Short Story
Scorched Digits
Nine times out of ten, the raptors will find us. They will screech death songs from the sky and dive violently downward, beaks dripping with want. Seven times out of nine, their feathers will shear off under the weight of the atmosphere, glowing hot white under reëntry. Wings like sunburst, mouths agape and drooling. Five times out of seven, the flames do not spread, they are fixed on the wing. Scorched digits searching in sunlight for blood and puss. Three times out of five, their instruments are rock-solid through the haze and blaze and the sweltering. One time out of three, a mother is swallowed into the sky.
My mother tells me this and I scoff and huff and puff and extend my middle finger slowly slowly s l o w l y while pulling my eyelid down with my other hand and sticking out my tongue and telling her she's full of shit. She'll explode like the fat guy in Monty Python. Except with shit. Except I don't tell her this, I nod and twirl and curtsey and say thank you ma'am, then bat my eyelids with my hands clasped, pushing my weight onto the front of my right foot and smile so hard it rips the corners of my mouth like construction paper.
Raptors don't fly and their wings once caught ablaze, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, engulf the beast whole and the bird shutters and jinks and screams so hard it shatters the ground beneath and it feels like my brain-blood curdles and the whey drip-drops from my exploded ear drums, like milk thistle, pierced and feeding. But raptors don't fly. They scuttle on dusty earth, cawing and flapping their chicken wings, begging them to be drowned in butter and tabasco. They bathe in tubs of brine with peppercorns and garlic. They lash each other with rosemary before they fuck like vermin. Idiot.
She kneels and plucks a small yellow-grey flower that flutters in the wind and stinks of sulphur and presses it against my upper lip and I cough and gag. This one is for back pain she says, nodding and raising her eyebrows like, amirite? A new one, purple and oozing. It smells like the science lab after a rainy day, after I ate Julia Palmisano's ripe pussy in the corner by the giant hood vent. This one's for if you have too much blood. More petals, sienna and chartreuse, like the colour blindness quiz on amicolourblind.com. Not enough blood, or, blood's not good enough. She grins like my belly is fat from all the good lessonstm.
These flowers are all poison. Her words are venom. I am a field mouse. If you eat yellow-grey, your vertebrae turn black and burst one-by-one like squibs. Purple makes you piss. Sienna makes your eyeballs turn soft like mochi. My heart aches like shattered ribcage. Like pneumothorax. Every lesson is a lie. Every smile is fire. I cannot accept an invitation from a beast.
Ten years ago my mother ate my apartment from the inside out. She smashed the floor so hard with her foot that the planks erupted beneath her and carried the tables and the chair and lamp with it. All slowly fell into that gaping maw. Picture frames whipped through the swirling cyclone, her arms outstretched like a messiah. Venetian blinds sucked up into swollen puffy pink cheeks. I screamed in silence outside the window, my hands smack-stuck to it like a gecko. After it was done, she told me she loved me and to layer my clothing in case the weather changed.
Five years ago a giant wasp flew inside of our house and stung me until my fingertips swelled up and burst from the pressure. I begged her not to let it in but she said it was a pollinator and that was important for the garden and the neighbours and because no one understood her like bugs did, not even me. Now my fingers are blown-off stumps like a cartoon shotgun that misfired and I can't use a computer or a piano or a typewriter or a sewing machine and all the buttons are falling off my jackets like pebbles. I slipped on one coming home from a film, landed on my back and exploded into a fountain of shiny gold rings which clinged and clanged and spun faster and faster, precessing until they lay flat like film. Hungry rabbits emerged from the bush to gulp them down, one-by-one, rubbing their rabbit bellies firm and fur-lined.
One year ago I pulled my tongue out of my throat to sell at the market because it was useless. It came out like a magician's rope, tugging my insides up and out my mouth like a tonne of fish in a net. My kidney flapped and flopped until it stopped and turned sullen and grey on the kitchen tiles.
