From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: The Anniversary

This was originally published at The Rumpus on April 24, 2017.

By mid-morning, it was so hot her breath felt as if it were being drawn back into her. She took the tin washbasin out to the front yard, filled it with cold water, and shampooed her hair. If she turned her head, she could watch her reflection in the kitchen window as she leaned over the tub. Her hips seemed so wide in that position, tapering down from the wraparound skirt to legs that were girl-like. She watched her hair turn from yellow to brown with the wetness.

Around noon, with her hair now sticking to the back of her neck with perspiration, she heard the screen door slam once, then again. It was odd for him to come home in the middle of the day.

She went to the kitchen but he was already gone. This was the way he did things. She looked at the kitchen table for a box, some sign of the gift she was sure he would sneak in and leave her just as he had every anniversary. She heard his truck backing down the dirt drive. There was no chance she’d catch up with him.

This time of day, the sun came in through the slatted windows and settled on the yellow linoleum in stripes. Now she saw it. There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake. A joke he had played on her, like the time he told her he was fixing the kitchen faucet and put a gag faucet where the real one had been. She remembered how she ducked and screamed, thinking she would be splashed with water when the new faucet came off in her hands.

But this was not plastic. He had tied a long piece of thick string from one of the lizard’s ankles to the kitchen table. Around the neck was a thin yellow crinkly ribbon that she had seen him pull out of the junk drawer the day before. She had suspected it was to wrap her gift. The ribbon was tied sideways around the animal’s neck in a bow. The lizard squinted as it turned its head slowly to look around the room. Its bulgy, liquid eyes scared her. She moved and the thin plates of skin on its back stood up. Now it turned its head swiftly and the scales rippled as if it were shivering.

She heard herself sigh, rubbed her hands on her skirt, and walked toward the white pine cupboards, making a full circle around the lizard’s body. It watched her. She found an aluminum pie pan under the sink and grabbed the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. She put the pan on the floor, poured the water in, and inched it over to the animal with a broom, backing away quickly and waiting to see if it would drink. The lizard sat on its squat legs and narrowed its lids into slits like cat’s-eye marbles. It appeared to be asleep.

Throughout the day, she kept going to the kitchen to check on it, afraid it might get loose in the house. In the late afternoon, she stood a distance away and threw a leaf of Bibb lettuce by the pie pan. She didn’t want anything to do with it, but she didn’t want it to starve. The creature, startled, was set into motion, skittering back and forth, first in one direction, then another, yanking itself back again and again by the string. For a while, she took a seat across from it, leaning forward. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she said.

She finished cleaning the house and had no choice now but to come back to the kitchen. She had to clear out everything to wash the floor, which meant moving the tables and chairs and putting it somewhere. Outside was where she wanted it. She could tell him it escaped, ran away. But that wouldn’t be honest and if they had promised each other anything when they married, it was honesty. Letting his gift run away, or rather, pushing his gift out the door, wouldn’t be a white lie. It would be flat-out deception.

She moved the chairs into the hallway and tried to untie the string, cursing him for making a knot she couldn’t undo. She went to the junk drawer, took out the scissors and, grasping the string, clipped it quickly and led the lizard toward the kitchen door, then the porch, like a dog on a leash. When she opened the screen door, the lizard tried to run back inside, as if it were afraid of the outdoors. She pulled it along, but it planted all four paws firmly on the floor. Its nails made a pitiful sound on the linoleum, then became stuck on the doorjamb. She gave a tug and over it rolled, like a child’s toy truck. Another tug, and it was up again and furious and ran towards her. It followed her the whole length of the porch until she scooted over the banister and tied it to one of the posts. She walked around to the back of the house and let herself in.

What a gift, she thought. Her present for him was wrapped and put away in a bedroom drawer days before he suggested they skip gifts this year. She had bought him a new jacket and white shirt. She undid the ribbon to look at them, then replaced the clothes and surrounded them with tissue paper. They looked so nice she took the shirt out again and held it up to her cheek. It felt so crisp and cool.

When the day had cooled, she bathed and changed into a fresh cotton dress and lifted her hair away from her neck to pin it up.

*

“What’s it doing out there?” he said when he came home. “Don’t you like it?”

On the table, she had put a candle and the gift box in navy blue paper and the good dishes, but he didn’t look at those.

“What’s it doing?” she said absently, for she had taken him to mean that the thing was doing something interesting or different and that she should go and look.

The lizard stood very still, as if it might be dead. The bow was gone.

“Why’d you put it out there?” he said.

“Because it belongs out there,” she said as she closed the screen door.

