you ‘sposed to be getting ready for the new pastor.  Mama ain't gonna be pleased.”
Terrance say in his smooth city-slicker voice, “It ain’t no big deal, Daddy John.  We just messing with each other with these old rotten pears.  There’s plenty good ones left.  Mr. Leonard ain‘t gonna know.” 
Daddy John don’t say nothing for a moment. Then he say, “You’re right Terrance.  Go on, fill your shirt up.  You too Arliss.”
They don’t move.  Daddy John reaches down and picks up a pear.  “Tuck your shirt-tail in.”  Arliss shoves his dirt-streaked church shirt into his pants and then Daddy John pulls the neck open wide and drops the pear inside.  Arliss stands stock still as the pear makes its way down his shirt.  Terrance laughing ’cause he ignorant and don’t know any better.  Me and Arliss ain’t laughing one bit.    
“Fill your shirts, boys.”  No one moves.  Daddy John fixes them with a look meaner than spit and says, “Now.”  
Arliss and Terrance get to grabbing and chunking pears down their shirt faster than I don’t know what.  When the shirts are stuffed full them boys stand before Daddy John, their hands groping and grabbing to keep the pears in place.  
Daddy John says, “That’s right, don’t lose a one,” as he walks back to the truck.  Terrance hesitates, but Arliss and I follow Daddy John.  He opens the truck door and tells me to get in.  Then Daddy John gets in next to me and starts the truck.  He points down the road with his middle finger and say, “Let’s show Mama what you boys been up to.  And don‘t you lose a one of them pears.”  Arliss’ head drops, but again Terrance ain’t knowing nothing.  
Arliss and Terrance start walking down the road heading for the house, all the while they hands is moving all over their shirts trying to hold them pears in.  Daddy John puts the truck into gear and follows close behind.  
I sit ‘bout as far as I can away from Daddy John and keep my eyes on the slab of cut cedar on the dashboard in front of me.  The wood all red lookin’ and the smell strong enough to make me gag a little.
“You best not be sick in my truck, boy.”  Daddy John lookin’ at me hard, making me have to pee just like at the grocery after he whupped me.  I nod.  Then he jerk his head towards the back of the truck and say, “What you see back there?”
I take a look even though I‘m scared of wetting myself.  “Axes, picks, saws and,”
“You seeing the future, boy.  I got me forty three acres sittin’ at the top of Turkey Scratch road.  You know how many two by fours up there waiting to be cut and sold, boy?”  Daddy John talkin’ but it like he talkin’ to himself.  He keep checkin’ the truck bed in his mirror like he scared he gonna look one time and all them tools gonna be gone.  When he talk, his face get all twisted, like he hatin’ the words in his mouth.  
He taps the steering wheel with his stump and say, “All them new houses being built one on top of each other down by the new Harvester plant and I’m gonna be a part of it.  I didn’t get to be part of the war, but I’m sure gonna profit from it now that it‘s over.  Believe that.”
While he was talking, Daddy John done revved that engine up so it sounded like it was ‘bout near to churn itself out onto the road.  The truck is going faster and faster and them boys is lookin’ back at Daddy John, they eyes so wide and white, and him behind the wheel just as hard and as solid as ever.  They don’t have no choice but to start running with all them pears bouncing and jiggling in their shirts.  
He keep on talking, like he ain‘t even seeing them boys.  His voice getting louder, more excited-like, making me want to cry.  He say, “I’m gonna need every twig and branch and when all that’s sold, I’m gonna take my money and I’m gonna buy me some more land and some more land.  And when I get enough land, ain’t nobody in the world can tell me what I can and can‘t do.”   
And still that ol’ mule was just getting going.  Daddy John shifted into second and I just knew he was ’bout to bulldoze right over the only brother I ever had.  Faster and faster we go, and me seeing them boys in my mind, their bodies flattened in the road, they guts and brains squirting out all over the hard gravel.  
But them boys ain’t ready to die today so they just keep a gettin’ it the whole way home until they is splayed out on that raggedy porch, gasping and wheezing.  Pears roll around their bodies like somebody done dropped a bag of loose marbles over ‘em.  
We park the truck next to the shiniest car ever been at our house and I know the new preacher done come.  Even though I want to press my face to the window of the red Oldsmobile more than anything I follow Daddy John to the house.  On the porch he says, “Pick them pears up.  You boys gonna run them on to Mr. Leonard’s after the pastor‘s visit.  Let him know what you done.” 
This time Terrance doesn’t hesitate, now he know a little something.  Daddy John done educated that hard head and it sure pleased my heart to see them boys pick them pears back up.  When Daddy John went into the house I reached to pick up a pear but Arliss’ arm shoots out viper quick and pushes me hard in the chest.  “Get back tattle-tail ’fore I bust you.”   
I can‘t help but wince.  Arliss’ arm ain’t nothing but steel.  But that ain’t what hurts so bad.  It was what he said, and the way he said it.  I say, “Why you do that?” and then give Terrance the eye.  I say, “Ever since this shiftless dog come sniffin’ around you been acting a fool.  Daddy John should‘ve run ya’ll down when he had the chance.”
‘Fore I could blink Terrance bust me in the jaw and I hit the ground.   
“Yeah Molasses.”  Terrance kicks dirt in my face.  “Get your ass back under Mama’s skirt.”  
Molasses.  That’s all I can think.  Molasses.  I hate that word more than sin itself.  Molasses.  I can’t move or nothing so I just lay there till them boys is done.  Then I get up, straighten my ruint clothes, wipe the dust from my face and hair.  I creep into the parlor where the visitors are.  Soon as I sit on the floor and cross my legs Arliss and Terrance scoot away from me like I got the mange.  
I’ve done had enough of them boys so I study the new Pastor.  He’s a lot younger than old Pastor Landers and his dark face is all freckled up, ’specially under his gold rimmed glasses.  He dressed all in white, from head to toe and even got a white hat sitting on his white knee.  Looks like nothing bad could ever settle on that white suit.  I be content to rest my eyes on that white coolness all day long but the second my eyes slid from the pastor to his wife I was stuck on her.
I ain‘t never seen anyone wear such a bright purple dress before, or sit so straight as Miss Yvonne.  She brown too, but not as dark as the rest of us.  The heels of her purple shoes are long and tall, and the toe so sharp look like she could kick a hole right through your heart.  And her hat.  I stretch my neck to get a good look at that nest perched on her head.  Shoot, that thing had leaves and berries and even a little bird stuck in there.  My eyes stay glued to that hat until Mama touches my shoulder.  
Pastor Henry clears his throat, smiles at Daddy John, seeking a smile in return but not receiving one.  “As I was saying, filling Pastor Landers shoes is going to be a difficult task.  From what I understand he was one of God’s great servants.”
“That man could talk a saint into sinnin’,” Mama says, rocking her chair with her foot.  “He start off talking, telling’ us about greed and about coveting thy neighbor.  He be tellin’ us about that darkness in our hearts and you know he mean you, not anyone else, but you.  And when the spirit take hold of him… shoot, couldn’t nothing or nobody bring him back ’till that spirit was through with him.  And we all join him - the spirit be in us too.  We singing and shaking and shouting and giving thanks.  Oh Lord, I’m gonna miss that man.”  
Miss Yvonne points her finger excitedly.  “That is just the kind of thing that we need to get away from.  That’s certainly not how it is done in my daddy’s church in Atlanta.” 
Mama pins Miss Yvonne with her eyes.  Miss Yvonne quickly say, “Don’t get me wrong, all that shouting and shaking, I’m sure it’s quite…” Miss Yvonne pauses.  “What’s the word I’m looking for?”
Mama says, “Moving?”  
Miss Yvonne shakes her head.
Mama adds, “Spiritual?”
“No, that’s not it.”  Miss Yvonne frowns.  “I know.  Entertaining.  That’s the word.”
Mama stops rocking.  “Well, we enjoy ourselves, if that’s what you mean.”
Pastor Henry says, “Yvonne, I think we should,”
“Church is for glorifying God, not for acting like you’re possessed by a bunch of demons, gyrating bodies shouting out Amens in some back-woods shack.  That’s why Henry is going to ask your husband to donate some of his land on Turkey Scratch road for a proper church to be built.”
Mama says, “New church?  Why we need a new church?  Ain’t nothing wrong with the one we got.”
Miss Yvonne prods her husband with her elbow.  “Henry?  Tell him.”  
Pastor Henry’s mouth hangs open so wide I see the metal fillings in his teeth.  Everyone is looking at him, waiting.  He clears his throat and says, “Now that the war is over, well what I mean to say is this is a new era for all of us.  Time to step forward, not step back.  A new church would,”    
“You’re not getting my land,” says Daddy John. 
“We aren’t asking for your land,” Miss Yvonne counters with an emphatic shake of her head.  “God is asking.”
Then Terrence say in a hushed voice, “Ooh-wee, I guess she done told you.”  
My eyes grow big as the moon and Arliss slaps his hand ‘cross his mouth to hide his snickering but it don’t do no good.  Daddy John cuts his eyes to Terrance and Arliss, ‘bout near slicing them in half.  All he do is nod and say, “You know you got it coming.”  
I don’t need to hear no more.  I squeeze as close as I can to Mama, wrap my arm around her thin leg, and press my cheek into her warm, brown flesh.  
Then Daddy John whips those eyes on our company.  “That’s my land, bought and paid for with my sweat and blood.  It weren’t you up before dawn every day of the week, planting and plowing, scratching to put food on the table.  And it weren’t you working a second job breaking your back ‘till midnight every night loading engines on a truck just to pay for a piece of land.  Just to say I am beholden to no man.  That weren’t you mister.  You ain’t got no right to come into my house and ask for it.  God gave me the strength to work night and day for seven years to have something of my own.  He ain’t taking it from me.  And if you think you are you must be plain stupid.”    
Daddy John done had his say and I know ain’t nothing the pastor or his wife can say or do to change it.  But don’t none of this matter anyhow ’cause Terrance and Arliss are sure gonna catch it later and I sure gonna enjoy myself when they do.   That’s what they get for treatin’ me like some mangy dog.
But Miss Yvonne still got some talking to do.  She says, “And you, would you like to go to a new church, painted white with big stained glass windows and seats with soft cushions?”
It takes me a second to know she’s talking to me.  She’s talking to me and all I can do is stare into her eyes.  I ain’t never seen such honey brown eyes, all gold and warm.  And that face, turned fully to me, the reddened lips and sharp white teeth, the nose so straight and narrow, her skin so creamy smooth.  
“I bet you sing too, don’t you?”  
I hear what she saying but it ain’t meaning nothing to me.  My head is nodding, I’m smiling and those golden eyes are still warming me.  
“Wouldn’t you like to sing in a big church, your voice bouncing all over the place, echoing your words back to you?”  
I smile, my head nods and she is the prettiest thing I have ever seen. 
“And you want your daddy to donate his land to God so you can sing in the new church?”
I nod and now my mouth is saying, “Yes ma‘am.”
“I know you do, uhm…” Miss Yvonne pauses and looks a little confused.  She glances at Mama.  
“His name’s Verdie,” Mama says.  “But the boys call him Molasses.” 
Yvonne says, “Molasses?” 
“’Cause he so sticky sweet.  Look at him,” Mama glances down at me, “clinging to my leg like he ’fraid of drowning.”    
My heart stops cold.  I am dying and only those honey brown eyes can save me.  But she is not looking at me.  She is laughing at me, Molasses.  They all laughing, all but Daddy John - he lookin’ straight at me.  
That’s when I knew I done gone against him.  That the one thing I ain’t never wanted to do, but now I done gone and set myself against his land and his sawmill.  I can’t bear his hard, flat eyes on me no longer so I cross my arms over my face to cover my tears.
“Boy, put your arms down.  You ain’t got no reason to hide your face from any man.”
‘Fore my arms even down the room get quiet.  I kept my eyes on my hands in my lap, not daring to look up into Daddy John’s face.  
When Pastor Henry say, “We didn’t mean,” Daddy John slices his hand in the air, cutting off Pastor Henry‘s words.  
Then Daddy John go on and say, “We got a church been marrying and burying, baptizing most everyone ’round here for nearly forty years.  Look like we don’t need a new church.  Maybe you two want to hoof it back to Atlanta and try your luck somewhere else.”            
Pastor Henry’s face all red and strained and his suit don’t look near so white as it had when I first eyed it.  And the way Miss Yvonne just starin’ at Daddy John was bound to make the temperature drop ten degrees.  But Daddy John ain’t caring.  He still ain’t caring when Miss Yvonne stands up and say, “If you think we are just going to walk out of here just because of a bunch of field hands are too ignorant to know what‘s best then you got another thing coming.”  
“Yvonne!”  Pastor Henry was on his feet.  “That’s quite enough.”
Miss Yvonne act like she don’t even know Pastor Henry done called her name.  She say, “If we say there’s going to be a new church then…”
Whatever Miss Yvonne had in her mouth to say just got swallowed up inside when Pastor Henry grabbed her under her purple arm and jerked her up out of her seat.  A proper scowl stretched her face and she let out a small howl of pain.
Pastor Henry shoved his white hat on his head and bowed a little to Mama and then Daddy John.  “We want to thank you kind folks for having us out today.” Then ‘fore Miss Yvonne could blink Pastor Henry pushed her on out the door.
    