She stretches her hand out places the flowers, ripped from their homes, into my palm and closes it with both hands, almost as if she knows that without direction, I would have let the petals fall. I would have let them float to the earth and eventually they'd wither and brown and find themselves packed into the dirt, trodden upon by wolves' paws and flattened by tractor tracks. Now you are safe, she says with a smile that belies the violence of our past. I feign appreciation and stuff them into my jacket pocket, which already contains two dollars, a crumpled receipt, five dolls' heads, and a videocassette from my fourth grade piano recital where my dead brother clapped too early, before I was done, and the camera panned to his ghost.
Now that is the story that is told when guests come for tea. Not how I starved myself to learn that song; how the notes shuffled and stumbled and elbowed each other on the staff, fighting for space like siblings in the backseat of a station wagon on the long drive home from their father's, who was no good (and I was just like him); how my eyes squinted so hard they stayed that way; how my fingertips, unsullied and nubile, still turned stiff and cold from trying.
On the car ride home, I say nothing. CCR's greatest hits plays quietly as our hips absorb the roughness of the gravel. When I am alone, in my room, I place the petals in a glass jar on the shelf with the three medals from bike races, the tiny plastic dinosaur, and the sticker that says “you are loved.”
Ballast
After school was done I slipped myself sideways through the slit in the chain-link fence. You didn't come with me because you said dinner was getting cold and you needed to eat and do the laundry and feed the cat and the cat was getting picky. The cat was getting picky and also he had diarrhea and needed new food. You needed to go the store, actually.
I slipped sideways and an end, sharp as silver, caught the edge of the sleeve of my t-shirt and went right through my shoulder, which was burned by the sun and red already. It was red already and now it was double red. Nothing phases me anymore. Don't think they won't notice you always said. You always said that and they never did.
I didn't think to call you to tell you I was coming. I left right after school and you probably needed to eat and something was always wrong with the cat. So I didn't call you. I didn't think to put on bug spray. Let them eat, for Christ's sake. Let them feast. I never could, anyway. Halfway through any meal you made I would start to choke. I would choke on my words and you would tell me to speak up and to stop doing that thing with my foot you hate.
I said it was double red but my blood was thin and yellow and it stained my shirt like puss, but it wasn't puss. It stung and smelled of sulphur and tasted just the same. Long ago I pulled the iron out of my veins with the strongest magnet on the planet and you just stood there, tsk tsking and click clicking your tongue that was thin, and split at the tip. I swatted the flies away from my soft, oozing flesh and started to count forty paces.
The mulberry branches swaddled me as I fifteened sixteened closer. You told me that somehow, in some sort of very specific circumstance that was also incredibly likely despite how rare it was, squirrels can go mad from eating the berries. Some kind of rabies. The juice was watery and thin and the fruits were distended like swollen nipples, purple from a day's worth of clamping and suckling. I didn't think about the rabies. How I could turn rabid and feral. I think of that too often, anyway. But how funny and clever, I thought, to pretend my hands were stained with blood, like the old days. The days before the magnet.
Twenty-two and my shoes were gloopy brown stuck in the mud and pulling off my heels like suction cups. This part almost scared me even though I know that quicksand was heavily overhyped as a means of a slow, painful death. There are many more obvious and practical and likely ways to die. Like hurdling off of the interstate at 80 miles an hour like a hot wheels car shot off a track in the living room of three small boys and their mother who is tired from a long day of making excuses. Or loving too much, too soon, or too often, and without pause, and without thought for oneself. I scraped the peanut butter mud off my pure-white shoes, which I could bleach later, and kept plodding and stomping. Most of the mud didn't come off, actually.
Twenty-nine and I don't think you ever gave me the rice cooker back. It was the cheap kind, with no modes, only rice mode. Cook rice mode and that's it. I leant it to you one day after school because you said someone on the internet told you to make rice and pumpkin for the cat. I'll need to buy a new one, because I'll never get it back now. Now that I am thirty-six with dirty shoes, which you would hate, and inching closer with mulberry sickness drip-sticking to my digits, which you would also hate. That's why I didn't call you. Because of the cat, the laundry, the berries, my quicksand shoes, the rice cooker, and a hot wheels car.
