Category: short fiction

Neighbors | Ryan Keeney

The morning after the moving truck arrived next door, I discovered a walkie-talkie in the zinnias on my windowsill. Its crackle roused me from sleep, and my joints creaked as I rose from bed and made my way to the window, where I saw that the walkie had crushed a quarter of the zinnias before coming to rest in the center of the planter, its cheap, black plastic speckled with potting soil and shreds of pink. Apparently it had been thrown from the neighbor’s driveway, an impressive toss considering my bedroom was on the second floor. By the time I levered the window open, the walkie’s crackling had stopped.

The zinnias had been a spring birthday gift from Claire for my sixty-fifth, and I’d planned on showing her they were still alive when she turned thirty this October. She had brought them into the kitchen with a tiny cake for two while I was making dinner, a marvel to her since I barely cooked during her youth. “Maybe this time you’ll keep them alive,” she said. I’d always been a plant killer, but she never stopped gifting me them, hoping for change. That was Claire. Now, gazing down at the zinnias, I thought of her last words to me, a phone call from Chicago. She’d said she couldn’t talk because she was in the car with Rebecca. They were going to yet another thrift store. 

“I’ll call you back later tonight about buying plane tickets,” she said.

I was eager for her visit. “Okay,” I said, “don’t forget,” and after she hung up, I pushed my hands into my eyes and wondered when I’d become such a nag.

As I was trying to salvage what was left of the zinnias, I found a folded note on the back of the walkie, wedged into the belt clip. It looked to have been written by a left-hander, smudged with back-slanting letters, in a girl’s flowery script: Just moved into 837 Baltic. Neighbors! Do you drive? Might be needing your help soon. Top secret. Hold the button next to the antenna. -J

I was thinking about throwing the walkie back into the neighbor’s yard when it crackled to life again. My curiosity got the best of me, and I pressed the button. “Who is it?”

*

J was short for Jenna, and that first Saturday morning she wanted nothing in particular, except perhaps to be heard. Her voice was thin, almost nasal, and full of excitement. She introduced herself with a burst of rapid-fire facts. She was fifteen, she had just moved from Carthage, Missouri, and she was stuck in summer school for the next month until real school started back up.

When she finally paused for breath, I said, “It’s good to meet you, Jenna. You practically killed my zinnias, you know.”

“What’s a zinneus?” she said.

“Zinnias. They’re flowers.”

“Oh, the flowers? Sorry about that. Good thing they’ll grow back!”

I brought my hand to my forehead and massaged my temples. “I don’t drive much, so I can’t help you in that department.” It was true—ever since Claire’s accident, I didn’t like to be on the road.

Jenna was undeterred. “I thought you could maybe drive me to school sometime, or I could practice driving with you? My mom’s usually at work, and my dad’s license is suspended. He got a DUI.”

I thought of Andy Placa, the drunk driver who’d taken Claire from me two months earlier, all because he was too proud or too stupid to call a cab home from a work happy hour. His Dodge Ram had obliterated the driver’s side of Claire’s little Volvo a mile from the apartment in Chicago she shared with Rebecca. This happened not ten minutes after I’d called her, hoping I could coax her into coming home to St. Louis more than twice a year. That night, I’d been so offended that she forgot to call me back that I put my phone on airplane mode so she’d worry about me if she called.

As I tried to push Andy Placa’s fate from my thoughts—his trial was on hold while his lawyers fought for a plea bargain—I realized Jenna had asked me twice if I’d heard her parents fighting the night before.

 “No,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

She sighed. “My dad’s not the violent type, but God he gets really angry. Sometimes I wish I could just smack him. My mom too. Smack them both and wake them up.”

As Jenna went on about their chaotic move and her mom’s work at the hospital, I dimly became aware of the History Channel playing in my study. I’d taken to leaving it on at night so I wouldn’t wake up to silence in the morning.

“What’s your name anyway? You never told me.” 

 “You can call me Mr. Beckworth,” I said.

“Don’t you have a first name?”

I hesitated. “Brendan.”

“Brendan it is,” she said. “I saw you in your kitchen. You’re old.”

“Yes,” I said, making a mental note to close the kitchen shade. “I guess I am.”

Jenna fell silent, and I found myself worrying she was bored. I thought about what it meant to be old, besides the physical weight of my years. I felt ghosts, presences, memories, all blurring together into what ifs and why nots. 

“I think my dad’s cheating on my mom,” Jenna blurted. “I don’t really have anyone to talk to here.” She sounded like she was holding back a sob. 

“I’m sorry if—”

“I gotta go. Over out.”

“It’s over and out,” I said, but she was already gone.

*

I replayed our conversation in my head as I made eggs for breakfast, never as good as my ex-wife Sarah’s. I thought of Claire and her best friend, Rebecca Burroughs, at Jenna’s age; I thought of our once-whole family. Sarah had left me and moved across the country while Claire was in college, and Claire’s death didn’t bring her back. At the funeral, Rebecca had told me that she was moving back home with her parents. “I’d like to stop by sometime if that’s okay,” she said in between sobs. But I’d been letting her calls go to voicemail. When her number flashed on my phone, the edges of my vision blurred, my breath quickened, and all I could think was how strange, how sad, to be a father with no daughter.

*

Over the next week and a half, Jenna and I spoke at the random intervals of a teenager whose world is centered on her own existence, happily ignorant of the goings on and obligations of the people around them. Not that I had many obligations. She didn’t bring up her father’s adultery again, and I felt too awkward to ask her. Mostly she told me about her day, that she thought the kids at her new school were idiots and her teachers were boring. That she loved the flowers in the school garden and wanted to learn to take care of them like I did. Our conversations were blips in my daily routine, and I realized I looked forward to them. I started leaving the walkie on my bedside table when I slept. I clipped it to my belt and carried it with me when I walked around the house. I looked forward to hearing the crackle.

One Friday night, while I sat in my office looking at old family photos, Jenna announced that she’d seen her father in bed with a woman who wasn’t her mother. “I came home from school after first period today because bitchy Jessica dumped a cup of water on me and told everyone I peed my pants. When I got home, I ran upstairs, and guess what I saw? Some blonde woman rushing to close my parents’ door as my dad rolled out of bed!”

“Will you tell your mother?”

I’d seen Jenna’s mother coming and going at odd hours in her nurse’s uniform. She was pretty in a fearsome way, with an angular nose and slim, feline features. Jenna’s father was thick around the waist but looked like he had been handsome in some not-so-distant past. I’d seen them all together as a family only once, walking from their car into their home. They must have been arguing, because I could practically feel the tension as Jenna’s father strode up to their doorstep while Jenna and her mother hung back, whispering. Even though I’d not yet met the man, I hated him.

“I don’t know,” Jenna said. “What if she knows already? What if she’s so done with him that she leaves and doesn’t take me with her?”

I stared out the window, where a ragged vee of Canada geese was making its way south across the gray sky.

“Brendan? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I said.

 “I know what to do,” Jenna said. “I’ll come over tomorrow morning.”

*

At ten the following morning, I heard a frenetic knocking at my front door. Though I enjoyed our chats, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet Jenna in person, face to face. I didn’t want to get involved in a messy family situation, and I was uneasy about having a friendship with a young girl behind her parents’ back. For a second I pictured opening the door to her irate mother or father. What would I have to say for myself?

The knocking resumed, and I opened the door. Jenna was boyish in dress with too-large green denim pants and a gray sweatshirt. Like her mother, she was pretty. Her easy smile caught me off guard, and it was hard not to think of Claire at that age.

“Ready for action?” she said. Behind her on my porch sat two large trash bags.

“Hello, Jenna.” I stepped back to let her in, but she stayed put.

“I’d rather get moving while my dad’s still asleep. Judging from the beer bottles in the kitchen, I’d guess we’ve got a few hours before—”

“Before what? What are we doing?”

Jenna just smirked. “Car keys, old man.” 

“You’re too young to drive.”

“No, I’m not. I’ve got a learner’s permit. All I need is an adult in the car. That’s you.”

I didn’t like the idea of letting a kid drive my car, but it was probably safer, considering how panicked I got behind the wheel. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

Jenna held out her hand and waited until I gave her the keys. “We’re going to Goodwill,” she said. 

*

The trash bags, Jenna told me, were filled with her father’s clothes. That should have given me pause, but it made me smile to picture Jenna sneaking into her father’s closet and cleaning the place out as he stewed in his sweat. She was a person who made things happen. I sat up a bit straighter in the passenger seat. For a moment, I felt young again. 

Navigating the streets of St. Louis, Jenna was comfortable at the wheel, a good driver at fifteen. Even so, thoughts of Claire’s accident soon caught up with me. The missed calls from unknown numbers when I finally took my phone off airplane mode. The paramedics claiming Claire had died instantly, even though they found fabric from the car seat under her fingernails, as if she’d clawed at the seat in pain. Miraculously, Rebecca was uninjured.

“Can you check my phone?” Jenna said. “I heard a text.” 

Grateful for the distraction, I reached into the center console for her phone, where I saw she had a text from her mother. There was a yellow heart and a flower behind Momma in her contact. “It’s your mom. Does she know where you are?”

Jenna ignored the question. “You know, when I was little, I actually remember them being happy together. I have this memory of being like three and taking a bath, and my dad’s letting me rub shampoo all over the walls, and the bath water is just turning into this bubbly soup, and then my mom comes in and says, “What’s taking so long in here?” and when she sees what we’re doing, she just starts laughing. Then she sits on Dad’s lap and they kiss.” She reached up to adjust the rearview mirror. “I guess it wasn’t all bad.” 

*

When we arrived at Goodwill, Jenna parked like an old pro. There weren’t many cars in the lot as we carried the trash bags inside to the counter, where a young man with a spotty beard was looking at his phone. As we stood watching the bored employee root through Jenna’s father’s clothes, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Turning, I found myself looking into the disbelieving eyes of Rebecca Burroughs, Claire’s best friend. She removed her hand from my shoulder as if she’d touched a hot stove. There were bags under her eyes, which were red rimmed, as were her nostrils. She held her hands to her mouth as her eyes welled. I could see the years she carried, and I wondered how much of Claire she still carried with her.

“Why don’t you answer the phone?” she said, and then she had me wrapped in those long, thin arms of hers. As we held each other, I smelled pomegranates and started to cry too. It was Claire’s favorite perfume, perhaps an old bottle Rebecca had saved.

“I’m sorry,” I said into Rebecca’s ear.

Jenna coughed and tapped my shoulder. “Bren… Mr. Beckworth? We’re good to go now.”

Rebecca pulled back and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry too,” she said, brushing an imaginary something off my shoulder. “Claire and I used to love your plaid shirts. I remember this one. It really brought me back for a second.” 

“How do you know Brendan?” Jenna said. “And who’s Claire?”

I addressed Rebecca. “This is my neighbor. She needed a ride to drop off some clothes.” 

Rebecca looked from me to Jenna, sizing up the odd couple we were. Then she offered her hand to Jenna. “I’m Rebecca. Claire is—was—my best friend growing up. Mr. Beckworth’s daughter.” 