That night Arliss and Terrence don’t let me sleep in the middle like normal.  They keep me on the outside and pull the covers away from me.  I tug at the sheet and pull it close as I can to my chin.  I lie there, listening to them boys talking of fast-moving trains and smoke-filled taverns, of crowded cities and stolen whiskey until their talk becomes my dreams.
Then, later, a feeling walks over me, like someone’s watching me.  I wake and through half blurred eyes I see him, the bull by the bed; his large, black torso outlined by the light of the hallway.  I’m thinking the beast is part of my dream but I see the thick, leather belt in his hand and I know it ain’t no dream.  Daddy John’s standing so close to me I see his railroad track scar snaking’ up from his hip into his armpit.  His chest rises and falls with heavy breaths.  Even in the darkness I see his hard face.  
Before I could think to do anything, Daddy John jerks the sheet and cover back from the bed.  I feel Arliss and Terrance stir next to me.  They gonna get it now, but I ain’t enjoying it like I figured.  
The first lick sears the top of my thighs.  I scream but it don’t do no good.  When Daddy John lifts the belt again I see he ain’t wearing his glasses.  
I holler, “No Daddy John.  It’s me, Verdie.  It’s me.  I sorry daddy.  I sorry.  Please daddy, no… no…” 
The belt pauses in mid swing.  Daddy John leans forward, squinting.  When he see its me he say, “You ain’t too good for an ass whuppin’” and lands another lick with his thick black leather belt.  This one gets me and Arliss good.
I curl up in a ball, tuck my naked legs to my naked chest.  I place my hands over my face as the belt rains down again and again and again.  No part of the body is safe from the burning strap, no amount of writhing or twisting can spare us.  At last, I am with them, them boys.