From the heat, his black hair had separated into individual strands, making him look older and scraggly.

“You didn’t like it,” he said and began to follow her around the kitchen.

She retrieved his favorite pasta dish from the oven and the salad from the refrigerator and he followed right behind. Their bodies made a shadow on the yellow floor that looked like the silhouette of two shy, hesitant boxers in a ring.

“Oh, I like it,” she said. She was intent on getting the dinner ready and didn’t look at him. “I like it just fine. You didn’t pay any money for it, did you?”

His face looked tight.

She motioned toward the window with her cooking mitt. “It’s just that there’s a million of them out there, and it’s a shame to throw away good money after one.”

“I bought it, all right? Cheap. From a guy at work. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d think it was funny.”

“I do think it’s funny. I laughed.”

“It’s really neat,” he said, trying to convince her. “It looks prehistoric or something.”

She made him sit through dinner before opening his package.

She expected him to say, I thought we agreed, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked eager, put his glass down, and said, “Well, let’s see what this is.”

He seemed stunned for a moment when he saw the clothes and then whistled low as he lifted them out of the box. He felt the material, ran his fingers down the length of the lapel, and smiled at her. “This is a good one. But what‘s it for? God knows there’s nowhere around here to wear this.” And then he laughed and said, eyes crinkling, “What have you got up your sleeve? I think you must be up to something, baby doll.”

“They’re interview clothes. You’ll need something nice to interview in if you try to get transferred back home or if you go to another company. Isn’t that why we came here? So you’d have a better job after this one? The next step up, you said.”

He went back to examining the jacket, rose half out of his chair and sat down again.

“Isn’t it?” she repeated and motioned with the back of her hand to the open bedroom door. “Try it on.”

He was standing now. He had the jacket on and went to the mirror, looking at himself this way and that, sizing up every angle.

“I told you,” he said. “I’ve got to put in a couple of years first before I’d even try to move on. You don’t just go looking for another job when you’ve hardly been here. You have to pay your dues.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was hoping that once you were here for a while, you’d like it.”

“What’s there to like?” she said. She began biting some ragged skin on her bottom lip. She fingered the rim of her glass. She knew her voice sounded bitter but she didn’t care. “You told me about the place. Patience, you said. You’d have to be brain-dead to have this much patience. To want to live here. You’d have to be a fool.”

He stepped in front of her. “I’m a fool then,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“You’re a fast learner. Everyone has always told you that. You’ll find another job. You don’t have to stay at that place.”

“You don’t want me to blow what I have, do you? If they get wind of me applying other places it won’t look good. And if I go in there now and ask the boss for a transfer back to where I came from, they’d die laughing. There are other guys, ahead of me, willing to pay their dues.”

She thought of those other men and what they and their wives must be like to be so patient, so accepting. She found herself wondering, for the first time since they had been together, what other kinds of men she could have married. Maybe I should have waited, she thought. And then she thought, I’ve heard about this. This is how things change.

“You act as if I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “They said I’d have to wait two years for a transfer. At least two years.”

“Oh, great,” she said, fingering the glass again. “I’ll be dead in two years in a place like this.”

He smiled at her.  “There she is. My melodramatic sweetheart.”

He removed his jacket and draped it neatly over his chair. He stepped behind her and put his arms around her.

“Look,” he said. “Baby doll. This is nothing. We’ll laugh about this later. It’ll be a story. Like a joke about how many miles we walked to school when we were kids.”

She looked through the window to where there was a thin stream of orange light across the horizon and nothing more. Some people might think the sight was beautiful. To her it had become barren.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”

And in the end, after they had finished dinner and lain together and after she waited for the movements of his body to cause hers to shiver, she turned on her side and closed her eyes. He put his hand on her hip and said in a whisper, “Baby doll? You still awake?”

She was in the lazy space between wakefulness and sleep and, so, didn’t answer. She thought she heard the animal stumbling off the porch, down the steps, and into the night, finally free.

Before she dreamed, an image came to her of the liquid eyes. As she began to fall asleep, her body jerked, quick and hard. She felt as if she were jumping straight up into darkness.

***

Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan.

Rumpus Original Fiction: Fantasyland

The spotlight belongs on Portia Control. For tonight’s final number, she takes the stage wearing the highest hair in recorded history. Her wigs are always an event, but this creation is most enthralling—a leaning tower three units tall, generous scoops of pistachio green. Loyal patrons of the bar brace for disaster, place their bets on whether the stacked wigs will fall. But Portia is no amateur. She works magic with spirit gum and bobby pins. Tonight, she is the fantasy, rhinestoned to death in her thrift store dress. No one can tell her otherwise.