Jenna shot me a look before she shook Rebecca’s hand, nodding solemnly. “I’m Jenna. Nice to meet you.” Then she broke into a wicked smile. “I just gave away all my dad’s clothes. He’s cheating on my mom. Mr. Beckworth let me drive here because I have my learner’s permit. He can be cool for an old guy.” 

“Good for you,” Rebecca said. 

Jenna beamed.

I asked Rebecca if she’d like to come over for coffee. 

“I’d like that very much,” she said. It turned out she had stopped driving after the accident too. Her mom had dropped her off at the thrift store while she went to the grocery. “I’ll tell her she can pick me up from Claire’s.”

*

On the drive home, Rebecca asked Jenna if she was worried about what would happen when her dad found out his clothes were gone. Jenna laughed. “I’m not scared of my dad, and I feel like my mom deserves to know, you know? Even if it sucks and she cries, it’ll be good for her. She’s stuck, and I don’t think she knows how to move forward. I don’t ever want to be stuck like that.”

“Your father’s an idiot,” I said from the back seat. “If you need any help, you know where to find me.”

Jenna smiled. It felt good to be the reason someone smiled.

When we pulled into my driveway, Jenna killed the engine and there was a moment of silence where it felt like if we all stayed together, in the car, we could avoid everything outside that might hurt us, or that had already hurt us and refused to go away. Then the moment passed, and Jenna handed me my car keys before waving goodbye to Rebecca. “I’ll talk to you later, Brendan,” she said. Then Rebecca followed me in.

“‘Brendan,’” she said, settling into the kitchen nook with a mug of decaf. “I’ll never get used to that. That Jenna girl is funny. I think Claire would have liked her.”

 I nodded. “I hope she’s okay.”

Rebecca looked down into her mug. “You know, you never really talked to us when we were kids. Claire and I used to joke that you were the upstairs ghost. We used to sneak past your office just to get a glimpse of you.” 

I shook my head. “I wish I’d been more present back then. I wish a lot of things. Lately I’ve been thinking it would have been fun if you and Claire had walkie-talkies that I could call you on when you were playing in the yard. I know it’s silly.” 

Rebecca looked at me with a sad smile. “I don’t think that’s silly at all.”

*

When Rebecca’s mom arrived, Rebecca hugged me again, and I promised to stay in touch. Watching her get into the car, I felt more alone than usual. I had finally worked up the energy to make myself a frozen dinner when I heard a crackle from my bedside table. I hurried upstairs, to the extent that I can still hurry. When I picked up the walkie, exhausted and out of breath, Jenna was there. “Thanks for today, Brendan,” she said. “Over out.” 

Before I could correct her or thank her or ask how things went with her dad, she was gone.

about the author:

The Atkins Supper Club | Kevin McCaffrey

The only thing more embarrassing than getting picked up from eighth grade by my seventy-four-year-old grandmother is the seventy-four years it takes to get inside this shitbox she calls a car. I fall in ass first and swing each leg over, broken then unbroken, while holding my crutches like it’s some handicapped circus act. In here, everything’s automatic: hand visor for a cloudy day, uncomfortable smile through brand-new braces and a full-seat recline to hide from Vanessa, the love of my thirteen-year-old life.

It’s the right turn out of the parking lot when everything slows down, when I shoot up straight in my seat like I’m tied to the ceiling, when I clutch the grab handle so hard my arm starts shaking, when I start to wonder — really, wonder — if today’s the day we don’t make it home. 

Grandma Trudy cannot drive. She can go through the motions — push the pedals, spin the wheel, honk the horn — and pretend she’s not a liability to everyone else on the road stuck ten miles under the speed limit, jumping curbs and grinding the clutch with those trembling white-knuckled hands like even they know she’s getting away with something. 

She nudges the wheel now with a whole-body sway, as if she’s more looking to bail out the side door than steer us through the intersection. Her white ‘84 Ford Tempo matches this shallow dive, a sweeping left into a green-now-yellow traffic light. The car lurches forward mid-turn, mid-intersection, sinking to a dead silence. We’re now blocking the second-busiest road in northern New Jersey.

A black Range Rover barrels toward us from the other side. I’m only what I see: a wake of dust and asphalt; sun rippling over a metallic hood as it lifts toward the sky; and then a bounce, as the SUV falls back to its tires. 

The suit and sunglasses-clad driver lifts his hand off the wheel, serving up a palm like this is the dumbest way he could have been inconvenienced this afternoon. He taps the horn and mouths “move” — he’s that close. This short beep gives permission to every car in the seemingly mile-long row behind him. The chorus builds until Range Rover leans out his driver-side window for the crescendo, screaming at 12-out-of-10 volume: “What are you doing lady!”

But that’s the thing. She’s not doing anything. Grandma’s staring straight ahead with this wide-eyed look of déjà vu. She does this once a ride. It’s part of the routine. I’m not sure what she’s doing exactly, or where she goes in that dusty grey bob of hers, but I call it Back to Nowhere, because this happens enough that she must know the place by now. Usually, she freezes up on a side street and all I have to do is steady the wheel. Once it happened while turning into the driveway and she blasted through a lawn ornament. Today’s the first time in traffic. Lucky me. 

There’s no pause in the beeping now. Range Rover’s laying on the horn holding up his middle finger through the window. Grandma comes to and twists the keys in the ignition but her shaking hand only gets halfway around: She can’t complete the motion. She tries again, and this time — thank God — the engine roars back at her. 

Storefronts flash by as we flee the intersection: Blockbuster, QuickChek, the strip-mall bowling alley that’ll sometimes serve you a beer without checking ID, Marshalls where I got my first pair of baggy jeans for a couple bucks. It’s the left at Old Hook Farm — one of the few that hasn’t been parceled out into condos yet — that she finally says something: “Let’s keep that between us, Chris.” 

This is the first time Grandma has treated me as anything but her thirteen-year-old grandson. In the three months since she started picking me up from school on Wednesdays, our interactions have been a one-way street: “Do your homework”; “That’s enough video games”; “Save room for dinner”; and, my favorite, “Does that look right to you?”, when she’s peering over me at the dining-room table.

Grandpa usually picks me up — is supposed to pick me up — but after his second heart attack, he’s off doing supervised jumping jacks at Pascack Valley Hospital on Wednesday afternoons. I should be taking the bus home, like I do every other day of the week, but since Mom left Dad everything is suddenly about family — now that we aren’t one anymore. 

That leaves me with captain hard ass, chief of the no-fun police herself, who will leave this Earth without ever uttering the word “Wawa” — not due to some long-standing beef with the South Jersey convenience-store chain — but because “it’s too silly”, she says, as if anything unserious might as well not exist.

So, “Sure Grandma,” I lie, because tonight I will tell everyone what happened. At the dinner table I’ll take her hand, lower my head, and with a strength and tenderness right out of Russell Crowe from Gladiator I’ll tell her we can’t do this anymore. It’s not fair to her, or me, or Grandpa or Mom, that it’s time to hand over the car keys and that awful, stubborn stare will surrender to a nod of silent acceptance. Grandpa will pat me on the back for doing what he never could. Mom will look on with pride that her son, now a man, was the one who finally got through to Grandma and next year in high school I will take the bus home to an empty house every single day — not one soul will see my grandparents in the parking lot. 

She veers into the driveway with a “Here we are,” like she didn’t almost murder us five minutes ago. Grandma gets out, walks over to the breezeway door next to the garage and waves me in. I’m staring at her from the passenger seat with crutches between my legs, waiting for any sign that she might open the door for me this time, help me, do anything. She waves again more quickly, as if to say, “C’mon get your disabled ass in here.” 

You would think breaking my leg, even if it happened while recreating a skit from Jackass on my BMX bike, would earn me the smallest bit of sympathy from Grandma. Nope. It’s like this handicap is something to be ignored and overcome rather than tended to in any way. I hobble out myself to a, “Don’t forget about your homework,” as the screen door slams behind her. 

—

I’m not sure what era their dining room is supposed to be from, but it’s not this one. Wood-lacquered cabinets line its swamp-green walls and are filled with hundreds of antique glass candlesticks: clear, colored, lilac crystal Windsor-cut prism, a Sahara-yellow 3-arm candle holder, the #300 Old Williamsburg. “Heiseys,” they call them. I elbowed a long pink one off the Thanksgiving table two years ago and it cracked in half. Only time Grandpa ever got mad at me, at least that I can remember, muttering “klutz” under his breath with half a candlestick in each hand. I cried on the ride home that day and Dad tried to cheer me up saying those things aren’t worth anything anyway. They were going to drive around in the RV out back and sell them all after Grandpa retired, 25 years as buildings supervisor at the high school. They made a big deal about it, threw him a party down at the Knights of Columbus with a spiral ham and strawberry shortcake. Grandma fell and broke her arm while dancing. We thought she just tripped. Now everything’s going on eBay. The shelves empty out a little more each week. 

Grandma lays a paper plate filled with Oreos on the table and flips through the mail. Between an envelope and a glossy magazine, she nods at the bookbag parked on the table. I can tell this is fun for her, making me sit here and do my homework on the last week of school. 

The mechanized drone of the garage door rumbles beneath my feet. You can track Grandpa’s heavy steps anywhere in the house, but it’s not menacing. It’s a bounce and a thud, this jolly giant parading around his castle. 

“Hello, hello!” he shouts as the breezeway door creaks open behind us.

He’s a massive German, top to bottom: size fourteen wide black bus-driver shoes; great round belly in spite of a 6′6” frame — a testament to his appetite, not his thirst as I’ve only ever seen the man have a whiskey sour on Christmas; and at the top is a 75-year-old miracle, a full head of Brylcreem slicked back black hair with one gray strand curled along a creased forehead. His two favorite jokes: saying the wrong thing on purpose: “more gooder, more better.” Or when we get Chinese food, he’ll smash a fortune cookie on his forehead, dump the crumbs in his mouth and spit out the fortune. His favorite magic trick: he would take me up on his lap as a kid, make a fist to his forehead and flex his bicep over and over. That giant wing of flesh flopped up and down like it had a mind of its own. I’d try and copy him, but my string-bean arm didn’t jump at all. I swore it was magic. How did it move? He could do anything, built half the house with his bare hands: the garage, the backroom, the screened-in porch for the cats. When he’s bored, he takes apart his minivan and puts it back together.

“We’re in here, dear,” Grandma calls out to him.

“How was the ride home?” he says, clawing an Oreo off the plate and ruffling my hair. 

“Fine, little traffic,” Grandma says before I can get a word in.

“Stir fry tonight,” he says in a long swoon, as if I’m not about to have the worst dinner this side of the Tri-state, jiggling a tangled plastic bag in a raised fist over the table. Grandma half smiles up at him: “Great.”

An hour passes with nothing but a couple of Oreos and scribbling in my notebook. I write Vanessa in the margins over and over as if I could summon her by perfecting the slant in my V’s, creating a summer for us together before Friday comes and we go to different high schools and I never see her again. She wrote Good luck next year! on my cast two weeks ago in big cursive swoops with her purple gel pen, the exact same thing she wrote in the back of my yearbook. It’s already fading into the plaster. 