* * * * *



Pushing Through 



It’s time, I know it, and there isn’t any way around doing what needs doing.  I just have to push past everything until that front door is shut behind me.  And that’s what I’m going to do.  Just push past.  But not right now because right now I can’t stop staring at my reflection.  I’m there, in the mirror, not fading away ghostlike and uncertain, but solid, real in a way I haven’t been in my twenty-six years.  I see my flat dark hair already starting to streak silver, my muddied complexion and big, brown, cow eyes.  I see my father’s blood in me flowing from that strong Irish line that had worked its way from county Cork, crossing the ocean to Virginia and then on into Hazard county Kentucky.   
The line had stopped in Hazard, but it doesn’t have to.  Not if I am strong enough to rewrite and reroute my own history.  
But breaking loose isn’t easy, never had been.  Not when I’ve been right where I’ve been every day of my life.  Not when the only job I’ve ever had was scanning groceries.  That and taking care of the house.  It’s all I was ever trained for, all I was ever good enough for.  It’s no kind of preparation for jumping up and starting a new life and I know it.  
And if all I saw staring back at me from the mirror was my same old worn out reflection I wouldn’t even think or dream or wish on another life.  But I see something else flickering in the mirror, something I can’t hardly recognize or believe.  Hope.  It isn’t just in the mirror, but in me as well born from that miraculous ticket burning electric in my jacket pocket.  
I tell my reflection, “You can do this.  Just be strong.”  But it’s too much, this reflection of mine, too filled with my past and present.  To look on it any longer makes the ticket and all its possibilities seem less real.  But I’m not about to let anyone or anything take away this hope in me, not this time.  All I have to do is push through that front door, and I’m going to, but in a minute, after this stomach-squall settles.
I sit on my bed and smooth a wrinkle from my patchwork quilt, touching where the different pieces of the fabric come together and bind themselves to each other.  I think how life is this way, connected like a large puzzle, and wonder what happens when one of the pieces comes up missing or is removed?  How does this affect the whole?  
I don’t dare dwell on this so I pick up Pogo, my stuffed schnauzer, and press my face into his fuzzy fur.  I inhale our shared life together, imagining I can still smell the scent of cotton candy from the carnival where Daddy pitched dimes to win Pogo.  
Only, I can’t call him Daddy anymore, not since I was seven and he stopped being my father.  But I never stopped being his daughter, not then at least.  I used to look for him everywhere, hoping he’d see me, see how I was aching to be his little girl again.  Hoping he’d start being my daddy just as suddenly as he stopped.   Only I didn’t see him for a real long time, not since he stopped coming to see me and Mama.
But all that changed when he came into the market where I sacked groceries, and still do.  I was fourteen when he came through my line with his other daughter, his real daughter, Jenna.  She is exactly seven years younger than me, blonde, petite, outgoing; everything her mother was and everything I am not.
I watched him with this daughter, whose birth forced him to choose between one daughter, born out of wedlock to one of his bank employees, and his wife’s first born.  It wasn’t much of a choice.  Anyone would have chosen the daughter of his marriage.  I understood, or figured I did.  
But carrying his groceries out to his Cadillac, watching my father and his real daughter joke with each other, laugh together, be familiar in a way I had once been familiar with him, I stopped trying to understand.  It wasn’t the loving attention he poured on his adoring daughter that made my arms go numb and my feet stumble.  It was the dollar tip he held out to me, looking me full in the face without the slightest hint of recognition that I was his blood, his child even though we share the same eyes, the same forehead and mouth.
I was nothing to him.  He wasn’t ever going to be my daddy again.  
So I put him aside, out of my consideration.  But still, when I close my eyes, he is there, in my head, his arms all muscled toughness, his warm brown eyes tender, understanding.  I feel his hand soft on my back once more as it had been from my earliest memories.  Still I think he’ll step into our cramped trailer and set things right.  
Even now, with that ticket in my pocket, my heart yearns for that knock on our door.  Instead, I get Mama’s voice roaring from the living room.
“Teeny!  You hear me?  My pill!”
For a moment it feels like someone is tightening a vice-grip on my throat.  I swallow once and say, “Yes ma’am,” wanting to add, my name is Mandy, not Teeny, but I don’t. 
In the living room, Mama’s massive body is taking up the whole couch.  She’s been sitting there for years now wearing the same dingy blue cotton nightgown, just about the only thing that fits her anymore.  She eats and sleeps on the couch, only rising to use the bathroom or make her doctors’ appointments.  Her only interest lays in the television before her and the food on her plate.
Mama scratches her dark head that had years before always been carefully styled and colored Marilyn Monroe blonde.  But she’d stopped taking care of her hair and anything else a long time ago.  Just gave up was all.  She says, “You forget I was supposed to have my diuretic thirty minutes ago?” 
“Sorry Mama.  I was getting ready for work.”  I bend down and pick up the dirty dishes stacked on the floor next to Mama, holding my breath to keep from gagging on the warm funk that surrounds her.  All the while I’m worried Mama’s going to reach down and snatch that ticket from my pocket even though she doesn’t know anything about it.    
“You call being a cashier at Pick’n Pack work?” my eldest step-brother, Joe, asks from the recliner, unshaven and unkempt in his ratty flannel housecoat and white tube-socks.  “You should have quit that after high school.  Got you a real job, like dancing.” 
I act like I don’t see or hear Joe.  But when I move towards the kitchen Joe sticks his leg out and blocks my way, nearly causing me to drop my armful of dishes.  I try not to tremble, but I can feel his black eyes oozing all over me.  He takes a drink of beer and says, “Hey Mama, could you see that?  Teeny dancing?”
“Joe, that’s not nice,” Mama reprimands, giggling.  “Why you want to set her up for failure?  Teeny’s fine at the Pick’n Pack.  She makes a few dollars there.  What’s she gonna make dancing with them tooth-pick legs and that iron-flat chest?”  Mama and Joe laugh hard while I stand there like I ain’t got any sense but to just stand there and take it.  And that’s what I’ve done, for years now, just take it and take it and take it all.
Mama adds, “And that look on her face?  Walking ‘round like she done smelled sour milk all the time.  And wearing them owl glasses too.”
Usually I don’t say anything when they pick at me, but that ticket is in my pocket and the front door is real close so I get the nerve to say, “Least I work.  Least I’m not living off a disability check.”
This gets Joe on his feet lightning fast and just like that he’s burning my face with his hot beer breath.  All my new-found nerve vanishes and I’m cowering once again before Joe.  He says, “I ain’t too disabled to put my size eleven boot up your,” 
“That’s enough!” Mama pounds her meaty fist on the end table.  “Sister, watch your mouth.  It ain’t Joe’s fault his back is shot.  He didn’t ask to get hit by that beer truck.”  Mama falls against the couch, barking coughs through her slab of a hand.  “See what you done, getting me all agitated,” she gasps.  “Get my pills.”
I say, “Yes ma’am,” my voice sounding all puny again.  In the kitchen I dump my dirty dishes on top of the dirty dishes already filling the sink.  A dull familiar pain fills my head as I think of all the stained and crusted dishes I scrub every night after work and the fresh stained and crusted dishes waiting for me every morning.  
It was endless, and not just the dishes.  Chip bags, beer cans, ice cream tubs, cheese wrappers and more, so much more, overflowed from the trashcan onto the floor.  Globs of ketchup and mustard and jelly and syrup sit like unformed statues on the countertops amid a layer of mouse droppings.
When Joe hollers, “Hey tit-less, grab me a beer,” I slip my hand into my jacket pocket and touch the ticket.  Just push through, get that door behind you.  
Then I close my eyes and see the sand and the water and the hot sun that never gets cold, and the blue sky that never drops snow.  The Texas coast, that’s what my heart is set on.  I think of the brown-skinned people with their Spanish words waiting for me, Mandy, not Teeny, down south.  That’s exactly where I’m heading just as soon as that door shuts behind me.   
When I hand Mama her pill she downs it without even looking at it or wondering if it is the wrong pill, perhaps a fatal pill. I doubt Mama has ever wondered about this, but I’ve imagined it, in my head, often.  Then I wonder about the quilt and the missing piece and my stomach flip-flops about forty times.  Soon, I’ll be the missing piece.  I look at Mama and wonder will I be missed.     
Then Joe says, “’Bout damn time,” and snatches the beer from my hand.  At least his eyes are on the television and not on me.  It’s been eight years since the accident and Joe’s spent most of that time drinking in the recliner or at the bar across the highway where Perry Winters got knifed last year.  If Joe wanted more out of life at forty it didn’t show.  I used to feel sorry for him, thinking life had worn him out early on.  He’d been alright when I was younger, when he still had a job at the processing plant.  
But ever since he crawled into my bed last month I know he is an evil man.  I fought him off the first time, but was unable to the next.  He hasn’t come back, but I know he will, which is why I have to push through that door and get south.  
It worries me, what if I’m pregnant?  What would I do with a baby?  But I think of that ticket in my pocket and I know everything will be alright.  If I’m pregnant I’ll have the baby somewhere warm.  And I won’t care that Joe’s the father so long as we are far away from him.
“Lotto number time,” Mama announces with her cigarette jutting out from her doughy face. “You know that person won the Mega-lotto last Saturday ain’t even showed up in Louisville to pick up the money?  Said the winning ticket was from right here in Hazard county.  Who you think got it?”
“How the hell would I know?” Joe growls.  “If I knew I’d track that fucker down and he wouldn’t have to worry about turning nothing in.  I’d take care of it for him.”
“I know that’s right,” Mama says, blowing a steady stream of smoke from her loose mouth.  “If I had that ticket I’d take all that money and get out of this dump.  That’s the first thing, right off the bat.  Then I’d get me a maid,” she shoots me a side-long glance, “a real maid that knows how to clean.  Really clean.  I’m sick of living like a pack of hogs.”
“Know what I’d do,” Joe asks, arranging six lotto tickets on the arm of the recliner.  “I’d buy me one of them Russian women.  They ain’t got jack-shit over there.  Bet I could swap her for a case of pork’n beans.  What you think Mama?”
“Pork’n beans!”  Mama slaps her massive thigh.  “Ha!”
“Man, I bet them Russian women know all kinds of crazy stuff.  I bet she could show my ass something,” Joe says longingly before shaking his head in disgust and exclaiming, “Goddamn beer truck!  Minnie wouldn’t have left my ass if I still had my job at the plant.  They was going to make me supervisor once Elton retired.  Supervisor...”  Joe swears softly under his breath and takes a long drink of his beer.
“Shush now, they’re starting.”  Mama and Joe sit forward expectantly as if everything they had ever wanted was suddenly, maybe within their reach.  
The room falls quiet.  As the numbers pop on the screen Mama and Joe check and recheck their tickets.  I don’t draw my ticket from my pocket.  I don’t need to.  Instead I let my fingers rest on it, the feel of it quieting my rushing blood since last Saturday.  
“Motherfuck!”  Joe rips his tickets in half.  “I got shit for luck, that’s what I got.”
“I don’t want to win none of that small money anyway.” Mama tosses her tickets aside, picks up a stale piece of pizza from the end table and chomps it in half in one ambitious bite.  “The Mega-lotto, that’s what I’m after,” she says through her mouthful. 
I watch her, this woman on the couch, thinking where is she, my mother?  What has happened to her, to us?  I try to see her as she had been years before when she was younger and smaller.  She was always up doing things; hanging wash out on the line,  scrubbing the kitchen floor, kneading biscuits, even winning a Twist dance contest at the fourth of July picnic.  But more than that.  She had once run through a green meadow with a homemade dragon kite soaring above her and me fast at her heels.  She had once carried me on her slim hip down a crooked mountain trail, me too little to continue without her help, me needing her, relying on her.  
It was all so very long ago and yet my heart yearns for the mother who had once clung to me on a rollercoaster, shrieking with laughter as we plummeted earthward.  And I ache once more not the loss of my father, but of my mother, who could console me as no other, who once had loved me as no other.      
But that mother was not to be found in the mountain of flesh whose life was slowly being consumed by the very things she consumed: the cheap nutritionless food, the endless supply of pills.  
No, my mother had disappeared, not abruptly as Daddy had, but slowly, over time, little by little.  When he left her, she lost touch with friends, stopped going to church, did everything she could to keep from doing anything that resembled living.  
When everyone started looking her way and talking out the sides of their faces, she stopped going to work.  Just stopped working and sat down on that couch where she’s been sitting for years.  That was all for her.  
When Joe belches again I know it is time.  I stand before Mama and say, “I’m going now,” thinking this is your chance Mama, now.  One look, one word and I am yours, here, forever to care for you.  To love you even.  
But Mama dismisses me with a flap of her trunk-like arm.  Her eyes never leave the repulsive drama playing out on television.  
This is all she can spare me.  Though this is nothing new and I should expect it, and do expect it, it still hurts.  But then the beach is there, in my head, the golden sand warm and welcoming, the music intoxicating and exotic.  It’s there, waiting for me and in four hours I’ll be in Louisville.  A few days later, once the ticket has been cashed and my money settled, I’ll be in Texas.  After that, the future is a blank slate.  I can go and do and be whatever I want to be.  Only, I never considered what that would be, I never had reason to.  But I’m ready to consider it and a great many other things now.  
As I push open the door to leave Mama says, “Mandy Louise?”
I pause, hating the faint hopeful beat suddenly pulsing in my chest.  She called me Mandy Louise, called my name just as she had that day I trailed behind her with the green kite stamped against an achingly blue sky and we had run together barefoot, through the overgrown grass, mother and daughter.
It is what I have been waiting for, that glimmer of my mother, my real mother and it is there in the way she called my name.  I remember all the reasons I love her, have always loved her and I am ready to do anything, give anything for her to be that real mother once again.
I turn to her, my thundering heart near bursting as I say, “Yes ma’am.”
Mama looks at me fully.  “Think you can pull your head out your butt long enough to remember to bring some ice cream home?  Chunky Chunky Choco-Nut, hear?”
My heart flatlines, right there in my chest.  I say the only thing I can say, the only thing she’ll understand.  I say, “Yes ma’am,” and then close the door gently behind me.