I didn't call you because I was there already. The sun was buzzing bright electric. It was now the kind of hot sun that you could hear, that sounds like cicadas, which you thought were making the sound, but it wasn't them, it was the heat and the sun and how the sun makes the heat and the sound, and also the light. So the sun lit up the tree, just like everything else around it. I mean that, everything else was also illuminated, because of the sun. But the tree was buzzing, like the sun. It was lit up. It was highlighted like notes from social studies class.
You used to say that a grave was pointless because when we die, God sucks the soul out of our bodies like the pit from a cherry and spits it out into a small bowl on his kitchen table. But here I am, berry-stained and peanut-butter shoes to see you at the base of the forty paces tree.
I didn't call you because you wouldn't've answered, six feet deep. I didn't like the cross in the ground in front of me. You never believed in that stuff anyway, but you baptized me for appearances. Because that was the style at the time. I threw my backpack off one shoulder like a hair flip and ziiiiipped open the compartment. Vroom vroom, hot wheels car on the side of your cross, like a track with no edges. Like rainbow road, we could just fall off. We could fall off and probably no one would know. I begged you to tell me no. To stop doing that thing with my foot you hate. To clean my shoes. You stayed silent at the base of the forty paces tree.
I stayed silent when you told me my favourite snacks smelled like cat piss, and the music I like sounds like it's made by a bigot, and the radio station I like gives you a headache. I stayed silent until I didn't, until I screamed and screamed and screamed and my lungs filled with blood, rupturing like water balloons in the singing sun, spattering sickness on the milkweed and on my shoes, my fingertips sparked like the fourth of July, my eyes turned into laser cutters and smelled of burnt balsa on the tray, my bones cracked and erupted through my flesh like continents colliding. After I turned into a beast you told me you stopped inviting company over, afraid they would see my scales, or that the venom I spit at you would land on their dress: polyester like the tide, curling quick with a puff of smoke.
I kicked your cross like I could make it die too. Like it would squirt out coins at me, like it would wiggle into transparency. Like I wish you would have. Like I could shatter your casket under the earth. Surely it's began to rot. Surely you have too. You defy God in this soil; He wanted you gone.
My face was a waterslide and my cheeks stung from salt and the sun. Triple-red. I turned the hot wheels car into a scene from the driver safety video we had to watch where the driver's head was spat out of the windscreen like a champagne cork. I thought my feet would bleed from the force as I stamped the shattered toy-store plastic in the dry dirt on your grave, at the base of the forty paces tree. They did, actually. Actually, they haven't stopped. Sometimes I do the Risky Business slide into the kitchen and from the crimson trail, a forest grows. Moss and lichen.
I knew you would be hot in that stuffy box. Cool in the earth, sure, but hot in that box. Like boil-in-a-bag. My knapsack had room for six flavours but I only brought one. I gave you the finger as I slid on a bloodslide away from the hot wheels car, your cross, and the can of cherry cola. Generic because you said money was tight and we couldn't afford to make big purchases.
I sprinted then, like after you would turn out the lights and let the demons suck at my heels with swirling tongues. You said it built character.
Thirty-six and my shoes are clean, gleaming beacons in the swirling sun.
Twenty-nine and I still haven't forgiven you. Any good Asian household needs a rice cooker, you said. And a good pair of chopsticks should be able to pick up a single grain like a specimen. Like in-vitro. The scientists smash that one little pearl into a golden yolk and five years later a child is born, cooing and cawing and squawking, mad with fear and loneliness.
Twenty-two and the rain hasn't washed the shards off the side of the highway. I know because I was there on Sunday and I saw your headlights smashed into fifteen-thousand pieces on the side of the six. They were yours, yes, because it was only that one model year when you could see your own ghost in the reflection. You told me that feature was taken out the next run.
Fifteen sixteen bloody shoes, triple-red and seething, sun-scathed and bleeding and I scraped through the fence like iron. My shirt turned black and bold and heavy as a pot, caught on the silver, left dangling. But dinner was getting cold, I mustn't dawdle. And I'd need to eat, and do the laundry, and feed the cat and he was getting picky. The cat was getting picky and also he had diarrhea and needed new food. I needed to go to the store, actually.