The sun is inching toward the horizon. A tangerine light pierces through the far window hitting me square in the face, extending over the table and running along the top of Grandma’s antiquing magazine, casting the room in a sickly orange hue. She gets up to draw the blinds. The steady smack of knife-to-cutting board echoes from the kitchen, sounds like someone’s trying to beat down the door. Grandpa’s go-to post-heart-attack meal is lean ground beef and sliced-up bell peppers, one of the fat-free, salt-free and taste-free recipes from his new Atkins diet book. Mom gave it to him after she ran through them all, lost 20 pounds and then gained all the weight back during the holidays. I can’t get away from that damn thing. 

Grandma’s still by the window. She’s eyeing up the cord as if she’s trying to draw the blinds down with her mind, ready to perform the lamest Jedi mind trick in the galaxy. The look extends down to her right hand, but nothing’s moving and she’s Back to Nowhere again, twice in one day, a new record. I hope it’s somewhere cool, maybe on the road in South Carolina where her hands don’t shake or freeze up, heading to a candlestick show or whatever the hell they’re called. Or maybe she really is nowhere – stuck in time waiting for another tick of the minute hand to come out the other side. I know that feeling. I know that place.

Last month the trails in Rivervale were slick and yellow from the rain and pollen. I was pedaling hard out of the berm ready for my first backflip in borrowed shoulder pads and no helmet while my so-called friends were screaming Steve-o, Steve-o, Steve-o because my middle name is Stephen and I was about to do something stupid. The bike slipped under me before the jump and everything went sideways to upside down, blue sky snaking through a canopy of oaks and sycamores into a drop and a snap and then the world got small, like all it could hold was this dull-and-sharp ache below my knee. Everyone was laughing and cursing until they came over and got quiet, and that’s when I saw my twisted-up leg in a half split under my new Haro X3. They all scampered up the hill to the road. Nobody looked back. 

“Do you need help Grandma?”

Any reason to get up from the table, get away from this math book. I pop up on the crutches and swing over to the window. Her hand’s at her side, fingers trembling, like she’s tapping away at some old tune only she can hear. No more chopping, only the hiss of bell peppers softening in a frying pan over an electric stove. Grandma turns to me with her mouth half open. 

“Trudy?” Grandpa calls from the kitchen.

“I’m fine, dear,” she hollers back.

I pull on the cord, draw the blinds and walk her back to the dining room. She thanks me softly; in such a low voice I can hardly hear it.

She steers us over to the table and the product of nearly an hour of “work”: an entirely blank notebook page except for oh my god Vanessa written sixteen times in the margins. I try to shield them with my hand as my whole face burns up and all I want to do is jump out the window into the backyard and limp the whole way home.

“Is that who you’re always hiding from?” Grandma says, but is nice enough to not expect an answer. “You’re all finished then, why don’t you go do your games?” she says so loud that Grandpa can hear it. She never lets me finish early, never tells me to “go do your games.” I pack everything in my bag and head over to the computer nook.

A maroon suit jacket and short brown hair appear in the kitchen hallway by my second game of Starcraft. Mom’s always late. It’s never on purpose, but she can never seem to peel herself away from that corporate park on time. So when she does get here, it’s like she has to make up for it. All smiles. Happy until she isn’t. She kisses Grandpa on the cheek as he’s reaching up for a serving bowl. Grandma’s sitting at the table in the back room now — a straight shot down the house from me — where we eat, flipping through that same magazine.

Mom waves me in from the kitchen: “Come — dinner’s ready. I’ll make you a plate.” 

I chug a can of soda at the table, poking at the mix of grey, green and orange on my plate. The stir fry looks like something you’d dump in a rabbit’s cage mixed with charred peppers.

Grandma’s plate is full, too. She must not be a fan of the Atkins lean-and-green special either. 

“Let me help you,” Grandpa says, turning toward her.

She bats him away: “I’m fine. I’m not that hungry.”

“You’re having an off day. Let me help you,” he says again, but this time in a hushed tone, as if we can’t hear him from the other side of a three-foot-wide table.

“How was your day?” Mom says between bites. 

This is my moment. My name is Chris Stephen Donahue, grandson to an unfit driver, son to a single mom, and I will have my revenge before high school begins: Grandma, lay down your keys.  

Across from me she’s fiddling around with a burnt green pepper on her plate, pushing it to the corners. I watch and wait for her to get a hold of it, bracing to tell the story of how we almost died on the ride home. I want her to see me, hear every word, know what it means to break your leg and never see your friends and maybe not have any friends and almost get in an accident once a week because Grandma’s too proud to change a single thing in her life, but nothing’s easy here. Her wiggling fork can’t find a way in. It’s pointless; no shit she can’t drive, she can barely eat. I shouldn’t have to say anything. Everyone knows she’s sick, and she knows she’s sick, but we still have to pretend every Wednesday like she isn’t because we’re all terrified of her. 

She finally gets a prong into the burnt vegetable. Grandma treats this heroic victory like everything else in life, with a blank stare, and maybe that’s it: Grandma’s as sick of us as we are of her. That’s why she’s off in Nowhere every chance she gets. No one will give her a second to eat her dinner, or drive the car — not me, Mom, Grandpa, Range Rover. Everyone wants everything how they want it, on their time, like “hey throw on these stupid shoulderpads and do backflips for us, Chris” and then peace out when you fall and break your leg. 

My mouth moves like the words have been wound up in my throat all afternoon, waiting to shoot out the first chance they get. The worst part of the story spills out onto the table, no strength, no tenderness, less Russell Crowe, more Joaquin Phoenix: “Broke down in the middle of Kinderkamack road,” I say, like I was talking about homework, or the weather, or their neighbor’s weird gnome lawn ornament.

Mom and Grandpa lock onto me, empty forks hovering above their plates. Grandma’s sitting up straight with this heavy, spiteful look that cuts right through me, as if even this half-truth is less than she deserves. 

“Chris, what happened today?” Mom says, leaning into the table towards me, like she didn’t hear me, but I know she did because she’s already pissed off. 

“Nothing happened. Grandma’s car stopped…working in the middle of Kinderkamack and this guy almost hit us.”

“Almost hit you?” Mom says, looking over at Grandpa, as if she’s accusing him of something. 

“I had the Tempo inspected last week,” Grandpa says. “Kinderkamack’s a busy road, Trudy, let alone with a stick-“

“I’m fine,” Grandma says in a gravelly tone. She forks up a wad of bell pepper, holding it up above her plate for a moment like it’s the easiest thing in the world, this charred-green-pepper-on-a-fork fuck you; watch me. It’s shaking all the way to her mouth, this liver-spotted arm fluttering out of a white short-sleeve polo. She furrows her brow, reminds me of the way she looked peeling out of the intersection this afternoon, as if she’d rather drop dead on the table than admit she can’t do something, and the fork pops into her mouth.

Grandpa throws up his hands and turns to Mom. She lets out this long, very specific exhale, the kind that means she’s hit her breaking point and the other side is sheer exhaustion or a foul-mouthed explosion.

Everything’s quiet after that, save the clinking of silverware, the sip of a drink. Grandpa’s a clean-plate clubber for the millionth night going. Grandma chews through her big bite, half Nowhere, half Somewhere. Mom shovels down what she’s got left, like she can’t get out of here fast enough. Tonight, no one will pretend anything will change. There will be no fighting at the table, or pleading, or half-hearted attempts to solve a problem that not everyone believes is even a problem. Grandma will keep driving. I’ll wake up tomorrow with the same scribbled-on cast over my shin. Stir fry will be served even if no one likes it. The Atkins supper club will meet again next Wednesday and appreciates your mandatory attendance.

I try to force some more down, give up and let Mom take my plate. My bookbag is all packed next to the door, ready to go. It’s almost dark out. I would usually go back to playing games while Mom hangs back here for a bit, but I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to. 

Grandma walks over to the kitchen sink next to Mom like they’ve been waiting for this moment. Mom pulls both faucets and waits a minute before flicking her hand at the stream. The water comes out hot here, so you learn to let it cool off. Grandma hangs her head over the sink gripping the countertop with both hands. Mom pulls the nozzle off the faucet and the water sprays left, right and all that dusty gray hair goes from dry to damp to drenched, matting against her scalp. A squirt, then lather worked into soft circles of foam and gray wisps and through it all, something happens: Grandma’s shoulders sink; her hips level out; the weight tilts from the balls of her feet back onto her heels. A glimpse of a smile underneath all that soapy hair, one she can’t keep from us any longer. She says something mom-to-daughter, so low it can only be for one person. The nozzle falls to the sink. Mom envelops her. Grandma lifts her hands from the countertop, slow and shaking, and grabs hold of the arms tied tight across her chest, pulling them into her, like she doesn’t want to be anywhere else.  

Mom rests her head against the wet, gray tangles and turns to me, mouthing slowly: “I’m sorry.” 

I shake my head because I want her to know it’s not her fault. It’s no one’s fault, but I can’t get the words out, and isn’t that how everything’s going around here. My eyes start to burn and I turn away.

Grandpa’s looking out the window at the backyard, in that way people in old movies sit on their porch and stare out at the road like they’re waiting for the sun to go down. I tilt my head to see what he’s looking at — maybe a squirrel tearing apart the lawn or a cardinal on the bird feeder — but the only thing out there is the RV.

Tan beige fitted into the dusky green grass. A faded-red line cuts through the middle, front to back. It’s blocked up at the corners — takes the weight off the tires — but they’re shot anyway. The paint’s peeling off the door, a marigold rust curls around the handle. Crinkled foil covers the windshield, and the two captain’s chairs behind it. Sunlight’s slipping off the hood now, nearly run out the yard, and then all at once, like someone flipped a switch out there, everything fades into the early summer twilight.

about the author:

Salt and Sand | Ali McLafferty

When Mrs. Minklewine came to Aunt Betty’s house, I hid outside the parlor door in Pa’s gas mask to listen to what they said about us.

“So good of you, my dear, to take in those two little orphans.” I knew that was Mrs. Minklewine, on account of her sounding like she’s talking through a noseful of bees. She’s got one of those beehive hairstyles, too, thick and fat and likely hiding something vicious. 

“Oh, Adelaide, it’s what any good Christian would do.” That was Aunt Betty’s voice. It sounded like dried-out corn stalks rustling in the wind.

“I heard,” Mrs. Minklewine said, her voice going low, “they’re both not quite right in the head.”

Aunt Betty sighed. “The boy’s all right. Samuel. Quite smart, actually. I caught him in my library last week, stealing books to read in his room. I’ve never pretended to be of a literary turn—my dear departed husband always said reading ruins a woman’s complexion—but I believe Dickens and Andersen are quite advanced for a nine-year-old.”

“But he stares. I’ve never seen a child stare like that before.”

“My dear, it is positively uncanny. I believe it is due to my sister keeping them locked up in that lighthouse their whole lives. Schooled them herself—well, not the girl of course—while Patrick tended the light. When he went off to war she was both lightkeeper and teacher.”

“But surely there were other children around. A small town nearby.”