The other queens are notorious outfit repeaters, worshippers of stretch fabric. They trot out their faithful standbys, the crowd-pleasing numbers they know will get wallets out of pockets. They don’t perform. They do laps around the bar, kissing cheeks, collecting dollar bills from drunk bachelorettes. At curtain call, they return to the stage a parade of half-drag. One of them, a newly minted queen whose name Portia has already forgotten, wears a T-shirt advertising the Iron Pit Gym—at curtain call!—and then the show hostess, a queen named Dawn Deveraux, emerges from backstage wearing flip-flops. It’s no wonder Dawn must remind the audience to applaud. On the mic, Dawn is a kindergarten teacher, pleading with her students to form a line. There are drink specials that Dawn needs to repeat—the vodka that nobody can stand is now only two dollars; Boozy Bottoms are half off—but the spotlight ignores Dawn and searches for Portia instead. Twenty minutes have passed since Portia’s last number, the one where she breathlessly lip-synced the side effects from a pharmaceutical commercial, and still the wigs sit heavy on her head, defying the laws of physics. Below the neck Portia wears a new look just for curtain call, a houndstooth overcoat the audience hasn’t seen before and will never see again.

After the curtain closes, the queens stream onto the dancefloor, choking the air with their department store perfumes. Portia cannot understand why these queens are treated as minor deities. Worshippers flock to them with offerings of well liquor and gas station cigarettes. Portia won’t accept such gifts. Her taste is far too particular. She drinks lemon drops out of champagne flutes. For her ceremonial post-show cigarette, she only smokes Fantasias, the luxury brand that comes in bright colors she can coordinate with her lip—cherry red, strawberry-milkshake pink. Any sensible queen knows that the performance doesn’t stop when you leave the stage. There is still an audience watching, even in the alley behind the bar, where Portia smokes next to the graffiti that reads BE GAY DO CRIME.

That’s where the new boy finds her, the new boy operating the spotlight. He has no theatrical experience, nor was he given any formal training, only this suggestion by Dawn an hour before the show began: “It’s a light. You take it, and you move it around.” But the spotlight moved of its own accord. The new boy swears this. The light is simply drawn to Portia.

She rewards the new boy for his flattery with a drag on her cigarette. Shivering in his corduroy jacket, he accepts readily, as if the cigarette might bring him warmth. “I’ve never done lights before,” he says. “Did I do okay?” His jacket has a fur collar, but in no way is it appropriate for winter. Portia feels a sudden motherly stirring. The jacket, she estimates, is at least a size too large for him. In the jacket, he looks like a child playing in Daddy’s closet.

“You were pretty good for a virgin,” Portia says.

A new song starts playing inside the Closet, the bump and grind favorite that comes on every Friday and Saturday when the party reaches its peak. The throb of bass is so heavy it shakes the whole block. “I bet the twinks are going wild in there,” she says. “Sucking down their vodka sodas. What is it about being skinny and hairless that makes you order vodka soda?”

The new boy laughs. “I love your name, by the way,” he says. “So funny. Portia Control! I kept cracking up.”

“Why?” she says. “What’s funny about it?”

“It’s. Ummm.”

“It’s what?” She takes pleasure in watching him squirm. She is having fun with this new boy. They are having fun together, both of them.

“Well,” he says, “uh, you know—”

“I’m kidding,” she says. “I’m messing with you. Yes, I’m a big girl. That’s the joke.”

“It’s hard to tell. If you guys are joking.”

“Guys?”

“Ladies. Gorgeous ladies.”

“That’s better.”

Holiday lights twinkle down where the alley meets College Ave. Christmas is over—New Year’s, too—but the city is in no rush to put away its decorations, and while some people might find this tacky, Portia can appreciate it. What’s so wrong with keeping that festive mood going long enough to see them through the winter?

She realizes she is staring at the new boy’s jaw, the empty threat of his stubble. For how long has she been staring? She can’t remember. She says, “Have you ever thought about doing drag? You have the face for it.”

“Yeah?”

“Cheekbones,” Portia says, “are very important.”

The new boy considers this. He finds a wall to lean against, strikes a pose that says I, an intellectual, am considering cheekbones. To complete the look, he takes a long drag on her cigarette. The smoldering end burns red, burns orange, bright bursts of color in the January gray. “Your name’s Dustin, right?” he says.

“I’m Portia,” she says.

“Yeah, but like, your actual name.”

“I don’t do government names. I hear that enough out in the real world. Don’t make me live in the real world any more than I already have to.”

The new boy takes one last sip of the cigarette. “I’m Miguel,” he says, and passes it back to her, but the greedy little thing has left her nothing but ash.