* * * * *


Geography Lesson



Cleveland finished his beer, produced a raw belch, and then motioned for the bartender to bring another.  A thin haze of smoke spiraled upward from the cigarette in his hand like some lost soul seeking refuge in a darkened heaven.  The neon Budweiser clock on the wall said it was almost three p.m. and the place was as dead as any other in that washed-up town.  Pool tables and poker machines sat like neglected toys in the suffocating dimness as country music, old and familiar, mingled with the sounds of clinking glasses and the errant buzzing of flies.  A few people with nothing better to do sat on bar stools and stared dumbly at the soundless television above the bar, reminding Cleveland how empty life was without form and purpose.
The man across from him, Kemper, said, “I done told you.”  Kemper wore a dark blue work shirt that strained for closure over his impressive belly.  Less than twenty years before he’d been one hell of a football player in high school, more freight train than linebacker.  But all hints of athleticism had long since been lost to the deep-fried thickness that covered him like a dull costume.  Even still, his heavy-jowled face could not conceal the fact that there was still a handsome man lurking beneath the added flesh and years.      
Cleveland, stiff-backed and erect, put his elbows on the table, hunched his shoulders forward as was his habit and said, “Horseshit.”  Unlike his companion, Cleveland’s body wasn’t meaty, and his short sleeved shirt revealed long arms ropy with muscle.  Average height and weight, he had once been described as rangy, kind of like a tough chicken, not scrawny, just rangy.  He’d been this way as a boy and he was this way now at sixty-two.  His buzz cut had turned a steel gray color but his eyes were still sharp and his ears caught everything.  About the only thing that reminded him he was an old man were his charcoal colored lungs which the doctor swore were about ready to give out.  
“I know what you said, I know it.  But it ain’t true.  Not one damn word of it.”  Cleveland pulled a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket of his gray t-shirt.  “You might be pretty good with a monkey wrench, but you’re one ignorant bastard.”
“Ah hell, why’d you want to say something like that?”  Kemper scratched at his beer label and frowned.  “I saw the map and everything.  His route was marked in red, right down through Mexico and Honduras, through Central America all the way to Argentina and Chile and back.  All on that old Kawasaki.”  
“First off, that bike of his can’t go half a mile without crapping out.  Secondly, Lem Pearson is just as broke as you and me, broker probably, and last of all the man ain’t never even been out of the state of Tennessee.”  Cleveland snorted and took a drink.  “Kind of like you.”  
Kemper shook his head and when he grinned two dimples appeared on both sides of his mouth.  “Here it comes.  World War II, Korea, Vietnam...”  
“That’s right son.  I hit the last year of World War II when I was just sixteen, lied about my age just so’s I wouldn’t miss it.  And for the record I did two tours in ‘Nam.”  Cleveland’s voice, which was usually abrupt and harsh, changed whenever he spoke of his military career.  His words became more important, ringed with pride and respect, perhaps even a little awe at what he had accomplished.  
“Hell, I served for thirty years. Ain’t nobody around here got shit on me.  I been places you can’t even pronounce, seen things you ain’t even imagined, things that’d make your drawers turn turd-brown right now if I was to tell you.” 
“But Lem said,”
“But Lem said,” Cleveland sneered.  “If you knew anything at all you’d know that North America and South America ain’t even connected.  It’s like him saying he rode his bike from California to Hawaii or from Florida to Cuba.  There’s no way.”
Kemper lifted the ratty, grease-streaked ball cap from his head and scratched his shaggy brown hair.  He thought for a moment and then crammed the cap back in place, causing the thick ends of his hair to stick out from his square head.  “I don’t know, Cleveland.  I think it’s all connected, North and South America.  All of it.”
“I’ll say it again – Horseshit!”  Cleveland slammed his fist on the weathered table causing the collection of empty beer bottles to jump.     
Kemper pushed his shirt sleeves up his thick, hairy arms then crossed them over the top of his belly.  “Just ‘cause you been in the military don’t mean you know everything.  It don’t mean everyone else is a moron.”
Cleveland leaned closer, his eyes glinted.  “Yeah?  So tell me Einstein where did the Titanic go down?”
“The Titanic?  What?  You’re testing me now?”  Kemper sighed heavily and rubbed the back of his neck, avoiding Cleveland’s intense glare.  Kemper looked like a little boy who’d been called on in class, and Cleveland enjoyed watching him squirm.  Finally, Kemper hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “It sunk up north.”
“Yeah?  Where up north?  Lake Michigan?  Canada?  The North Pole?”
“Hell, everyone knows it was the Atlantic,” Kemper scowled, “over by Alaska.”
Cleveland said, “Alaska, huh?” and Kemper nodded his head uncertainly.  Cleveland turned and looked over his shoulder towards the bar.  He said, “Lily, honey, can you tell Einstein here where Alaska’s located?”
A girl perched on a barstool glanced up from the magazine she was reading.  She wore a yellow tank top with pink butterflies, denim shorts and looked to be around eight, no more than nine years old.  Her long blonde hair hung limply around her shoulders; her thin legs were white against the dark bar which her flip-flopped feet kicked in a slow rhythm.  She twisted an earring absently as she thought.  “It’s in the Pacific,” she began tentatively, her voice small and shaky at first but then firmer when she added, “near Russia.”
“Thank you, honey.”  Lily turned back to her magazine and Cleveland turned back to Kemper.  “Pretty pathetic.  My little girl knows more about it than you.  So next time just keep your trap shut about things you don’t have any knowledge of.”  Cleveland took a drink and added, “And that would be most things.”
Kemper’s face reddened and his breathing grew deep.  He muttered something under his breath.   Cleveland’s tilted beer paused before his waiting mouth.  “What was that?”
Kemper leaned back in his chair pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table before him.  “Said bet she’s learned all kinds of things this summer, sitting up in this bar with her old man.  Anyone ever tell you little kids ain’t ‘sposed to be hanging out in bars?  What kind of father,”
Before Kemper could say another word he was on his back on the floor with the edge of the table pressing into his soft throat, staring up at Cleveland, red-faced and bug-eyed, gurgling for help as his arms waved uselessly at his side. 
“Tell me again how to raise my kid, Goddammit!  Go on, tell me!”  Cleveland pressed the table harder, pushing his rage into Kemper, cutting off his air, choking him.  “I’ll kill you,” Cleveland whispered fiercely.  “I’ll take the very life from you, you filthy mongrel.”
It took three men to pull Cleveland back and toss him out the door.  He picked himself up from the ground and brushed the gravel from his skin and clothes.  It wasn’t the first time he’d been shown the way out of a bar, and he thrilled a little in knowing he could still stir things up, even if the Marines didn’t have any use for him anymore.  
In the truck, Lily wouldn’t look at him.  Instead, she studied the battered, old National Geographic magazine on her lap.  On the cover was a picture of hot air balloons, the brilliant blues, greens, yellows and reds blazed against a brown desert canyon.  Ever since a neighbor gave Lily two cardboard boxes full of her son’s old National Geographics she’d had her head buried in them.  She even removed her favorite maps and taped them to her bedroom walls as if to remind her there was a whole world out there waiting on her to just get a little bigger, a littler older.         
“I guess you showed him what a Harkness knows.  Alaska in the Atlantic?”  He grinned, but Lily wouldn’t look at him.  Silence sat in the truck with them, heavy, still.  He didn’t mind silence, but Lily wouldn’t look at him and that didn’t sit right.  
He pulled his keys out of his fatigue pants and then shot her a dark look.  “What’s wrong?”  But she only smiled weakly and looked away.  
Stubborn, that’s what she was, stubborn and silent.  He wanted to grab her thin shoulders and jerk her around to face him.  But as soon as the emotion welled inside him it slipped away.  He could no more hurt her as hurt himself because she was him in a way his other children never were.  The two boys from the first wife were pale, lifeless creatures that grew to be lackluster men, men that were used, forgotten.  Men who were not really men in his book.  The boys wanted nothing to do with him, as did his elder daughter; a plain, unimaginative girl who would never know nor care that the Titanic went down in the Atlantic ocean, nowhere near Alaska.    
But this girl, Lily, his only child with his third wife, she was a Harkness.  Sometimes when he looked at her it was like facing a mirror.  All the things he loved in the world were right there in her, right there for him, giving him strength to face the old age that had stripped him of his uniform.
“What did Mr. Kemper say to make you mad Daddy?”  She turned to him now and her eyes were the flat gray color that ran through his family, her mouth thin and red like her mother’s.  She was twisting the back of her earring, a gold cross, like she did whenever she was thinking hard on something.  She was always thinking, always locked away inside herself.  He’d been the same way, tucked into himself even as a young boy.  Only after he’d seen enough, done enough living did he expand outward to face things head on.   
Cleveland’s face reddened with anger as he ran two fingers along the top of the dash, leaving a clean streak in the light layer of dust.  The dust was from the gravel road that led to his house.  No matter how often he cleaned the truck, or rode with the windows up, the dust was always there.  He inspected his fingers and said at last, “That man was not very nice.”  
She frowned, squinching her eyes together so that it seemed she was crying faint, brown freckles.  “But I thought Mr. Kemper was your friend?”
“He’s an acquaintance, honey.  Just someone I have a drink with now and then.”  He glanced in the rear-view mirror and watched a couple of men enter the bar.  Harry, the barkeep and owner, had made it clear Cleveland best stay away for awhile.  Now he’d have to go all the way over to Pit Tavern because of Kemper.  He cursed fiercely under his breath.  If his wife was at home where she belonged, not working at that hardware store, the girl would have been with her, and he would still be sitting at his table with his beer.
“Mr. Kemper’s my friend.” Lily said.  “He’s funny and he always gives me peanuts for my coke.”  
“Honey, Mr. Kemper can give you all the peanuts in the world, but that don’t mean he’s your friend.  He said something in there that wasn’t very nice and I’ll be hanged if some foul-mouth grease-monkey is going to disrespect me in front of my little girl.  You have to learn that people can be ugly, real ugly.  Know what I mean?
She closed her eyes and thought for a second.  Then her eyes popped open and she bounced a little in her seat, tucking her legs under her as she turned her body to Cleveland. “Like Miss Jenkins?  She’s got a mole with hair sticking out of it on her chin.  She’s ugly.”
“There’s ugly like that, but then there’s ugly on the inside.  Just because someone might be pretty on the outside don’t mean they’re pretty on the inside.”  He stopped because she was looking at him as if he were explaining how to dismantle a jet engine.  He scratched his jaw and sniffed.  “You’re a soldier’s daughter, that makes you a soldier too, and we soldiers don’t cotton to being disrespected, not by anyone.  You’re just a little girl now, but the older you get, the more you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“But Daddy, why did Mr. Kemper,”
“Kemper got mad ‘cause we showed him how ignorant he is,” he explained.  “People don’t like to be proven a fool.”  But in his mind he saw them, his parents, working the tobacco fields, their hands stained for life, knowing only the tobacco and little else, not even how to read and write.  And he remembered how they signed for everything with their mark like trash, like field niggers, and how he hated his parents for their ignorance.  But mostly he remembered the shame of being their child.  That’s why he joined the military, to put their shame and ignorance behind him.         
“Maybe we shouldn’t have told him about Alaska.  Maybe he doesn’t need to know he’s ignorant.”  Lily twisted her earring again.  
“Don’t start talking like that, Lily.  Lots of people dumb themselves down and that’s all it is, dumb.  Don’t be afraid to be right, stick to your guns and people will respect you for it.  Promise me you’ll never hide how smart you are.”
Lily looked at him with her big gray eyes serious, her thin mouth pressed tight.  She held out her hand to her father and he wrapped his large, wrinkled hand over her soft skin.  She said, “I promise, Daddy,” and then shook on it.    