“The lighthouse was on its own little island. The nearest town was thirty miles away, so they had to have food and such things delivered. The children spent their whole young lives stranded on that barren rock.”

I peeked through the crack in the door and saw Mrs. Minklewine give Aunt Betty an aren’t-you-just-the-sweetest-for-taking-in-the-orphan-freaks pat on the shoulder. 

“And the girl? What will you do with her?” Mrs. Minklewine asked.

There was another sigh. “Lord knows, Adelaide. Seeing her at my dinner table every day… well, my dear, it’s unnerving. She gives me gooseflesh.”

Mrs. Minklewine made a you-poor-thing hum in her bee-crammed nose.

“More tea?”

“Please. And another of those darling little strawberry cakes too.”

There was the sound of Aunt Betty’s long skirts rustling, and I looked up to see her scrawny body and sourpuss face coming through the parlor door. Through the gas mask she was all green-gray and blurry at the edges. She saw me at the same time and screamed so loud I was sure the neighbors could hear. Her teacup went flying in the air like a toy plane and smashed into a billion pieces on the tile floor.

“Merciful heavens, Samuel!” She put a bony-fingered hand against her chest. “What on earth are you wearing?”

I stayed where I was. My legs had fallen asleep, so I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. 

“It’s my Pa’s gas mask,” I said, and I heard my voice all hollow and muffled like a ghost.

“I know that,” Aunt Betty snapped. “Why on earth are you wearing it?”

“Pa gave it to me,” I said. “He told me to put it on whenever I smelt bullshit.”

Aunt Betty sorta blinked at me with her owl eyes, so I gave two really big snuffs.

After that she locked me in my room for about five hours and I didn’t get any dinner, except that Cordelia pushed a piece of bread under the door, and also a broke-off piece of candle because Cordelia doesn’t know that you can’t eat candles.

***

We did live in a lighthouse, but it wasn’t on a barren rock. It was on an island called Temissea, and it was the most beautiful place in the whole world. I’ve never been anywhere else in the world besides here, which is a town called Ironvale, and I hate it with all my heart because it’s gray and cold and everyone ripped out all the trees to put up houses that all look the same. It’s a hundred thirty-seven miles from the sea—I looked it up on a map—so it’s all dried out and dead. The only way I can hear the waves now is by sleeping with my ear pressed against a shell I took from home.

I know Temissea was the world’s most beautiful place ‘cause Mama told me so. She said “Let’s stay here forever, just us four and the gulls and the fish. I’ve seen the rest of the world and it’s nothin’ special, it’s turned sour from all the people filling it up. This is the last beautiful place on earth, and it’s ours forever.”

And then when the telegram came that Pa had died, and after she’d climbed to the top of the lighthouse and hung onto the iron railing and looked out to sea for a long time, the wind whipping her hair across her face, she said “Let’s stay here forever, just us three and the gulls and the fish, and nothing else can ever touch us.”

At night when me and Cordelia are supposed to be asleep in the separate rooms Aunt Betty put us in, Cordelia will sneak in and climb into my bed. She can’t walk and usually has a wheelchair, but she knows how to pull herself across the floor. So I wait until I hear her sliding down the hall and then I open the door and pull her up into my bed. I like to hold her in my arms and put my shell to her ear. And then I talk to her.

Cordelia can’t talk. She never could. Or not with real words, anyway. She has her own language no one understands, not even me. It’s a bubbly kind of language, gurgles and hums. She used to jabber all the time in Temissea, but since we got to Ironvale she just clams up ‘cause everyone looks at her weird. 

So I do the talking for us. I like to pretend I’m telling a fairytale, even though Mama said there was no such thing. “They’re all real,” she’d told me. “All of them. It’s just that people in the outside world, with their cars and their televisions and their radios, have forgotten that. Magic is real, Sammy. Wouldn’t it be a sad thing if the world was only full of humans? What a poor world that would be.”

“Once upon a time,” I always start my stories, “there was a magical girl called Cordelia.” 

This is what Mama always called my sister. Our “magical girl.” She always talked about Cordelia coming to us, like she wasn’t so much born as just arrived on our doorstep one day.

That night, after I got punished for saying ‘bullshit’, and after Aunt Betty finally unlocked my door so I could go pee, Cordelia crawled into my room and onto my bed. I ate the bread she’d given me—and licked the candle too, for good manners—and wrapped her in my arms.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a magical girl named Cordelia. She wasn’t like nobody else in the whole world, ‘cause she was magical and they weren’t. She lived in a tower with a magical fire the fairies gave her. As long as the fire stayed lit, she was safe.”

Cordelia gurgled and went tuh tuh tuh.

“But one day, the fire went out. And into the tower came four horrible goblins with grabbing hands.”

Cordelia whimpered, and I smoothed her hair.

“They took Cordelia to the Goblin Queen, who locked her in a castle. The Queen hated her, ‘cause she feared her magic.”

Cordelia went very still.

“But,” I said, rocking her a little, “There was also a prince. He’d always loved the magical girl, so he followed her all the way to the Goblin Castle. Then he took a mighty sword and smote the Goblin Queen. He carried Cordelia in his arms back to the magical tower. The fire was ashes now, but he told her to blow, blow, blow.”

Cordelia began to blow like she was trying to put out birthday candles.

“And the light returned.” I stared up at the ceiling and tried to swallow the sore thing in my throat. “And they were safe forever.”

Cordelia took her little hand and brushed it over my face. She likes to do this a lot. Her fingers brush over my eyebrows and slide down my eyelids, go round my nose and lips and tickle my cheeks. Mama once told me Cordelia can’t see all that well, so she probably does this to know what we look like.

Cordelia murmured in her bubbly little voice. Then she took my shell off her ear and put it on mine.

In the morning I woke up alone.

***

“I’m sending you to school today, Samuel,” Aunt Betty told me at the breakfast table. It was about two weeks after I’d listened in on her and Mrs. Minklewine. She’d taken my gas mask away, but I found it again under her bed ‘cause that’s where she always hides stuff. Aunt Betty is not very smart.

I froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

“School?”

“Yes.” Aunt Betty buttered her toast. She always puts the teensiest bit on her bread, so it goes scrape scrape scrape as she spreads it and it scratches at my ears. “It’s high time. I can’t believe my sister kept you out so long.”

Whenever Aunt Betty says “my sister” her voice sort of warbles. Sometimes when she thinks I’m not watching her face cracks like an egg. I can’t decide if Aunt Betty hated my Mama or loved her, but I think maybe it was both. 

“We don’t need school,” I told her. “We learned just fine with Mama.”

“Watch that tone, young man. Every child needs school. You need to be among other children, not just… ” She looked over at Cordelia, who was strapped to her chair so she didn’t fall over. Cordelia has a tough time swallowing, so she mostly eats pureed baby food. Right then she was painting her nose with it.

“Where’s Cordelia gonna be?”

Aunt Betty pretended she didn’t hear me.

“I said where’s Cordelia gonna be?” 

Aunt Betty flinched. “There is no need to speak as though I am deaf. The answer is none of your business.”

I felt like something cold had wrapped itself ‘round my neck.

“I think it is,” I said, “on account of her being my sister.”

“Trust your elders to know what’s best for her,” Aunt Betty said. She took a delicate bite of toast. 

“Is she gonna be here all day?”

A sip of tea.

“You’re gonna stay with her, right? You’re not gonna leave her alone?”

Scrape scrape scrape. 

“I said are you gonna leave her alone?”

Aunt Betty’s plate clattered loudly as she dropped her toast. “Young man!” she barked. “Don’t you dare raise your voice at me! Such manners. I am Cordelia’s caregiver, not you. I will decide what is done with her.”

What is done with her.

I gripped my spoon so hard it left red marks on my hand.

Cordelia was looking at me with her round eyes, baby food still on her nose. I smiled so she wouldn’t feel scared. 

“I made you a paper bag lunch,” Aunt Betty continued, her voice all soft again like nothing happened. “A sandwich and one of those cookies you like. I baked them last night.” For the teensiest second she looked up at me kind of strange, kind of hopeful. Then she grabbed her knife and dug it back into the butter. “The bag is on the kitchen counter. The school bus arrives in three minutes. Put your bowl in the sink now and make sure you arrive promptly.”

What I really wanted to do was throw the bowl at her nasty old face and unstrap Cordelia and run out fast as I could. But Cordelia is seven now and pretty heavy, and I didn’t know how far I could’ve gotten before she caught us.

The school bus ride was only the second bus ride I’d ever had in my whole life. The first one was when four men I didn’t know came to the lighthouse after Mama died and put me and Cordelia and a small bag of our stuff on a bus to Ironvale. I threw up four times on that ride. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that on the school bus with all those kids around, so I spent the whole time with my lips tucked behind my teeth. The other kids left me on a bench all by myself and just stared at me and whispered and giggled to each other. I recognized a few of them from when they’d ride their bikes past Aunt Betty’s house and gawp at Cordelia sitting on the grass. 

I decided right then and there I hated them. 

***

At lunch we ate on the playground, and I found the farthest corner from everyone else. I took Aunt Betty’s stupid cookie out and threw it to some ants, who got real excited.

“Hey.”

I looked up. There was a boy standing over me. He had yellow hair and fat freckles all over his nose. He was big.

“You’re the freak’s brother.”

I felt like someone had poured hot water all over me. I could feel my neck turning red.

“Guys!” the kid called out to others on the playground. “It’s him!” I looked for a teacher, but they were all smoking cigarettes in the shade and not paying any attention.

A whole gaggle of kids ran over and made a circle around me.

“How come your sister looks so weird?” a girl with a blue bow said, chewing the end of her braid. 

Another boy laughed, and I saw a big ball of pink bubble gum rolling on his tongue. “There’s somethin’ wrong with her face,” he said.

I felt my hands go all sweaty and rubbed them on my shorts. My sister is beautiful, I wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come out. And my ears and neck were so hot I felt like I had a fever.

“How come she don’t talk or walk?” the freckled boy asked.

The girl with the blue bow took her braid out of her mouth. “My Ma told me it’s on account of her drowning.”

I looked up at her quick, ‘cause I didn’t know how she could know about that. Then I saw her nose was kind of thin with flarey nostrils and I thought, I bet your last name is Minklewine.

“She drowned?” the boy with gum snapped it, all excited. 

“Yeah,” the girl said. “In the ocean. Her mom dropped her in.”

“That’s not what happened!” I burst out. All the kids looked at me, and I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw started hurting. “She crawled in.”

“She what?” another girl with two pigtails started laughing.

I didn’t want to tell them. I didn’t remember it all that well. It was sort of like remembering something you saw happen when you were underwater, and there was no sound and blurry images. Cordelia on the sand while Mama pulled in a big net of fish. Cordelia crawling into the water, splashing in it. I was too young to know this was bad, so I just watched her. Cordelia loved the water. She clapped every time Mama dipped her little feet in. 

Then a big wave had come, and she’d gone right under. I waited for her to come up, but the water went smooth again and I didn’t see her. 