 

She invites him over to keep her company while she does her stoning for tomorrow night’s show. It’s a long and lonely process, applying rhinestones to fabric, but just how long she keeps to herself. She does, however, issue the requisite warning about the E6000 fumes upon their arrival at her apartment. She believes those fumes have mind-altering properties. You have to take a break every hour or so, step away from the glue and fill up on fresh air.

At Portia’s apartment, overhead light is forbidden, its cruelty toward drag queens well-documented. Lamplight is kinder, more flattering, and a lamp is yet another object Portia can adorn with fringe and beads. To someone who has never stoned before, her apartment with its low light and scattered syringes probably looks like the den of a heroin addict, but the truth is much sadder—she’s a drag queen who buys secondhand and spangles every garment herself. Portia visits the women’s section at Vintage Wearhouse so often that the cashier who merely cocked his eyebrows at her selections in the beginning has started asking questions. Her answer is always that she’s shopping for her homebound mother, her poor mother who likes to dress up in the mirror because it makes her feel alive.

“And he believes that?” Miguel says.

“People like him will believe anything,” she says, “as long as they don’t have to believe queers exist.”

Anyway, Vintage Wearhouse is a crapshoot. Only sometimes is their selection worth the homophobia. Where Portia most reliably strikes gold is estate sales. None of the other queens at the Closet will shop a dead woman’s wardrobe. They find the practice morbid; they prefer to sew their four-way stretch swimsuits and serve the same look week after week. Portia’s standards are higher. Whenever a big girl croaks, Portia is there to rifle through her closet. That’s how she found the houndstooth coat, the coat. Does Miguel remember it? Of course he remembers it; Portia says so before he has the chance to respond. Even if her haul is not up to par, even if she comes home from a sale with trash, it doesn’t matter. Portia knows how to make trash look good.

 

Miguel is newly twenty-one, a student at the university enrolled in a full slate of business classes. Majoring in business—that was his dad’s idea, he says, not his. It is the most essential of the strings attached to his dad’s offer to help pay his tuition. His dad works in landscaping. He and a team of four other brown men are shuttled around the Indianapolis suburbs in the back of a pickup truck to plant flowers for white people with money to burn. This has been his father’s workday for nearly twenty years now. Miguel will make something more of himself—thus, business! Miguel will not spend his life down on his knees.

“Your dad is right,” Portia says. “I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life on my knees, and I regret every minute of it.”

“Ha ha,” Miguel says.

“Does he know?”

“About what?”

“Your appreciation of artisanal meats.”

“I think so. But if I don’t say it out loud, we can go on pretending. And as long as we keep pretending, he’ll keep covering tuition.”

“So this is a long con,” Portia says. “You’re scamming him. Look, as a rule, I respect the hustle, but in this instance, I’m not sure.”

“It’s not a scam.”

“Sounds like one to me.”

“A degree in business can take you anywhere.” Look how precious he is, trying to believe his own line. He gnaws on the skin around his thumbnail, his teeth as square as a woodland creature’s.

“The longer you put off telling him,” Portia says, “the harder it’s going to be. I’ll just say that.”

“Thanks for your input,” Miguel says, “but it’s fine. I’ll be fine, Mom.”

“Not Mom. I’m not that old yet.”

“Tell that to your hairline,” he says quietly, as if already apologizing for it.

Here is a lesson Portia learned years ago—you can get away with being rude and nasty if there’s a twinkle in your eye. Miguel’s eye has no such twinkle.

“Was that okay to say?” he says. “Your hairline really isn’t that crazy.”

“Oh, stop. No backpedaling!” She gives him full permission to read her into the dirt. Nothing is off-limits, save for her government name, which is not to be repeated. “So,” she says, “where were we? My hairline. Go on. Destroy me.”

 

He needs to know the backstage gossip if he’s going to work with the queens up close. Has he heard about the amateur porn? The oldest queen at the Closet makes amateur porn with her two mustachioed lovers. She is the cabaret singer, the queen with the terrible, caked-on makeup. Miguel nods as in yes, the terrible one, I remember. You can look up the terrible one on PornHub, where she and her Super Mario boyfriends have a decent following. Portia can show him right now if he wants.

“I think I’m good,” he says.

“Oh, it’s hilarious,” Portia says. “I’ll send you a link. Homework for next time.”