Later that evening, Lily lay stretched out on her bed with a pile of National Geographics next to her and one opened before her.  The orange and white plastic record player next to her bed played soft, sad whale songs from a record that she’d found inside one of the magazines.  With her eyes closed, she imagined herself on the ocean, watching the long, monstrous body of a blue whale slip past her vessel, feeling the cold, salty spray of sea water on her face as it passed, its haunting song bruising her tender heart.
That’s what she wanted more than anything, to be with those magnificent creatures with their songs that spoke quietly to her.  She looked up at the poster of Greenland over her dresser and wanted to be there.  But not just there, she wanted to be in the Aleutian Islands, Galapagos, New Zealand, and all the exotic places that were mapped out and stuck to her walls.  
That was her secret hope.  To be on a big ship and go anywhere and everywhere.  The maps on her walls, the whales singing to her on the record player and the magazines, they all showed her what was possible, what was out there waiting for her.  She just had to figure out how to get out of the flat delta cotton fields and onto a boat that could carry her to all those places.
Just like she had to figure out something that had been bothering her ever since Cleveland got kicked out of the bar that morning.  She had a question in her mind, one only the National Geographic could answer.  She searched until she had the answer, and then went to her daddy.      
He was sitting at the kitchen table, situated so that he could watch Wheel of Fortune on the television in the living room and grab a beer from the refrigerator without leaving his seat.  Lily stood next to the table in her Holly Hobby nightgown with her hair still wet from her bath, and waited for him to notice her.  He sat alert, on edge with his shoulders hunched forward; his hawk-like eyes trained on the contestants, ready to pounce on each missed guess, each wasted vowel.
“Q!” he shouted.  “What’s that guy thinking?  Hear that Angie?”
Angie, her mother, was at the sink washing dishes, still wearing her red smock from the hardware store.  She was about twenty years younger than Cleveland, thin, average height, with dark hair that fell in girlish curls around her ears and neck.  The softness of Angie’s smile revealed a generous soul, one that was quick to overlook the inconsistencies of life, the small failures that plague us.  
She said, “I’d take an R any day, but Q…” and then shook her head and sighed as she slipped her bare, white arm into the greasy orange dishwater and removed the plug.      
Cleveland took a drink and then emitted a long, satisfying belch.  “Hell, a retarded squirrel could do better than that noodlehead.”  When the show went to commercial, Cleveland reached back and pulled another beer from the refrigerator. 
Angie dried hers arms with her dishtowel and nodded to Lily, “What’s that behind your back?”
Lily turned quickly so no one could see what she was hiding.  “A surprise.  A surprise for Daddy,” she said softly.  
Cleveland removed the cigarette from his lips and laid it on an ashtray already half full of butts and ash.  “A surprise for your old man?  Well, let’s have it.”  He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.  
Lily kept her hands behind her back and began, “Remember how you said if I knew I was right about something I should speak up?”
“What’s this all about?” Angie asked, her voice rising uncertainly.  She shot Cleveland a puzzled look and moved toward Lily.  
Cleveland stretched his legs out before him and yawned.  “Lem Pearson told Kemper some fool story about riding a motorcycle down through South America and back.”  
“But Daddy,” Lily began, the pitch of her voice rising as she spoke, “that’s what I wanted to show you.  Remember how you said the story couldn’t be true because North and South America ain’t connected?”  Lily stood waiting, clutching a map in her thin fingers, cheeks flushed and mouth quivering, ready to spill the beans.  
Wheel of Fortune’s theme song began, drawing Cleveland’s attention away from Lily.  “Alright, hurry up.  My show’s back on.  What is it?”
Lily laid the map on the table and jabbed excitedly at Central America with her finger.  “There, Daddy.  See it?  The Isthmus of Panama?”  She glanced around to make sure her father and mother saw what she was talking about.  “It connects Central and South America.”  
Angie grew tense, glanced nervously at her husband and then gave Lily a little nudge.  “That’s enough now, Lily.  Go on and dry your hair. Your father’s watching television.”  But Lily did not move.  
Cleveland stared as Lily slipped her finger confidently along the American continents.  “See Daddy, Mr. Kemper was right.”
When her little white finger lingered over Panama, pointing out just how goddamned ignorant he was, Cleveland grabbed Lily’s hand, crushing her little girl’s fingers in his tight fist.  She looked up, offering him her small face pale with pain and confusion: his daughter, his child.  
“Well ain’t you a smart little shit?” he snarled, tightening his grip, watching her wince for a couple of pounding heartbeats before violently slinging her hand from him in disgust and knocking the magazine to the floor. 
Cleveland’s attention returned to the television.  The wheel was spinning again.  He took a drink of beer, stuck another cigarette in his mouth and lit it.  
Angie went to the sink, and made herself small, invisible.  Lily was still near him, smelling of strawberry shampoo, not breathing, not moving until suddenly, silently she slipped away.           

Later, in her room, Angie brought the magazine to her saying, “Baby, why you want to bother your daddy like that when he’s watching his show?  Go on now and get ready for bed.  Dry that hair, first.”
When Angie was gone, Lily sat for a long holding the magazine in her hand.  She ran her finger up the binding, feeling the glossy page, looking at the picture on the cover but not really seeing it.  She liked holding the magazine, feeling all it contained, the whole world, right there in her hands.  
After a while she got up and pulled a much-used cardboard traveling case from her closet and opened it up on her bed.  On her dresser was the stack of magazines.  She filled the suitcase, one at a time, studying each cover carefully before placing the magazine gingerly in the case.  When she was through with the stack, she removed the record from the record player.  
She paused, hardly breathing, waiting a moment before placing the whale songs record with the magazines.
Next, she removed the map of the Ivory Coast taped next to her light switch, folded it and added it carefully to the magazines in the case.  Next was Greenland, then the Islands of the South Pacific from above her bed.  Central Asia, the Aleutian Islands, Croatia, India, Honduras – they all came down and were folded lovingly into the traveling case until at last the case was forever sealed and banished to the closet and all that remained was Lily on the edge of her bed, stripped bare as the bare paneled walls surrounding her.