I don’t remember Mama screaming but she probably did. I do remember her jumping into the ocean and searching all around. She dove in again and again, like a dolphin. And then finally I saw her push Cordelia above her head, and then she was dragging herself back onto the sand with Cordelia in her arms. 

Cordelia was blue and very still. Mama put her on her belly and pulled her arms up over her head, rocking her back and forth. And then finally a huge fountain of water just spewed out of Cordelia’s mouth, and the blue color started going away.

Since then, she’s always tasted of salt. I feel it every time I kiss her. And ever since then, she leaves trails of sand wherever she goes. Even here in Ironvale, hundreds of miles away from Temissea. 

“Maybe she’s dead,” the freckled boy said. “Maybe she’s a ghost that don’t know she’s dead. That’s why she’s so pale and doesn’t talk or walk.”

“She ain’t human,” the bubblegum boy said. “No way she is. No real person looks like that.” Then he tried to copy the way Cordelia talks, but he didn’t do it like she does, which sounds sweet and soft and pretty. He crossed his eyes and jutted out his chin and went “Uggghhmm, gooo.” 

Right then I thought of the story I’d told Cordelia about the Goblin Castle. I thought about the prince. And so I stood up and socked that boy right in the eye. He went down howling and I kicked him in the mouth. His gum went flying out.

I spent the rest of that day in the principal’s office. He took a thick wooden paddle to my buttocks and whacked me as hard as he could. It hurt like hell to sit the rest of the day, but I had to ‘cause Aunt Betty wasn’t home when they called.

So I spent that whole time worrying where Cordelia was, too.

***

A week later I was sitting with my gas mask outside the parlor door again.

Every time I wear that mask I think about Pa. I think about his wild red hair and how he used to let me sit on his shoulder. I think about how he held Mama in his arms and tilted her chin up to kiss her. I think about his face when he came home on shore leave a few months after Cordelia was born. He came in uniform, but before seeing her he folded it away and put on his old fisherman clothes, the ones that still smelled like him.

He’d looked surprised when he first saw Cordelia, and Mama looked a little scared. I was real small, but I still remember this. But I also remember Pa smiling and picking her up, and holding her little soft head close to his chest, and kissing her white cheek. 

He gave me his gas mask when he left that time. He said “Take this, son. It’s good to wear when you smell the bullshit.” He laughed, then got real serious. “Take care of that lil’ girl.”

Then he’d gone, and that was the last I saw of him.

In the parlor Aunt Betty was making a real good show of sighing and tsking like she actually cared a whit about us.

“What did they say, Betty?”

“That she’d be a good candidate. They can take her as soon as next week. And I can’t care for her, Adelaide. The older one, he’ll grow up and leave, eventually. But she’d be tied to me forever. I know she’s my niece, but… ”

“She’s not your child,” Mrs. Minklewine said. “You have no obligation, Betty. You’ve already done more than enough for her.”

“The treatment would help. It wouldn’t cure her, but it would help.”

“Does it… hurt? It sounds quite frightening.”

“They assure me it doesn’t. I saw them treating a young woman. I admit it was… unsettling. They strapped her to a chair and put a block in her mouth for her to bite down on. Then they applied electrodes to her scalp, and…”

There was a pause, and I knew Mrs. Minklewine was leaning forward like a vulture. I realized I was digging my fingers into my palms so hard that one of my fingernails had cut my skin and it was bleeding a little.

“And they say this works?” Mrs. Minklewine said.

“It makes them calm. I worried that if I put her there alone, away from her brother, she’d resist. They also told me it would stop her seizures.”

“Does she get those frequently?” 

“Ugh, my dear. Anytime she is near water. Bathing her is a nightmare. I don’t know how she lived by the ocean for so long.”

“She hates the water?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. She’s drawn toward it. It’s when we take her out of the water that she has them. In the bath she’s fine. But as soon as I lift her out, the seizure begins.”

“Interesting. One would think that after her first drowning as a baby, she’d be afraid of water.”

“Well, you know,” Aunt Betty said, “She was born in water.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“She was a mermaid birth. En caul, you know. Still in the amniotic sac.”

“Good gracious.”

“Indeed,” Aunt Betty said. “More tea?”

“Please.”

I felt so light-headed I wasn’t sure I could stand. But I stumbled to my feet anyway, ripped the gas mask off my head, and ran quiet as I could down the hallway before Aunt Betty could see me.

Then I hit the wall and slid down with my gas mask in my hands. I stayed there, just staring at the lines between the tiles, for a long time. I felt like all the bones had melted out of me. So many things were screaming in my head I couldn’t hardly catch my breath.

I didn’t know what “en caul” meant. I didn’t know what an “amniotic sac” was, either. But I knew what Aunt Betty meant. She said Cordelia was “born in water.” She said, “mermaid birth.” 

So that’s when I knew what she was. What she’d always been.

***

When Cordelia crawled into my bed that night, I wasn’t in my pajamas. I was wearing all my clothes, even my shoes. I had clothes for her, too, in a bag near my pillow. But when she first crawled in I just held her in my arms and put my shell to her ear.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “There was a magical girl named Cordelia. She wasn’t like anybody else in the whole world, ‘cause she was magical and they weren’t.”

Then I took a deep breath. “And she was a mermaid.”

Cordelia gurgled. I kissed her cheek and tasted salt.

“Cordelia loved the sea, but one night she saw a light shining down through the water. She thought it was a fallen star. When she swam up to touch it, she saw three humans on the island. They looked so happy. Cordelia knew that if she turned into a human she’d never be able to walk or talk. But she didn’t care. ‘Cause she’d fallen in love with the humans, especially the little boy. She wanted to be his sister and make him feel safe. 

“So one night, she pulled herself out of the water and gave up her fish tail for legs. In the morning the family found her lying on their doorstep. They loved her from that second on.

“On the magical island Cordelia always felt safe and loved. Even when her human father died, she wasn’t too sad ‘cause she knew he had fallen into the sea, and that he’d wait for her there. And even when her human mother died she still wasn’t too sad, ‘cause she’d asked for her ashes to be scattered in the water. So Cordelia knew she’d one day find her Mama there, too.

“But when they were both gone Cordelia started to feel the ocean pull her more and more. And when evil humans came to the magical island to take her and her brother away, she cried, and left trails of salt and sand the whole way there. She and her brother were brought to a witch’s house. Cordelia hated it. She wanted to return to the sea—but she couldn’t leave her brother. She loved him too much.”

I had to stop, ‘cause there were tears just gushing out my eyes and that sore lump in my throat was getting too big to talk around. Cordelia must have felt them splashing onto her face because she reached up and wiped them. I sniffed a few times, and held her tight.

“But the witch was dangerous, and she hated mermaids. She planned to cast a spell on Cordelia that would make her forget the sea forever.”

Cordelia went still. I sat up slowly and pulled one of her little dresses from the bag beside my pillow. She looked up at me with her big, glassy eyes.

“So one night her brother snuck her out of the witch’s house.”

Cordelia lifted her arms. I pulled her nightgown over her head and put the dress on her. Then I found her small feet and put on her socks and shoes, the ones she’d never walk in. 

Cordelia put her hands on my face, on my nose and mouth. “Thhh,” she said. “Blll.”

“I’ll be OK,” I whispered. “You’ve protected me long enough. I can take care of myself now. All that matters is that you’re safe.”

Then I lifted her into my arms—she was lighter than I ever remembered—and carried her downstairs.

I carried her all the way to the Greyhound bus station. And then I bought us two tickets with money I’d snuck out of Aunt Betty’s purse. 

The bus ride took six hours. The whole while I held Cordelia in my arms and thought about what it must’ve been like for her all this time, living in the human world.

When the bus finally arrived at the seaside station, I lifted Cordelia in my arms and carried her out. By then I was hungry, and she felt heavier. But I carried her all through the streets of that town, which I’d only seen once before. Almost everyone was still asleep, except for a few people opening up grocery stands. 

I carried her all the way to the beach. The sky was turning orangeypurple as the sun crawled up from the horizon. But I could still see the light of Temissea, blinking like a star.

I put her on the sand, and then I sat with her. She took fistfuls of it and sprinkled it all over her lap, laughing and laughing. She put some in my hair, and I smiled, even though I felt like I couldn’t hardly breathe. 

Then she started sliding on her belly toward the water. 

There was no one else on the beach. Just me, dead tired, sitting in the sand with my arms wrapped ‘round my legs. And Cordelia, sliding like a sea turtle down the bank.

When she hit the water she made a happy little gurgling noise. I watched as it lapped around her pale face and soaked her dress. 

Then a big wave came.

Bonus audio of Ali reading from her piece…

about the author:

Until It Ends | Shayna Brown

He asked me for a ride, and I agreed. When I arrived at his house, he was on his hands and knees outside filling a crack just below one of his windows. His house is a tapestry of decay, its wood siding tired and splintered. I was glad to see him tackling at least one of the issues.    

“Winter’s almost here,” he said. “Fixing up the house so critters can’t get in.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and then insisted we take his car. He also insisted on driving. I felt warm at the realization that he really just wanted my company. Before we’d even left his driveway, he turned to me.

“Will you be at my funeral?” he asked.

“Yes, Dad. Shut up. Drive,” I said. We rode in silence for a few minutes.

“It will be a nice funeral.” He laughed, not realizing I was taking him seriously, that the idea was too much for me to hold. My heart made a fist and I refused to engage.

“I had my palm read once,” he said. “Apparently, my lifeline goes until it ends!” I stared out the window, trying not to contaminate the conversation with my worries.

“You’re too afraid, Sandy. Too afraid of death, but also of life. When are you going to start living your life?”

I stayed quiet because I didn’t know how to answer. How could I focus on my life when he needed me to make sure he didn’t stop living his? My throat was filled with blame that didn’t belong here. 

“You could travel the world,” he said, barreling on. My frequent desire to run away thrummed in my chest. My days were a circus, juggling a career, single-parenting a ten-year-old boy, getting divorced, and now this. World travel was so far from a possibility I almost snorted. My chest burned. He was unable to see me sitting right here beside him.

“And who would take care of you?” I asked, a question that felt like a bullet. He stopped at a red light, and I listened to the birds in their homes just outside, making noises that seemed so joyful. They didn’t know that winter was on its way. The light turned green.

“It’s all in your head, you know,” Dad said.

“What is?” I turned to look at him. His eyes were on the road and his big, bushy eyebrows sat like large caterpillars on his forehead. The rest of his features seemed to be drooping, like aging was just a process of melting. Behind him, old oak trees lined the street, the last leaves of fall clinging to the branches.

“Your suffering. Anguish. It’s not real. It’s in your head. Everything’s alright if you let it be.”

I thought of the divorce papers awaiting me at home. I thought of Dad a few months ago, perched on the edge of a couch in a fluorescent-lit exam room, eyes wild, un-seeing me right there in front of him. I thought of my son in school right now, his eyes big as full moons at the news of his parents’ divorce. As I told him, he’d rubbed his small hands together, and now I wondered about the length of his lifeline.  

“Maybe so,” I said, a gift from me to Dad, an agreement not to point out that some of the most real things in the universe can’t be seen at all. I swallowed and looked out the window.

***

We walked into the Houston Star Urology office together. I took a seat while Dad checked in. The place smelled musty and sour. The smell scared me. There was no light in that smell, no carefree days. It was the smell of illness and pain.

I looked around the room. Dark, worn carpet sat under chairs shoved uncomfortably close to one another, and cheesy beach paintings littered the walls. Five other patients were waiting. All men. They appeared to be about Dad’s age, though some were definitely older. The line-up was a wash of white hair and age spots. Everyone was well-dressed in slacks and button-up shirts and shiny, clean shoes. Every single one of them.

A grey-haired nurse called Dad’s name and we both stood up. He looked at me with a tight jaw, so I sat down quickly, awkwardly.

“It’s alright, you can come on back,” Dad said a little too slowly, and I worried he was melting right in front of me. The nurse nodded, which I took as assurance that this would be a verbal exchange only, fit for a daughter’s ears.

We went back to an exam room, where we were left to wait again. Dad was diminished in the bright office light, sitting slightly elevated on the exam table. His thinning grey hair sprouted in every direction, giving him a mad scientist look. His own button-up shirt was wrinkled and familiar to me. My chest tightened and I reached over to brush off a bit of dirt from his shoulder. We sat in awkward silence for a minute, under the harsh light of the exam room.

“Wanna see some pictures from Oliver’s baseball game last weekend?” I offered, and Dad looked away.

“Later,” he said, and I was hurt by his lack of interest in my son. His first grandson.

“Amy and Charlie are coming to town,” I said, to fill the silence.

Dad let out a huff, and I regretted mentioning my sister and his other grandson.  

“Keep Charlie out of my laundry room. I’ve got all my tools out and I don’t need a five-year-old messing with them.”

“I’ll tell Amy,” I said, looking down.

The doctor came in, saving us from our awkward attempts at small talk, to explain next week’s procedure and its logistics. He was a tall man, younger than felt comfortable, the tip of his colorful Nike Air Jordans peeking out from underneath light blue scrubs. He shook my hand and went over pre-op details with Dad. Have you noticed any changes in urinary habits, such as blood in the urine, frequent urination, or pain during urination? Do you have any known allergies to anesthesia, or a history of complications related to anesthesia? 

Dad and I had grown old together, in a way, but he got such a head start that now he was here, battling old age, and I wasn’t quite yet to the half-way point. My right thumb rubbed the inside of my left hand, feeling for the lifeline, finding nothing.

I turned my attention back to the doctor.

“And of course this is all written down here,” he said, handing me a colorful stack of paperwork. “Including our emergency line should you need anything outside normal office hours.” The doctor nodded at us. “I’ll see you bright and early next week!” he said with an enthusiasm that felt out of place.

Dad looked at me from beneath the relentless fluorescent spotlight, eyes pleading, as though I were responsible for this. I felt his fear. I saw him hiding it from everyone, but he couldn’t hide it from me. He’s never been able to hide anything from me, no matter how I’ve wished he could.

A physical exam was next, so I showed myself back to the waiting room. I sat staring at the stained carpet, trying not to let the smell get into me, as if that were the thing causing all the problems. I rested my hand on the worn, fabric arm of my chair and scanned the paintings of beach scenes on the wall.

Two men sitting across the room from me started talking to each other. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the room was so small and quiet I couldn’t not hear.

“It happened overnight,” one man said to the other. “I woke up one day and I was old!” He chuckled, hands clasped at his round belly. A button of his plaid shirt strained to escape its confines.

“How old, can I ask?”

“Eighty-eight!” the man answered without pause, with pride.

“Wow,” said the second man, “I’m only eighty-two.” I loved him for the “only.”

“Well, you look good,” said the first man, waving a finger in the air.

“So do you!” said the second man. “I mean, I would have pegged you at a decade younger than that.”

“It’s genetics. I’m a lucky man. Life’s real good.”

There was a slight hesitation in the conversation. A moment of silence.

“It truly is,” the second man said. “Life’s wonderful, dancing along, until it ends.”

“Until it ends,” the first man repeated, like the amen of a prayer.

The man looked at me with a tired smile, catching me in my eavesdropping.

“You’re the youngest I’ve seen in here!” he said. Both men stared at me now.

“I’m here with my dad,” I said loudly and too defensively. They nodded, and one of them shook his finger at me.

“That’s a good daughter right there. I’m sure he appreciates that. Very good daughter.” Rocks thumped in my gut, the words moving something deep that I tried to ignore.

“It’s not a big deal, really,” I said, waving a hand in the air and feeling heat in my cheeks. Dad re-entered the waiting room and looked toward the men before taking his seat beside me. The room went quiet. He seemed even smaller now than when we had entered the building. The incredible shrinking man.

“Ready?” I asked.

“They’re putting together some stuff for me. Just a sec.”

We sat silently, facing forward in our side-by-side padded chairs. No one else was talking now. All eyes were trained on the carpet. The smell was relentless.

“I’m sorry, Sandy.”

“It’s fine, Dad.”

“You shouldn’t have to be here.”

“I’m glad to be here. Thank goodness I’m not traveling the world, so I can be,” I said. Dad made a sound that was a cross between a grunt and a laugh.

“It shouldn’t be a daughter’s job. I just don’t have anyone else.” 

“Dad…” I started.

“I have money,” he said, hand to forehead, a frustrated rub. “I have plenty of money, I could hire help, but I don’t want a stranger here, or in my home. I just…” He trailed off and we both looked down.

The receptionist slid open the glass window partition that separated her from us and said Dad’s name. I hopped up and grabbed the bag of supplies in a nondescript brown paper bag that reminded me of the ones I used to send to school holding my son’s lunches. Dad stood up, and together we walked out.

***

Amy and Charlie came to town a few days after Dad’s surgery. With the cancer removed, he was well into his recovery at home. Amy and five-year-old Charlie brought energy and chaos. Dad and I sat in the living room and watched wide-eyed as Amy immediately busied herself in the kitchen and Charlie ran around singing a Blues Clues song. Who’s clues? Blue’s clues! You know what to do! The open floor plan of Dad’s house left too few walls to soften the noise. Amy walked over to us, small glasses in hand.

“Here, Dad. This is good for healing. Turmeric, ginger, vitamin C.” Amy said. She handed him a small glass of orange liquid and mimed drinking it. Dad gave me a look but gently sipped the concoction.

He’s never been comfortable with Amy, but I admire them for not giving up on each other. She is his miniature, his thick eyebrows dancing over her eyes. I’ve watched the two of them play-act at father-daughter behavior but there’s always been something invisible separating them, taking their words and twisting them and throwing out the good ones and leaving them both confused and aching.

Dad moved in his seat and Amy covered her mouth in a reactive gage when she saw his clear plastic urostomy bag with bloody urine swishing inside. His eyebrows pinched together, a sign of distress only I’m trained to recognize. He shifted in his chair and pulled a blanket onto his lap.

Charlie was running around the house singing loudly and banging a stick on the ground. Amy bustled like she’d had too much coffee, getting Charlie some water and forcing Dad to take a cup, too.

“Hydration is an important part of healing!” she said in a sing-song voice. Dad looked at me and I put my hands up. Not my fight. The day progressed like this, loud and awkward, but I was grateful Amy was here. Dad was smiling at the company. The last couple days had been just me and him, and I think we were both glad for the new energy. For once, I wasn’t the sole caretaker. Maybe now I could start living that life he wanted me to live, I thought, and then felt like I was choking on guilt. 

Dad was starting to doze in his La-Z-Boy recliner, pain meds kicking in. I gave his shoulder a squeeze so gentle it wouldn’t wake him and left for the night.

The next day I showed up early with eggs, bacon, and biscuit mix for breakfast. I found Amy in the kitchen making coffee, complaining about the kitchen window that was stuck ever-so-slightly open, letting a cold puff in. 

“Dad agreed to have a handyman come by today. I’ll add the window to the list of things for him to check,” I promised, making a mental note. My nephew ran in. “Charlie, do you want to help me make some biscuits?” He turned to me with a bright smile.

“Yah!” he yelled and grabbed my hand. Within minutes we were shaping biscuits and scrambling eggs. Dad hobbled in and took a seat at the table. He pressed his lips together and gave me a nod. Charlie and I got the biscuits in the oven and were about to go check out a new coloring book when we heard Amy scream from the bathroom.

Charlie and I ran to her. Dad walked, quickly but gently. Amy threw herself out of the bathroom and sputtered accusingly, “Snake! Dad, Snake!”

We stretched our necks to see in the bathroom and, sure enough, there was a long, dark brown snake wrapped around the rectangular mirror above the sink.

Charlie said, “I wanna see the snake!” and tried to run in.

“Charlie get BACK!” Amy grabbed him and he started to cry.

“Ah, it’s just a baby rat snake, not poisonous,” Dad said. But this put none of us at ease. The “just” before any kind of snake in the bathroom doesn’t change the alarming fact that we are in the middle of Houston, Texas and somehow there’s a snake inside the house.

Slowly, calmly, in his checkered PJs, Dad walked to his laundry room. We watched, frozen.

He returned holding an old machete, its faded wooden hilt fitted in his hand. He appeared taller holding this tool, and he was standing with an energy I hadn’t seen in ages.

“Well, little snake. Urine trouble,” he said and looked at me with half a smile, like we’d been through the whole ordeal just for this opportunity to share a pun. He wagged his eyebrows until I smiled back.

Charlie yelled from Dad’s side, “Yeah! You’re in trouble!” as if delighted that someone else was in the wrong for once.

“Dad, give it to me,” I said, reaching for the machete. It was rusted and looked dull, but I couldn’t think of anything else we could use. Wasn’t this just like us? Searching for the best way to fight the world, together?

“I got it,” Dad said, taking a strong step into the bathroom.

“You’ll pop a stitch! Just go sit down!” I yelled. I reached for the machete and he looked at me. My hand on the handle seemed to shrink him right back to his post-op, fragile self.

“Sandy,” he said. His white hair was wild on his head, and his eyes were droopy and big. I dropped my grip of the machete.

“Okay.” 

Dad turned from me and faced the vanity, where the snake looked peaceful with its body wrapped around the mirror. He let loose a strong strike aimed at the snake, his eyes clear and focused, and missed, hitting the wall beside the mirror. He reared his arm back for another strike, this time hitting the tile of the backboard and sending a ceramic chip clattering to the ground. He stared at his own image in the mirror as he hacked at the snake-lined frame, nicking the edge of the mirror itself and causing a small, spiderweb crack to grow across the glass. The snake finally seemed to notice Dad and lifted its head threateningly. It opened its mouth wide, flicking its tongue out to taste the air.

“Dad!” Amy yelled from the door of the bathroom, covering her mouth with her hand. 

The snake started to move, its scales glimmering under the light, its muscles tensed and coiled with potential energy. 

Dad struck again and hit the side of the mirror with such force that it sounded like a cymbal crash. He attacked without pause: hits aimed at the intruder but missing every time by a few inches, leaving gashes in the sheetrock instead. The snake finally lowered its head and turned away from us, slithering along the wall and escaping through a small opening in the window beside the bathtub. 