* * * * *


Sacrificial Milk 

It started with a dream, a vision really, that he awoke from, his skin slick with night-sweat as his old voice trembled forth, “Emily.”
Dr. Irving lay in his pod, the late morning as dark as midnight.  It would be this way, night-time from now on.  His planet, Eudora, being small and relatively unimportant, had shifted undeniably onto the orbit path of its own largest moon.  The sun had become a myth, part of a past that could scarcely be imagined or remembered.
It was time to leave; there was nothing for him or anyone else on the base.  The supply ship from earth had stopped coming months ago; no one knew why.  If rationed carefully, there was enough food to sustain them a few more months, six at the most.  But in that interminable darkness they were all already dead, this he knew.
It was strange, the calmness that lay claim to him, soothing him.  Dr. Irving rose and looked about.  He would take no food, no bedding, only what was already on his body and a few items which he packed into a pouch which he slung over his shoulder.  His hand itched for his medical bag, but the bag would stay behind, he had no need for it.  The only other thing he grabbed was an oyster colored shawl made from the feathers of the Oooglysod bird.  This he wrapped about his shoulders as he stepped into the bright, moonlit darkness outside.  
He was alone on the street, passing unit after unit, the windows shut tight against the dark, the faint outline of silver light streaming through the edges of the windows.  They were locked up tight in there, his old friends, warming themselves with miniature solar orbs that gave off a warm yellow-green glow, the only sun left to us, he thought.  And soon, this too will be gone.        
They could leave, even him.  They could re-transfigure their individual units, piece them together into one ship as it had been when they arrived.  Almost three hundred units; it would take some doing.  Reassembling the units would be the easy part, getting three hundred families to agree to one purpose was the impossible task.  And even if it were accomplished where would they go?  All contact with the earth home-base and even other sub-stations had ended months before when the planets realigned, locking them into their lunar path.  Who knew what remained of the universe they had known?
It was the end.  But Emily had come to him in his dream or vision, whichever it was, and had shown an alternate ending.  He accepted this vision even though he still wished for a little more time.  As Dr. Irving passed the last unit he realized that’s all he really wanted.  He wasn’t quite through with his thoughts just yet; he wasn’t quite through trying to make sense of it all.
Dr. Irving paused at the foot of the unguarded guard tower; the old rule of never leaving the compound without permission presented itself.  But the old rules were now as irrelevant as the science and medicine he had studied on earth seventy-plus years before.  Nothing he had learned had prepared him for his life on the sub-base.  He’d come after medical school, volunteered even, when the base was just getting started and people still felt adventurous and unconquerable.  He supposed he’d felt the same way then, but he had long since been unable to summon those treacherous feelings from youth.  
He walked away from the base, away from certainty into the swelling bruises of the purple desert.  His feet sunk into the cool sand, the tiny granules filled the open spaces in his sandals.  The dream was with him again, his steps the steps of his vision, the land the land of his vision.  Nothing moved but him; the desert beasts kept their distance.  He knew it would be so and was not afraid.
The glowing moon, as wide as the horizon sat before him drinking the planet in, ingesting it.  Their path was very close to the moon now, it was always with them: a silent judge, the waiting executioner.  He walked towards the moon as if personally drawn to it, thinking this stormy white moon will have us yet.  This is what they all said in solemn voices, defeated voices.  Everything revolved around this moon; it became their God, unmerciful, vengeful.
He walked on unhurried and unconcerned with the structures growing smaller behind him in the eternal night.  He did not cast a look over his shoulder at his past; the future was before him.  When he made out the faint outline of a tall bluff in the far distance he stopped for a rest near a solitary analystiid.  Dr. Irving broke off one of the smaller limbs of the cactus-like plant and sucked the sour milk from the open end.  When he had exhausted this limb, he broke another and drank again until he was satisfied.  
The wild analystiid milk was strong, much stronger than the milk processed on the base.  Dr. Irving found himself lying on his back staring into the black, diamond-studded expanse above him.  Rich in all the essential vitamins, the milk was a natural antibiotic that contained mild sedative and hallucinogenic agents.  Millions of pounds of analystiid milk, or Miracle Milk as it was called, had been harvested from the vast analystiid forests of Eudora and shipped to earth to feed the hungry, whose numbers grew astronomically each year.    
But when the earth’s privileged learned of the milk’s strong anti-aging qualities, milk prices skyrocketed and the poor countries that relied on this milk to feed their nation could no longer afford it.  The poor starved and the rich remained young.
And now the great analystiid forests, once as far-reaching as the Sahara desert or the western plains on earth, were dead for want of sunlight.  Only a few solitary plants remained.  The production of Miracle Milk had finally come to an end.    
Dr. Irving said, “It’s a matter of excess.”  He lifted a handful of purple sand and watched the grains slowly seep from his clenched fist.  He felt his blood slowing in his body, felt every cell exhale.  A sulphuric breeze from the acid pits from the south swept over him, stirring his feathered shawl and sweeping gritty sand into his face.  He held his breath and let his tears cleanse the grit from his eyes.                    
The milk and tears were too much for him.  He rolled to his side and brought his pressed knees to his chest and placed his hands under his head.  The purple desert stretched before him and he was glad that it was waiting for him.  The base and everyone on it was under a dark cloud or dark moon as it were.  It wasn’t just the isolation, the lack of contact with earth, or the large milk silos, unfilled and unneeded.  It was more than all that.  
It was like that other dark time.
No one talked about those days, or even thought about them if they could help it.  The matter was pushed from the mind as soon as it surfaced, even for Dr. Irving.  But Emily had replayed those days in his dream; the days when the wombs of women were barren. 
It began a couple of years after Dr. Irving arrived on the frontier planet on the shuttle.  If thirty babies were delivered one year, the next year maybe only twenty-two were born.  Dr. Irving noticed the decline, but thought space, the living in it, made conception more difficult.  He was young and inexperienced, they all were.  Almost no one remarked or complained about the gradual decline of births for a few years.  But when only eleven babies were born one year, then eight the next, people began to worry until one year there were no babies and none the year after and the year after that.  
But that wasn’t the worse thing that happened.  Women went mad for want of a child.  They forgot to change their clothes or eat for days at a time.  They tried to steal children from other families.  Paranoia set in.  Men, blaming their wives’ barren conditions on some disease or disorder, turned in desperation to girls, starting with the eldest, and then turning to the younger girls as their efforts failed.  The girls were unwilling to participate in these efforts and had to be forced.  
And still no babies were born.
When women began throwing themselves into the acid pits south of town, men battled each other, delirious with grief and guilt.  
People were not themselves. 
Those were frantic days for Dr. Irving and his small medical staff.  They were unprepared for the sheer volume of mental illness and violence gripping the base.  There were never enough hospital beds.  Medicine was on short supply and the morgue, well…  
Dr. Irving sat up, tucked his knees to his chest and draped his long arms over his knees.  For the first time he looked back in the direction he had come from but all he saw were dark cloud shadows shifting over purple dunes.  It was just as well, he thought.  He got to his feet, turned his back to the moon and began walking into the desert where steep the sand dunes fell into deep sand valleys.  
Moving in the darkness, out of the moon’s reach, Dr. Irving remembered much of the land.  He’d come before, only once, but once had been enough.  Emily, his wife, had brought him, and in his dream she had led him once more.  It had been many years since they’d traversed this land, when the childless epidemic was at its worse, and the madness and violence were at its peak.  
Emily had joined Dr. Irving on the sub-base a year after his arrival.  They’d gone to the university together on earth: he a medical student, she an archeologist.  She’d always been captivated with the thought of space and the idea of life on a foreign planet.  She did not believe Eudora to be lifeless as it was supposed and spent her days wandering the wilderness, searching for signs of ancient civilizations.  Emily was rooted in the past, in the ways and understandings of things long past knowing or believing.  And he had loved her as one loves the kiss of sunlight upon bare skin.  
At the base of the rocky bluff Dr. Irving felt a little nauseous, as if he might be sick.  He studied the structure before him, knowing it to be a wicked thing, but knowing it was where he belonged.  
“Here,” he reminded himself as he made his way up past boulders, pushing his hands into cracks and crevices, getting a good hold and climbing upward.
He was breathing hard when he reached the black mouth of the cave, which was just as he remembered in his dream.  He pulled a solar orb from his pouch and held it in his flat palm.  The orb fed off the heat in his hand until its warm, green light illuminated the entrance.  He proceeded forward, ducking slightly as he entered the cave, placing his empty palm on the cold rock walls as he moved forward.  His thin, old blood raced in his ears and his heart pounded in his papery chest with an intensity he had not felt in years.  
The narrow passage into the cave gave way to a large cavern.  Pink stalactites hung from the domed ceiling, glittery in the glow of his orb.  The air smelled of the dank water wetting the walls.  He stood in amazement, moving the orb slowly about him, taking in this inner world.  Over half a century had passed since he last stood in the cave and yet it was as if he had never left.  The oval shape of the cavern, the stale mineral taste of the air, and the reduced temperature were familiar to him.  
Just like before.
He moved to the back of the cave, to the structure made of pink granite; a table, flat and broad.  It was sturdy in a way that would have been reassuring had Dr. Irving not been so intimate with its purpose.  His hands trembled above the flat surface streaked with the dark veins of an ancient evil.  He reached to touch the strange symbols carved into the table’s stone flesh, wondering at them not for the first time.  
But Emily had not wondered.  She had known what needed to be done.  She understood the old ways, the old Gods of a planet she said was not really called Eudora, but was truly Plysstodul, meaning ‘holy vessel’.  She was the only one who knew of the great ceremonial gardens, the Gardens of the Spirits, she called it.  
An ancient city, undiscovered and waiting, had revealed itself to Emily, spoke to her on one of her solitary expeditions.  She’d been in the east, studying vast rock formations, trying to uncover what their placement and forms meant in the universal sense.  The formations had purpose, this Emily was certain of.  She walked among the rocks polished marble-smooth and stained varying shades of purple by the desert sand-storms that erupted without warning and choked the air with a fury of sand and wind. 
It was there, from cracks and crevices that they first spoke to her, or sang to her really.  Their silvery voices carried no words Emily could discern, only a luxuriating melody, inviting her, drawing her into a slit in a rock, barely wide enough for her trim body.  The slit was an opening, a gateway into the real world of Plysstodul.  
Inside the Garden of the Gods, a sapphire river snaked brilliantly between open courtyards of the ancient Greek fashion that lined both sides.  Rock formations were now marble columns engraved with an unknown language, symbols unrecognizable to Emily, but nonetheless inspiring.  The columns supported a ceiling with a painted mural of a hoofed creature: powerful, commanding.  
The animal was golden, with a face of solemn justice that gave Emily the sense of being in church as a child and looking up into the face of the Apostle Paul in the great stained window behind the altar.  As she stared at this great holy beast, she became aware of the music once more, and was filled with such peace as she had never known possible.  
The alluring music worked to dull her senses but Emily fought against it, determined to find its source.  She had seen no creature, but knew she was not alone.  Their presence was felt, around her, near her, in great numbers and she would not have been surprised at all if an invisibly solid body brushed up against her.  
Sensing the music was coming from the river, Emily went to it.  As she moved closer the beautiful sounds intensified, bringing tears to her eyes.  Something in her was brought together, some old internal conflict healed, some uncertainty laid to rest.  And always, the rest of her life, she would wish to hear that song, that pure sound that cut her like a delicate knife which seemed to injure and heal in the same stroke.  And it seemed she had to touch the water, to dip her hand into that loveliness, to submerge even a part of her.  
But when her tender white hand entered the sapphire blueness the ground quaked beneath her, propelling her forward, thrusting her elbow and shoulder deep into the water which was no longer the startling blue of a November sky, but red, rusty.  And her arm, which she removed from that rusty foulness was blood-stained.  For that was what the water had become and that is what she removed her arm from; a river of blood.  So shocking, so shocking.  
She stumbled back, crab-walking away from the treacherous river that had taken from her the only true beauty she had ever known.  But it was not only the river that had changed but the columns, those magnificent pink and lavender beams now ran with blood from each engraved symbol.  But more than that, that sweet luxuriating music had been replaced with a stark, empty silence which filled her soul forever more.  Her grief knew no bound.
When the hoofed deity above her roared his thunderous contempt upon her she shriveled into an old woman, her life spent in that instant.  And then she ran, on her feeble old legs, hobbled away from the horrific Garden of the Spirits where blood flowed into the earth and silence marked the barren emptiness of all things lost and forgotten on planet Plysstodul.   
His wife had returned to him with a fever that never truly went away.  Always she had an elevated temperature.  Always there was some infection she was fighting.  But she never said a word, even when strands of her hair turned white, even when cried out in her sweat-soaked sheets at night, moaning into her pillow the most mournful sound Dr. Irving had ever heard in his life.  
Only when the women began throwing themselves in the acid pits did Emily awaken from her dark dream, knowing and certain what must be done.  Just as he had woken from his dark dream, knowing and certain what must be done.
Dr. Irving was there, once more, to do what needed doing.  He held the green light before him and studied the dark stains streaking across the cold, dead marble.  Here, he thought, we laid her, Jessup’s child, the youngest in the colony, not yet six years old.  And I, he thought, a doctor, a man of science and reason, laid her down with her tender eyes on me, frightened but trusting, for I had delivered her into the world, my face the first her infant eyes beheld.
Then Emily, also trusting that he would do the right thing, the thing that needed doing, had placed in his uncertain hand the jewel-encrusted dagger she had discovered in the dull yellow clay of a forgotten subterranean river.  That hoofed God would not accept a sacrifice from a woman.  Emily had been very clear on this.  It had to be him, a medicine man.
Dr. Irving looked at his wrinkled and spotted hands as if the knife were again in his grasp.  Then Jessup was on the table, again, now, before him, the child, an innocent.  Emily had held her, comforted her.  She sang a song, an earth lullaby, and stroked the golden hair, hushing the child, soothing her.  And the girl allowed this for she had not seen the knife just yet.    
Then the words, the sacrificial prayer, had flowed from his numb mouth, he disbelieving but anxious also for that bountiful harvest, those new babies to save them all.  As he spoke, he felt Emily’s eyes on him, felt her hunger for the ritual.  He would never look at her the same again.
With an efficient swipe of the blade on Jessup’s tender throat, her blood flowed onto the table, cleansing them all.  
That was all there was to it.  Within days of the sacrifice a chemist discovered the molecular agent in Miracle Milk that had caused the barren conditions.  A concoction was created, of what Dr. Irving was never certain, and added to the processed Miracle Milk.  Within a year the hospital nursery was filled with newborns.  Husbands and wives embraced each other, daughters were safe again.  
It was as it always had been before.
Except Dr. Irving never knew if the sacrifice was responsible for the scientific discovery or whether it would have been discovered and corrected anyway.  This question ate away at his internal organs, gnawed at his sanity.  For Emily, her hoofed Gods had been merciful.  Her faith was intact, strengthened even.  
They would not remain together much longer.  While he was elbow deep in deliveries, Emily roamed further from base-camp, in search of that alluring music once more until one day she did not return.  He assumed she had died in the wilderness, and felt it was for the best, her death, and he put her and the child out of his mind.
Until last night’s dream.    
Dr. Irving laid himself flat on the table.  He did not stop to think if he was doing the right thing, if it would work or not.  He removed the dagger from his pouch, that same knife as before.  Then he said a prayer, but not the same one as before, but one from his heart.  
“Oh heavenly fathers, Gods of men and moons, suns and stars, hear me now.  I give this blood, my blood as only I can give, willingly and with a full heart for the realignment of the universe, the careful plotting of this planet.  Bring back the sun and fill this small world with thy healing light.  Save us from our errant path, align us with thy favor.” 
These words filled his mouth with a honeyed wonder.  When he was through speaking he was ready.  With an efficient swipe of the blade against his aged throat, his blood flowed onto the table, cleansing him.  He lay ignoring the pain in his neck.
Then Emily and the child were on either side of him holding his hands.  Emily was young again, strong.  At long last, his wife had returned to him from the wilderness.  She nodded her head as his blood flowed onto the table, as if to reassure him all would be well.
Then he turned to the child and said gently, “I’m very sorry.  I didn’t want to hurt you.”  
The child did not answer, but touched his cheek with her hand.  Soft, salty tears slipped from his eyes, not from sadness or pain, but from the knowledge that sadness and pain would be his to bear no more.  