Dad let the machete fall to his side, and then he laughed. I ran over and quickly closed the window, locking it securely.

“Did you kill it?” Charlie asked from outside the bathroom. Dad shook his head.

“Nah, wasn’t trying to. But I scared him out, he’ll never bother us again. Little guy could just feel the change in weather coming and was looking for a safe place to hide.”

Dad took his seat at the kitchen table and we all followed. He was sitting taller now, energetic and vibrant.  

“Enough excitement for Grandpa; let’s all cool off now,” Amy said. Her voice was a little shaky, but the singsong was creeping back in. She carried biscuits and eggs over to the table. I put the machete on top of the refrigerator for safekeeping.

After breakfast, I helped with dishes and wrote up the list for the handyman. Charlie was sitting quietly, watching a TV show, and I let my shoulders drop.

“We’ve got him,” Amy said, standing a little too close to me and whispering a little too loudly. “Go home. Get some rest. I can give the handyman your list. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of fires at home to tend to.” Dad looked over at me when she said this and gave a nod, either at me or the door. I hesitated.

“You’ve got him?” I asked. 

“I’ve got him.” 

I squeezed his arm and gave Charlie a hug goodbye.

***

I got to Dad’s house the next morning before Amy and Charlie were even awake. Dad was sitting on the porch in an old, wooden rocking chair.

“I’m surprised that thing isn’t collapsing.” I gestured to the chair with my chin. I took a seat on the porch floor, back against a pillar.

“Old doesn’t mean useless,” he replied.

“I didn’t mean-” I started, but he interrupted.

“Truth is, I was useless before I was old.” He stared past me, looking at nothing behind me.

“Na, Dad, you’ve never been-” I started again, and he interrupted a second time.

“I read Charlie to sleep last night. Not useless. I missed out with your boy, but I’ll make it up to him. And start stronger with Charlie. I’m gonna be a real Grandpa now.” I thought I saw his eyes dampen just a little.

“You were imaginary before?” My jaw clenched; I regretted the edge in my tone. “I mean, it’s all good, Dad.”

“It will be,” he said. And his eyes moved from the nothingness behind me to my face. The surprise of eye contact made me shift in my seat. “You will be, too. We get a break now. You’re a good daughter. You make me want to be better.” I felt my throat start to crack and as I started to answer, he pushed up from his chair.

“Hey! You gotta listen to this,” he said, leaving the conversation to lean in the front door. He returned with a dusty old, portable CD player. He plugged it in to the covered outlet above the porch and hit the eject button, grabbing a CD the machine slowly spit out. It looked scratched, and I doubted this ancient setup’s ability to produce any sound at all. He wiped the CD off on his shirt, and then popped it back in the player, which sucked it up eagerly. Something played, loudly, but I didn’t know what it was. I remember fiddles and a woman’s voice singing in a language I didn’t know. Dad grinned, big. He looked, for just a brief second, like his old self. Except happy. In that moment I believed him. I believed everything. He would follow the doctor’s orders. And stay healthy. He would become the grandpa and the father that he’d always promised to be.

The song came to a punctuated end and the woman’s voice faded into the air. “That’s something, right?” Dad said. I did not disagree.

about the author:

Crooked | R.K.B.

Crooked fences line the street like broken teeth in a jagged smile.

Chipped brown paint flakes from white wood. Cars shoot by the narrow houses, one by one. The cars don’t stop or slow down. A red van pulls into her spot. Her—the woman that sits on the porch, the one who has always been there. She cusses into the street, a string of utterances and damnations pouring from her mouth like an opening salvo. The red van stays for some time, braces the steady fire of the woman’s voice; but even it pushes off after a few seconds.

The red van’s wheels screech against the roughness of the asphalt. The sound of those spinning tires rings off Uriel’s braces, makes him wince. His hands, small, grip the black straps of his bookbag, where they squeeze. The sky has darkened enough now that there is too little light to allow anyone to see his fingers quiver, like violin strings. He can hear a siren in the distance, the sound of it fighting the echo of a train somewhere attempting to push its way past the city.

Uriel stands in the street now, directly in what he thinks, what he knows to be, the center.

He does not move a muscle, save the quivering of those small delicate fingers. Frail cones of light from the streetlamps on either side stretch themselves to him, into the middle of the street. The streetlight’s reach falls short of where he stands. Gulfs of darkness, pitch black as tar in the street, look to swallow him.

The streetlights flicker, and with each stretch of spiked shadow Uriel’s dread grows alongside, dreading what will happen when it is dark enough that he has to go inside.

The sun falls lower and Uriel burns copper. Dead sunlight wraps him tight, a brief shield from what waits for him behind closed doors. That great panic in Uriel, ever present today, sits in his chest, molten ice, and he knows the red van will not slow down before the driver does. Uriel cannot move. He does not.

He shatters his legs in three places.

The impact knocks Uriel unconscious, and he is dreaming before his body flies up into the windshield.

His ears are deaf to the crunch of his small weight against the glass. The weight of his nine-year old body is not even enough to crack the windshield. When Uriel lands across the street— fifteen feet away—his eyes are shut.

The red van halts a few feet from him. Behind a few windows on either side of the street, curtains rustle. The silhouette of faces moves in shadow behind each. The red van drives away, slower than before, when the woman on the porch once again begins to yell. She curses both the driver and God. Neither listen.

When the ambulance arrives, urgency deafening in its song, Uriel is taken from the street. He wakes in the ambulance to the echo of the siren. The hospital the ambulance drives to is a brutal building, its low grey walls prison-like.

On the inside it is bright and too cheerful, like an apology. Uriel falls back asleep when he arrives. He dreams he has run away with Oscar, his little brother. They run from their house, and their school, but mostly from their mother. In the dream, true as to life, she hunts for them with unmotherly sharpness that makes the foggy pain, the diluted haze of it, a thing of kindness. The world melts like old chocolate in front of them, murky and rich.

The doctors have to saw his femur down to reattach it with titanium and wire. Uriel sleeps under their knife and doesn’t wake up till well after they are done.

The nurse assigned to Uriel is new. The sight of him, asleep, smiling in his narrow bed, breaks her down in a supply closet at the end of her shift.

Eight years later and the panic still walks with him as he leaves from the bus stop, and traces of ice still line the insides of his stomach. His panic these days curls around the shape of the key in his hand, rime of internal frost guarding one of Uriel’s only possessions that have meaning.

A day does not pass when the key in Uriel’s fist does not shake when it opens the door above him. Keys listen for the songs of invitation sung by their doors, hoping they do not go silent. It is all too easy for songs to change. His own mother has mastered a knack of changing the locks to their home, and he does not keep whatever key sings to her home with him whenever he leaves.

The steps in front of Mrs. Stuart’s house are always the hardest to climb. In front of Uriel, they look monolithic, daunting. One day, he hopes, they will look like just steps.

A month after the red van, his mother does not pick him up from the hospital. Mrs. Stuart calls his mother from Uriel’s room in the hospital. She asks first. Asks where the little boy’s mother is. When Mrs. Stuart’s questions receive feather hollow answers, the questions turn from questions into damnation. Only half awake in his little bed, he hears only some of what comes out of the old woman’s mouth as she clutches the stethoscope around her neck like a talisman that can do more than find the rhythm inside a chest. He half hears as Mr. Stuart paces in his little room, a congregation of other nurses circling the woman— their faces in something of awe and something of terror. She curses his mother in that hospital, cursing her skin and her bones, and her mother’s before her for raising someone so “wicked.” When the fires of her threats are exhausted, Mrs. Stuart takes him home instead. No one argues with her. He leans on the old woman, who climbs the steps steadily, something of righteousness threading through her frame as she lifts them both to the top of the steps. Now, the rusted white metal railing to the left of the stairs wobbles; it cannot take his weight.

He has tried before.

A year ago.

He winces with the memory. His left leg, shorter now than his right and the weaker of the two, had crumpled under him, sending him toppling down onto the sidewalk. A boy from school had been with him. Uriel had been distracted by attention that was not a practical joke and eyes that did not mock him. Uriel had liked the boy’s cloud green eyes, the bright violence of them set in the boy’s brown face. But the green-eyed boy had laughed when Uriel fell.

Behind him now a car speeds down the street, the hushed air whoosh of its movement loud and sudden.

The sky is an unscarred blue above his head. The cold bites into his threadbare clothes, though he’s layered his shirts as Mrs. Stuart has told him to. He breathes into his gloves and wriggles his fingers. As he makes his way up the stairs, he keeps his hands plastered to his side. He has to resist the urge, even after all these years, to find something to hold on to. At the top he walks the narrow distance across the covered porch. His boots crunch down on the stiff fibers of the old carpet along the wood deck. The storm door is broken and does not latch properly. When he opens it, he steps inside the small space and wipes his boots along the mat there.

Before he can knock, Mrs. Stuart’s voice yells through the door.

“Sop playing and get yourself out of that cold, before you freeze to death on my porch.”

He pushes open the door, mumbling, “Yes, Ma’am.”

The smell of rosewater and spices hits him as he crosses the threshold. He smiles a quiet smile, looking straight down as he does. The first floor of the house is only barely warmer than the outside. The heat has not yet been turned on. There are space heaters, small and black, in front of the radiator in the corner. The living room is occupied by an old L shaped couch, its deep and floral-patterned seats covered with blankets. Sweetly thick voices dripping with feeling tell their stories over the air as the radio sends soul music throughout the house. He walks through the living room, to the kitchen.

The cold recedes as he gets closer.

In the kitchen the oven is on. The light on the oven is broken, so Uriel cannot see what is inside. It smells like pie, and his stomach rumbles. The rumble is loud, a heavy growl hard to ignore. Uriel pretends not to notice. He is used to pretending.

At the sink, Mrs. Stuart kisses her teeth, a sound long and slow and fed up. Uriel’s mother makes the same sound whenever she is upset with him. But when she does it, it is a cruel thing, drawn out and twisted like the serrated blade of an old knife. Fists trail behind the sound, too many to avoid. In 17 years, he hasn’t found any way to avoid upsetting his mother except to vanish.

Mrs. Stuart shakes her head but doesn’t turn around. Uriel takes off his gloves and puts them in his pockets. For a moment the sound of his mother is in his ears, and his eyes, and his nose.

“I can help with the washing up…if you want?” he offers.

The dishes in the sink are mostly large pots and pans. They fill the small sink and spread out onto the counter. Mrs. Stuart wipes her hands and turns around.

The lines on her face are a roadmap of concern he does not know what to do with. A network of grooved skin bunches around her eyes and mouth.

“You eat breakfast today?”

Uriel does not think that is a question. No upward lilt softens her tone into anything other than an accusation. Uriel moves to the sink and pushes up his jacket sleeves. He knows Mrs. Stuart is angry with him, so he avoids looking at her. It bothers her that he has slept at his mother’s more often recently—twice this week, a dozen times in the past month.

“Nothing in the fridge back at her place,” he says.

It’s a lie. There were things in the fridge, but they weren’t for him. He had cereal at the school, catching the bus early to get to what the district called breakfast. He knows not to take what is not explicitly his, and the world has given him little.

He also knows by now that not talking cannot shutter the conversation. He scrubs the grime off a cast iron skillet. When he is done the surface of the pan is a dull tire-black.

He wonders if it is still there, hanging in the dining room like a curse.

“It’s why you still got that damn limp. Your knees should be better than mine. Just last week I was thinking that Oscar’s got bigger than you, and Lord knows that boy don’t got any more food than you. I feed you both the same. He at your momma’s house right now?” Somewhere in the last few years, he knows that Mrs. Stuart had got the idea that if she just fed the two boys enough, if enough rice and peas and festival fish were consumed, that his bones would grow stronger than they were, that broken pieces of him would unbreak.

“He’s with some friends,” he says. He spits these words out, almost guttural. The water runs and runs and runs, faultless as it falls from the faucet.

Mrs. Stuart stops drying the dishes. She puts her hands on her hips. “So she’s not home. Again.”

The old dress she wears has flour on it. The white stains the pastel orange fabric. It clumps in some places into dough. The coarse tan apron wrapped around her waist catches most of the food before it can hit the floor.

For Mother’s Day two years after the accident, he made her that apron in school: “Thank you” embroidered on the front lapel.

She tries to tell him he already has a mother. The old woman chews him out, eyes growing wet with each word, until she gives up. But then she ties the thing around her waist and hugs him close.

She wears it whenever she cooks, whether Uriel is present or not.

Uriel keeps washing, though there aren’t that many dishes left. He eyes up every item before he touches them, meticulous in his scrutiny. He goes as slow as he can. The curtains from the window above the sink come undone. He wipes his hands and re-ties them before they unloose completely and come falling into the water. He goes back to his process and doesn’t look up.

“I was gonna tell you.” he says. It is a lie and neither of them need to point at the fragility in the structure of it.

She kisses her teeth again, the air crushed between her molars a warning. She goes to the oven and opens it. A wave of heat rolls out across the floor, and up the backs of Uriel’s legs. He shifts his weight, pauses. The oven fills the room with the scent of pecans. 

“How was school?” she asks.

He almost shrugs, then stops himself. He doesn’t want to talk about his high school, crowded and hostile. There are no more boys with green eyes for him there. The students at Hartnell are of two types now, either bullies or overflowing with pity—both make him feel too seen and made more brittle for it. He purses his lips.

“I got a good grade on my project. The one for Bio that we worked on,” he says.

“That’s right. Now go on and set the table,” she says. She takes the pie out of the oven, leaves the door open. On the rack below, covered in aluminum foil, are two dishes.

The dining room is filled with echoes that Uriel tries his best to avoid. Uriel takes the placemats and puts them on the oval table in the dining room off the kitchen. It’s a short walk. He goes back for the plates she has left on the counter, then the silverware and cups. Pictures are framed across the dining room walls, row after row of photographs. The echoes are deafening.

On his way back to the kitchen to grab the napkins, he forgets to mask his limp. Mrs. Stuart lets out a small beaten sigh when she sees. Shame blossoms in his stomach, and its warmth inches its way up into his ribs.

“Call Oscar after you eat,” she says. “Tell him he’s got no business sleeping on the street when he knows that I got two rooms upstairs nobody uses but you two.” She slides the two foil wrapped trays across the counter for Uriel to take.

He takes the trays and makes his way to the table. He doesn’t limp this time, straining his left leg to match the gait of his right.

At his mother’s house, whenever she is drunk, his mother makes fun of the way he walks. There is always the shape of something mean folded into her voice. Not like Mrs. Stuart, his mother does not yell at him and the world for him to heal; she does not wish each night for something as small as Uriel’s comfort. In those moments, his mother’s house goes hurricane-still, and laughter is wrung from Oscar. His brother and he do not look at one another for days afterward.

Uriel has learned to hide the limp, along with the parts of himself that are truly broken.

He puts the plates down on the placemat in the center of the table. He pulls out Mrs. Stuart’s usual chair for her, the wood scraping across the boards. He cannot help but look at the wall now. The pictures are blatant, their trapped memories spilling down the wall and into his eyes, a cascade of images he cannot avoid.

In one picture frame, a black man throws a woman into the air. The motion is effortless, they smile broadly at each other, love resting in the corners of their eyes. The grey sky clears for her, and as she rises her head breaks through heaven. Uriel looks up. The air stings Uriel’s nose and threatens the corners of his eyes—not from cold that has found no home in Mrs. Stuart’s house, but from the sharpness of memory—metal and blood and a throb of remembered pain in his hips. In the corner, small and simply framed, is the now familiar picture of the same man, but older. Time has not overlooked him. The man crouches at the foot of a red van. The man grins at the person taking the picture. There is an openness to the grin and, to Uriel, the man stares directly at him through the frame.

That photo reappeared on Mrs. Stuart’s wall a year ago, filling the empty space its absence had made for almost a decade.

The grinning man is in prison now. Hit and run.

Uriel looks down at the table. He does not want Mrs. Stuart to know that he has noticed it.

He is always surprised to find the photo does not have a butcher’s knife sticking from the glass. On a call around the same time the picture went up, Uriel remembers Mrs. Stuart yelling at the grinning man who is her brother. “I hope you rot.” To her, the hatred she has for the grinning man is almost a duty of hers, God-given and blessed.

Uriel looks back into the kitchen.

“You don’t have to let us stay,” he says because it is true. He has no claim to this place, to this house, to this woman who hates her own brother for almost killing a 9-year-old that had no strong desire to live. He says this often enough that he knows that the phrase hurts Mrs. Stuart, and yet he has never been able to stop himself from repeating it, a bundle of words to guard against the possibility of not being able to return here.

She shakes her head and sits, muttering under her breath as she does. Uriel sits, and they are both afloat in no movement except the air pushed steadily to the ceiling by the pecan flavored heat of the oven. Uriel feels, as he sits, as though he has stolen the man in the picture’s place, a cuckoo at Mrs. Stuart’s table.

The food is distracting, the rice heaped onto his plate like steaming mountains. He goes for the pork chops first. Apart from the music that still plays, it is silent for a few minutes. The Temptations pray for rain in the background, backed up by a chorus in harmony. A cold draft encircles the table, and there is a stabbing pain in his legs. The rods in them seem to spring into needles when the weather changes. Uriel winces, and shivers.

Across from him Mrs. Stuart looks up from her food. A strange look takes her, and for a moment Uriel looks into the mirror of her eyes at himself. Her deep brown eyes turn themselves into wells and the crinkled skin around her eyes creases further. It’s not quite pity and so he accepts it. But when her lower lip trembles for a moment, a barely visible shudder, the shame inside bubbles from the cracked earth of him and its oily shape curls around his ribs and squeezes.

Mrs. Stuart reaches her hand out to the apron from where it hangs to her right. Then she looks down at the table and blinks more than a few times.

They eat, the scraping of their forks and knives against the ceramic the only sound between them. Between bites he wonders if Mrs. Stuart hates this street more than even he does.

He thinks she does. Though their hate is not the same.

“Where’s your schoolwork?” she asks. She stands and lifts the cover from the pie tray. She removes two pieces, sets them down in front of him.

Then she disappears for a moment. When she gets back, he’ll tell her it’s Friday and he didn’t get much to do anyway. He listens to the shuffle of her steps along the floor and waits.

He picks at the crust of one of the slices. A thin chip crumbles off, and he excavates the damage with his fork. Golden chips flake off and fall, making a small heap. When he’s done, the slices look lopsided and unwhole, broken things.

The house gives a slight hum, and a low buzz emanates from the walls. Dust, cobwebs, and the distinct smell of crayons competes for a moment with the smells of the house.

The radiator in the dining room rattles violently before it settles. It sounds like something small, terrified, and caged is killing itself against the bars of its prison. When Mrs. Stuart returns, the room is warm. He smiles down at his plate. She begins to clear the table, scraping all the leftover bones and bits onto one surface. She points to the foil covered trays and the pie still on the table.

“Now, I’m gonna leave this out here if you want more. So, make sure you leave enough for Oscar.”

“I can help pay for the heat this year,” he says instead. His voice is smooth, and it doesn’t warble. He has practiced saying this in the mirror, correcting the tone to one that sounds most mature. He does not know how much the heat costs but thinks that what he earns from the job he works part time at the bodega two blocks from his high school must be enough that he could afford at least some of it.

Her hand shoots out and raps him across the back of his head. She rests her hands on her waist. It is merely a warning, carefully soft. Still, it registers in his gut, and Uriel bites his lip.

The shame has wrapped itself around his lungs now, tightening with every breath. “You going to pay for part of the rent for the last eight years, too? Huh?”

She shakes her head at him. She starts piling large portions of food onto the one clean plate, muttering under her breath all the while. She looks at Uriel again.

“You know what? I’m going to make Oscar his plate now and just put it in the fridge. Make sure he sees it when he gets in.”

She takes the plate into the kitchen and doesn’t look back. But she’s loud— putting away things with abandon. Metal clatters against metal, ceramic clinks. The cabinets open and shut with a harshness. Even the Temptations can’t drown out the jagged quiet left behind.

An almost silence, like the one when he was seven, locked in the bathroom with Oscar and hiding from their mother who roamed their house with gin and anger and an extension cord.

He wants to tell Mrs. Stuart that he just wants to have a stake, a reason to know that the key in his pocket now will not become just another useless thing. He eats his slice of pie slowly, a careful destruction, carving it into crumbs. He stares up at the wall. The man beside the red van has a smile on his face now like Jesus, all knowing and impossibly kind.

When the noise of cabinets and footsteps in the kitchen quiets down, he sees Mrs. Stuart in the threshold of the two rooms. Her arms are folded against her chest. Behind her, he can see the apron, hanging on its own special rack.

“I’m sorry.” he tries. His eyes flicker back up to the picture. “Don’t start,” she says.

Then Mrs. Stuart follows Uriel’s eyes up to the corner where the crouching man smiles down at them. Her lips make a straight line, and she shakes her head. She swears under her breath for a long while, looking up at the photo. It almost looks like prayer.

Uriel nods, chews on the inside of his lips. He does not correct her anger. He does not tell her that were it not for the man with the smile like Jesus, he and Oscar would still be trapped with their mother and her anger. The shame curls up out of his mouth, up his throat. Left there, one day, it will choke him.

“Can… we stay?” he says, quiet. He does not know why these are the words that come instead of ‘thank you,’ or ‘I love you.’ Mrs. Stuart doesn’t answer him for a long while. She opens her mouth, then shuts it. Her eyes settle on the apron.

“Lord,” she says, shaking her head. This is the answer she always gives, half admonition and scorn, half promise. A promise that he will have a place.

He nods again. He cannot breathe.

Uriel’s tears startle them both. He has not cried in front of her in a long time. His tears are silent things, rivers without sound or end. Tears trace their paths down his face, making the leap to the floor when his chin becomes too full.

Exhaustion fills the home like a gas leak. Their eyes, held open by waiting, flutter to stay open.

They sit in silence, staring up at the photo, waiting until Oscar comes home.

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