   * * * * *
                

Check out the following PREVIEW CHAPTERS for:

CURSED!
My Devastatingly Brilliant Campaign to Save the Chigg

By Idabel Allen


Chapter 1
The Pygmy

“Hey, hey, Lady Godzilla, don’t burn me with your fire lizard breath.”
That’s Mr. Lan.  He calls me Lady Godzilla because I am blessed with a statuesque physique, meaning I am tall and strong.  
But lately I haven’t been feeling too tall, or too strong.  In fact, I’ve been feeling like a pair of worn-out gym shoes stuck in sticky, grimy goo, the kind that oozes beneath theater seats.  It’s like I’m stuck in a theater where the same horrific movie is replayed over and over.  And that horrific movie is only my entire eighth-grade year, a year that should be erased from my memory for good, starting with my beloved Gramps’ funeral last July, almost one year ago to the day.
Just thinking about Gramps makes me feel about as low as low can go, and I’m hardly in the mood to tango with Mr. Lan.  But what can I do?  He’s holed up in my bed, in my room for the next month, practically half my entire summer vacation.  If that’s not bad enough, my dear Madre has instructed me to wait hand and foot on him like he’s some high roller from a Vegas casino.   
“Mr Lan, if you’re waiting for me to call you a gnarled-up Cambodian pygmy, it’s not going to happen.  I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’ve matured a lot since last summer, and I’m no longer interested in arguing with you,” I inform him quite politely.  I add, “And since you insisted on taking over my room until the week before I start high school, I would really appreciate it if you would try to be a little more pleasant.”
“You mind go blank-blank, dumb-dumb?” he asks as if I hadn’t said a word.  “Set table up for game.  I not getting any younger, and you not getting any prettier.” 
So much for being pleasant.  He’s looking at me with sharp eyes, daring me to retaliate.  He’s waiting for it to begin - the insults, the jabs - just like the good old days.  
The good old days.  Summer days spent filling Mr. Lan’s satin slippers full of wet sand as he and Gramps played dominoes.  Dropping a bawling cat on Mr. Lan’s sleeping stomach as he and Gramps lazed the afternoon away in matching hammocks.  Adding pickle juice to Mr. Lan’s afternoon tea and Gramps’ beer.
Those good old summer days had been going on each summer that I could remember.            
But the good old days are gone because Gramps is gone.  So I set the card table up next to my bed and keep my mouth shut, even though a thousand invisible ants are gnawing away at my lips, wearing down my resolve, urging me to retaliate, to fight back.  
Except the only fight that ever really mattered is over and done with.  And when I lost that fight, I lost all my gumption.  But worst than that, I failed not only myself but the one person in the world who truly and utterly depended on me, who needed me.  
And now I have no one.  First Gramps died, and then the bestest, truest friend the world has ever known left me.  
Actually, she wasn’t that great of a friend the time she turned on me.  And sullied my good name.  And became my mortal enemy.  In that respect, she pretty much sucked as a best friend.  But other than that, she was the best friend I will ever have in a gajillion years.  Even when I am a famous zombie screenwriter/director/producer and the entire world is wallowing at my feet begging to be my best friend, she will remain the truest friend I have ever known.        
“Hey, you listening?” Mr. Lan smacks the table with his palm.  “Or you got worms in ear again?”
I bite my lip.  A, they weren’t even real worms that time, just gummy worms.  And B, they weren’t even gummy worms, they were gummy bears.  I could tell him all this, but I keep my saintly mouth sealed as I open the box of dominoes.  I refuse to let him antagonize me.
“What happened to that big mouth?” He looks at me suspiciously.  “I gone one year and now you too big-shot Godzilla girl to talk to poor Mr. Lan.”  Then he looks around the room.  “How big shot mature Lady Godzilla like I take down these silly monster posters?”  He stretches his hand to the Night of the Living Dead poster hanging above my bed.  He knows full well it is my, as well as Gramps, all-time favorite movie ever. 
I say, “Geez, calm down, you old crank-case,” knowing it’s what he wants to hear, but my heart just isn’t in it.  My heart is plumb worn out.  
And even though I know I should keep my mouth shut and rise above his petty aggravation, I have to set the record straight.  “First off, they are not silly monsters.  If you knew anything about anything you’d know they are zombies.  And it is a scientific fact that the walking dead may be real.  If you want proof, just look in the mirror.”  
I didn’t mean to add that last part, had sworn I wouldn’t stoop to Mr. Lan’s level, yet somehow he always brings out the worst in me.
“For a Lady Godzilla, you sure got Mothra manners.  You be nice and I let you change my bedpan.  How you like that?” he asks with his beady eyes shining meanly.  
I must say, bedpan got my attention.  I take a good long gander at him.  Although he looks about the same, there’s something different about him since I last saw him, which was at Gramps’ funeral.  He’s still just as cantankerous as ever, still calling me Lady Godzilla and making remarks about me that I find downright uncharitable.  
But there’s something in the way he’s trying to get my goat.  It’s as though he needs our battles to keep things going the way they were when Gramps was still here, the way they’d always been every summer when he came for his annual visit.   
And even though I am now a mature young woman with a promising high school career before me, I play along despite the fact it’s the last thing I want to do.  
“Bedpan?  You don’t even have a bedpan.  What you have is halitosis.”  Halitosis is chronic bad breath, and if there’s one thing Mr. Lan has it’s chronic bad breath.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say it is toxic.  Okay, toxic and noxious.  Like having sewer vapors leak into the air each time his cranky old mouth creaks open.
“Bad breath is a sign of illness, Chicky.  I’m very sick man,” he adds, pulling his red silk kimono closed at his neck.  He says he is sick, but he is not.  He just likes taking an afternoon siesta.
But for such a crusty old goat he certainly keeps himself groomed.  His nails are always trim and clean, unlike my teeth-ravaged nails.  His hair is always cut, and he even uses some old-fashioned hair gel to plaster it in place.  He doesn’t even have hair sprouting from his ears or hanging out his nose like my Padre does.  
“Don’t even pretend you’re sick,” I warn.  “Mom already told me how you invited yourself for a visit.”  
It didn’t make sense him being here.  But according to mom, once you save someone’s life, like Mr. Lan saved Gramps in the war, it’s hard to let go of that life.  She thought his visiting would help his grief process.  Funny, her being concerned and all for his grief process when she hadn’t been concerned at all with mine.    
“Oh, you tricky girl.  I not invite myself.  Your mama ask me babysit you so she can go back to work.”
“Babysit me?” I exclaim, shocked.  “I don’t need a babysitter.  I took care of myself all last year while she worked.  I don’t need anyone.”  Even when I said it I knew it wasn’t true.  Learned it the hard way.  Still, in my head I kept thinking, she called him.
“Yes, Lady Godzilla take good good care of self.  I see that,” Mr. Lan says, nodding at the angry red scar running up my arm.  I lower my arm so he can’t see it, furious that he should even know about it.  I can’t believe Mom called him.  I can’t believe he is here when all I want is to be left alone.
He says, “So here I am, in this nice, comfortable bed,” and presses the mattress a couple of time to test its springiness.
But he doesn’t need to.  I already know the springiness of my own bed so I say, “That comfortable bed is my bed.  The most comfortable bed is in the spare bedroom, hint, hint.”
“Other room no good.  This room face east, Chicky.  I most comfortable here.”  And, as if he has to prove his point, he sighs contentedly. 
“I don’t care if you are comfortable,” I complain.  “You can’t come here and take over my room.  You’re infesting my room with your being.”  
Being.  Something I am now very interested in.  Beings and spirits and ghosts.     
“Ha!  You lucky, Lady Godzilla, if you get one leftover ounce of my energy.”  He holds one nubby little finger up.  “I have very good energy.  Very good.”  He smiles, pleased with himself.  “Now you, you baaad energy.  You energy no good.  Negative.  In your bones negative.”
“I do not,” I answer hotly, not playing around now, but really getting aggravated at Mr. Lan.  “I’ve got very good energy.  Better than you.”
“What you know about energy?  All you know is on the television and on the computer.  That not real.  Not real.  Not real like what’s inside.”  He touches his chest.  “This real, this energy.  But you don’t know, Lady Godzilla.  You don’t know.”
“I know more than you think I know.  I know all about bad energies”, which I really don’t, but I won’t let him know that, and even add, “and all about curses.”
At this the old man’s eyes narrow suspiciously.  “Curses?” he asks in a voice that does not conceal his interest.  “Yes, curses very real.  Even for your people.  But your people don’t believe in curses.  Not like my people, not like they should.”
“What do you mean ‘your people’?  You grew up on a farm in Nebraska.  Gramps told me so.  Besides, I do too believe in curses.  I mean, I know for a fact because of my friend.”
And saying “my friend” made it all real again.  My friend, gone for over three months now, since April.  It weighs heavy on me, what we did, how we tried to fix things, only to fail miserably.  I can’t help thinking that if Gramps had been around, things might have ended differently.    
I suddenly miss Gramps like crazy.  It was Gramps who made me Mr. Chippy pancakes in the morning and had a cup of juicy juice waiting after school each day.  It was Gramps who snuck me out of bed after lights out to watch the most zomborific movies ever made!  And when I was old enough to start making my own zombie videos, it was Gramps who always played zombie number one, as well as victims two and three, and even the bumbling sheriff.      
Gramps is the only person in the whole wide world that could help me now, when I need it most.
But he is gone, and I am sitting across from Mr. Lan who says, “Yes, you are troubled.  I saw it the minute you came in this room.  Good thing your mama call me.  Very good thing.”
I want to argue, to say it isn’t a good thing.  It isn’t a wanted thing.  And for my dear Madre to suddenly barge into my life after being so uninvolved, it is all the more unbearable.  If she is so concerned, why didn’t she stay with me after Gramps died instead of going right back to work and leaving me to come home to an empty house every day after school?    
  “Tell me,” Mr. Lan instructs firmly, pulling himself upright in the bed, indicating for me to pull a chair up next to him.  “I will listen.  These curses, they are tricky business.  I have to know everything.”
I hesitate, thinking he is making fun of me.  But I see he is not.  He stops speaking the broken English that he uses when he is trying to irritate me and now speaks using nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, making complete sentences, making complete sense.  He is now speaking like the lawyer he was before he retired.
I am now feeling like one of his clients, standing before him with a problem I cannot figure out or correct on my own.  And that’s what this is, this whole thing with the curse.  It’s something beyond me.  
I look at Mr. Lan and he is no longer the pygmy but a wise elder waiting for me to begin. 
So I pull up a chair and begin to tell the story that has been replaying in my head since that fateful night in spring.                

   * * * * *


Chapter 2
A Triumphant Raid

Funny about beginnings.  For me everything started the day Shannon and Mindy and I got kicked out of chorus for changing the words to songs.  If the line was “close to you”, we’d sing “far from you”.   If the line was “somewhere over the rainbow”, we’d sing “something stuck in a drainpipe”.  
Of course, Mrs. Jutney, our severely beak-nosed chorus teacher, failed to see the beauty in what we were doing.  Shannon, Mindy, and I, being the only eighth graders and the eldest in class, sang our versions as the sixth and seventh grade students tried to drown us out by shouting the correct words.  I believe it was this struggle that led Mrs. Jutney to slam her bony fists on the piano keys, and then stand and point her Skeletor arm toward the door.  Although her mouth was clamped shut, her cheek and neck muscles worked as if she were chewing on something.  Then her mouth opened and that tinny voice of hers crowed, “Get out! You girls are banned from chorus.  For LIFE. Especially you, Ginny Edgars.”
At the doorway I paused, then turned quite dramatically toward the piano and said, “That’s Virginia J, for Genius, Edgars, if you please.”  
A puzzled voice said, “Genius doesn’t start with J.”
“Exactly,” I responded.  Then with a commanding flourish, which I am well known for, I pushed my way through the doorway with Mindy and Shannon on my heels.
But we didn’t return to class.  Instead we took turns giving each other piggyback rides through the halls, celebrating our freedom, committed to making it last for as long as possible.  The last thing we wanted was to return to Miss Henderson’s room for study hall.  
So after a triumphant raid on the boys’ bathroom to swipe all the toilet paper, we paraded into the girls bathroom, laughing and shouting, “Ding dong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead, ding dong the wicked witch is dead.”
Then Mindy, with her short, spiky blonde ponytail bobbing anxiously on her head, asked, “Have you ever in your life seen anything as funny as those funny little sinks in the boys’ bathroom?”
“Not I, Min-min,” replied Shannon gravely from behind her round owl glasses. “How do you think they wash their hands?  Those sinks didn’t have any faucets.”
“Silly rabbit, those weren’t real sinks.  They’re urinals,” I explained in my harsh, toneless Mrs. Jutney voice.  “They don’t need sinks.  It’s a scientifically proven fact that boys do not wash their hands.”
“That’s just gross!”
“It’s disgusting!”
“Why it’s downright revolting, if you ask me!”
Then mayhem ensued until I kicked open the first bathroom stall and declared, “I christen thee, La Toiletta, Queen of the Golden Waters.”  The toilet was flushed and we erupted into riotous cheers.  
I found this exercise very agreeable and moved on to the next stall.  But when I kicked the door open, there sat Carrie Larson.  But no one ever called her Carrie, just Frecklefart Fanny because of the big, red, splotchy freckles that covered her entire body.  
But never, not once did I ever call her Frecklefart Fanny, or Frecklefart, or just Fart as others did.  That’s just disrespectful and crude, two things I am most certainly not.
I only ever called her Chigger, or the Chigg, because every time I looked at her during the first two weeks of school she was furiously scratching chigger bites.  Some people I could name said she had fleas, but I knew they were chiggers from experience.  Let’s just say, it is not a good idea to run through a field of waist-high stinkweed wearing only an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny Pocahontas bikini and red velvet cowboy boots in the dead of summer while pretending to be Miss America.  Take it from me; such an exercise will only end in tragedy, tragedy in the form of the most obscenely thorough case of chigger infestation ever!  
And did I itch like crazy?  
You know I did.   
Carrie sat there on the pot with that frizzy red hair puffed to extremes all over her head, her face covered in what could only be described as a bad case of being the Chigg.  She wore a ridiculous blue and white ski jacket, as she had every day since school started the month before, even though it wouldn’t get cold in Alabama until December.  
She had a book in her hand, one of those little green pocket bibles.
And there she was, not looking at us, frozen, quiet, small, waiting for us to go away.  Waiting for us to run back to class and tell everyone that we caught her praying on the pooper.  And maybe we would have.  Only there was something about Carrie Larson that made me pause for once.  
So instead of running to class with my big mouth yapping, which in retrospect is exactly what I should have done, I threw my arm grandly toward Carrie, did my award winning bugle salute sound effect, and announced, “Behold, the Chigg.”  
And that was when everything started for me.       

   * * * * *


Chapter 3
Busted

Of course we ended up in the principal’s office.  Our merrymaking in the bathroom did not go unnoticed.  And who noticed it but none other than Queen Hagatha herself, Mrs. Jutney.  Before we could swap bible verses with the Chigg, Mrs. Jutney poked her beaklike nose into the bathroom and immediately raised a big stink.  
She was really good at that, raising big stinks.
Her long, gangly ostrich legs carried her into the bathroom where she squawked, “What’s going on in here?”
I told her we were just washing our hands, but she wasn’t having any of it.  
“Washing your hands?  Likely story.  Would you like to explain all of this…this mess?  She flapped her birdlike arm around to indicate the streams of toilet paper that flowed from stall to stall and sink to sink, and the hefty wads of dripping-wet toilet paper stuck to walls and ceilings.
Did I mention we made use of the boys’ toilet paper?  Well, we did.   It was a complete mess and it was marvelous.  And I must add it was quite a thorough job, one that I took immense pride in.
Of course, being of a more humble nature, I did not take credit for any of it.
The end result was a trip to Principal Lewis’ office for not only Shannon, Mindy, and myself, but for Chigger as well.  
I should explain that I did not know the Chigg at all.  The county had closed the old rural middle school at the end of the previous school year.  Students from the closed school were now bussed to other schools throughout the county.  That’s how Chigger ended up in my eighth-grade class at Locust Fork Middle School.  
Other students from the closed school ended up in my class as well, but right from the beginning it was obvious they didn’t want anything to do with Chigger.  They did not speak to her, and she did not speak to them.  As I mentioned, she just sat there scratching chiggers for the most part.
In fact, she did not speak to anyone that first month of school other than to mumble “here” when roll was called.  She just sat at her desk wearing that ridiculous blue and white coat while the rest of us were wearing shorts and flip flops.  
And she was always alone.  Even in a crowded group she seemed on her own.  She had a talent for isolation.  In class, she never really seemed to be listening to the teacher, but instead stared at her desktop as if her very life depended on it.  Every now and then she risked a peek out the window, holding her sad eyes steady for a brief moment.  Then her eyes trailed back to her desktop.  If she even heard the teacher or knew what was going on in class, I could never tell.
Of course, I saw all this because I wasn’t in the habit of listening to Miss Henderson, or any of my other teachers, for more than ten minutes before my attention strayed.  I couldn’t help it, I swear.  There was just something about the steady droning of voices reading aloud from history books or reading books or any book that had the worst effect on me.  It was in these moments I wanted to jump on top of my desk and break into song and dance, hello my honey, hello my darling, hello my ragtime gaaaal.  Or better yet, snatch Miss Henderson’s stuffed basketball from the reading area and bounce it off someone’s unsuspecting head.  Nothing like a vicious round of dodge ball to break up a boring social studies lesson. 
I’d been down this path many times before and it always led to the same thing for me, T-R-O-U-B-L-E!  After excruciatingly active sixth and seventh-grade years, I swore to my parents that, now that I was older and in better control of my impulses, I would be the model student.  No more outbursts in class.  No more wrestling boys to the ground and forcing them to apologize for saying that I smelled like a big mustard turd (the unfortunate result of my affinity for mustard sardines).  No more trips to the principal’s office.
Just like there was no more Gramps to make excuses for me.  No more Gramps to take me out for ice cream afterwards.  No more Gramps to stick up for me when my parents got wind of some minor infraction.
Without Gramps around I felt about as deflated as an old bicycle tire.  I guess that’s why I’d held to my promise to be good pretty so well.  But all that changed when Mrs. Jutney stuck her unwanted beak into the bathroom and spoiled everything.   
Of course, parents were called.  My real estate agent of a mother wasn’t pleased about having to cancel a house showing.  I tried to point out that being called to the office once a month was much better than once a week, but that woman who calls herself my mother wouldn’t even let me get the words out of my mouth.  Instead she told me to “shut it”, and that it was time for me to start acting like a “young lady” instead of an immature baby who can’t be left alone for two minutes.  
Talk about being rude.  
I pointed out that I was, in fact, quite mature for my age.  Since Gramps was gone, I did my own laundry and made sure the fish were fed at least once every week or two.  I even made my own suppers when I was home by myself, which was pretty often, and in fact was quite an accomplished noodle boiler.  Truth be told, I was practically the most self-reliant person on planet Earth.
But she wasn’t hearing anything I said.  Instead, she went on and on for like thirty two billion years about growing up, being responsible and blah, blah, blah.  Then she told me how disappointed Gramps would be in me.  
Someone else might have been crushed by such an unnecessarily low blow.  But my dear Madre had outfoxed even her foxy self.  Anyone who knew anything knew Gramps was the last person in the world to be disappointed in my behavior.  I mean, this is the guy who used to soak his bare feet in the fountain in the middle of the mall as he scrounged up change.  Sometimes he even scrubbed his socks while he was at it.  
As dismayed as I was in my mom’s very uncosmopolitan view of the situation, I was appalled at Shannon and Mindy’s parents’ reaction to our harmless hijinxs. Using some weird, distorted logic, they blamed me for everything and requested that Shannon and Mindy be transferred to another class, away from me!
Now why would anyone want to do that?  Surely they understood that their little ploy would never, ever, not in two hundred and forty-two thousand years, ever break the bond of our friendship.  Did these parents not understand that we were blood sisters, inseparable and unconquerable?  The very idea of putting us in separate classes elicited a hearty yet derisive laugh from me, which I admit did not seem to help matters.
Not only were my friends banished from my class, they also were assigned two weeks of kitchen duty during breakfast for their roles in the bathroom festivities.  
For our punishment, the Chigg and I lost recess for two weeks and picked up kitchen duty during lunch.  So while everyone else headed out to the playground after lunch, Chigger and I cleaned tables and washed dishes.  
Other than my friends being moved to another class, I thought the incident ended rather well.  To start with, we had access to all the leftover cake from lunch.  Also, although it was punishment, working the industrial dishwasher was kind of fun.  Or could have been if Chigger allowed herself to have any fun.
But she was too scared for fun.  Too scared to breathe, just about.  But that’s what I learned, not what I knew at the time.  So each time I sprayed her with the sink hose she wilted a little, but she never came after me in a vengeful fury like I hoped.  And each time I threw my dirty dishrag at her head she just accepted it as if such treatment was expected.  
But she never, ever, not once, tried to squirt me with a bottle of ketchup or dump Jell-O down my shirt.  Never even slapped me in the face with a slice of pepperoni pizza.
Now I ask, what was wrong with this girl?  
The answer: plenty.  

   * * * * *

FOR MORE FICTION by author Idabel Allen, be sure to visit and bookmark Idabel’s:
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