The biggest story is Dawn, the show hostess. Dawn is mother to nearly a dozen Deveraux girls, several of whom—this is not to be repeated—have sucked her toes in exchange for bookings. Dawn is going through a divorce and milking it for all it’s worth. The divorce is her excuse for repeating stale material on the mic: I’m a little distracted right now. Maybe you heard? Miguel should avoid friending her on Facebook, where she posts only photos from the latest furry convention or mopey updates about how quiet her house is now. Never mind that Dawn was out on the dance floor every Saturday night slobbering all over some local twink, back when things at home were bliss. These days she hovers near the bar after her shows, collecting pity drinks. Meanwhile, her husband—“A total sweetheart,” Portia says, “he worshipped her, the dumb fuck”—has been banned from entering the Closet ever again. Dawn made sure of it.

Miguel says, “Is that true about Dawn’s toes? You’re for real?”

“Oh yes,” Portia says. “Those little piggies get around.”

“That’s nasty.”

“Foot stuff isn’t nasty. Dawn is nasty. Let’s get that much straight. We don’t kink-shame in this house.”

 

He asks her what his drag name is. He does not ask what his drag name might be or could be. In Miguel’s mind, it seems, there is a right answer, one that Portia is uniquely qualified to intuit. And perhaps she is. Portia will play the role of drag prophet. She will do her best to communicate with the showgirl in his subconscious.

“Her name is Chiquita,” Portia says. “Like the banana.” For her signature number, Chiquita would do a bit of burlesque in a yellow dress with marabou trimming. The dress would be built to be torn away; it would peel in four different places: neck, shoulder, back, shoulder. Portia points to those places on her body, miming a little striptease.

Miguel objects to this moniker. The name, the whole concept—it all sounds like a crude stereotype to him, the exotic Latina covered in fruit.

“That’s drag, babe,” Portia says. “Stereotypes and stupidity. You have to own it. You take the dumb shit people say to you, and you wear it like armor.” She has been stoning her gown, her armor, for hours now, an effort she can count in calluses. The night has slipped away, and light begins to filter through her velveteen curtains. Still, the garment barely glimmers.

She asks Miguel if he has any advice for her on how to manage her money, and he says, “You’re a drag queen, you don’t have any money,” which stings, but it’s the truth. In the daytime, Portia works at a cellphone store, convincing townies to upgrade to unlimited plans they don’t need. She won’t tell Miguel which store it is; Portia isn’t meant to be seen in the world of strip malls. She makes decent money in the realm of lanyards and slacks, but that income goes to her drag closet. Portia is a costly venture that has not yet yielded profit. Portia is a long-term investment.

“In other words, you’re going to be broke for a while,” Miguel says. Nothing wrong with that. Miguel is, too. For months he had a steady gig working the line at Build-a-Bowl, but just after New Year’s, Miguel showed up five minutes late to a lunch shift, and his manager told him he should go home and reflect on his issues with authority. In his file—this mythical file, often referred to yet never seen—there are multiple strikes against him, complaints describing him as uncooperative and lazy. So claims the day manager. All the managers there are white. Everybody else who works there is white, actually, and none of them have ever been told they have an attitude problem. Only Miguel.

“That place is fucked up,” he says. “A Philly cheesesteak bowl, that is such a fucked-up concept. But the tips are good. The tips are so good, you don’t even know.”

“Tips are great,” Portia says, “but let’s not neglect the shaft.”

“Um, yeah.”

“I was trying to make a joke.”

“I’m describing racism. What about that is funny to you?”

“I believe you were describing a Philly cheesesteak.”

“Fuck off,” he says, but actually, this is her house, so if anything, he should be the one to fuck off. He shifts in his chair like he is signaling his intention to leave. He slides an arm into a jacket sleeve, but slowly, tentatively, a burlesque in reverse. She suspects he’s bluffing. In the event that he isn’t, certainly he has fumbled the opportunity to make an impactful exit.

“Sorry,” Portia says. “I guess the joke didn’t land.”

“I’d like to speak to whoever cleared it for takeoff,” Miguel says.

The next night, they show up to the Closet together an hour before showtime. Portia carries her triple-stack wig on a mannequin head. Miguel, ever the gentleman, lugs Portia’s suitcase, which is no easy feat. The suitcase weighs at least thirty pounds. It is packed with her costumes for the night—a different outfit for each of her numbers, and of course, a last look for curtain call that is stoned within an inch of its life.

Outside the bar, stationed as close to the entrance as is legally possible, is a street evangelist in a crisp white polo, his flesh pink and wet like smoked ham. This man has been accosting the queens for years, condemning them to hell for as long as Portia has been doing drag. A venue will close, a new one will pop up in its place, and Mr. Ham will be there to let them know that they are sluts, they are whores, they are Satan’s foot soldiers in the cosmic war between good and evil. Tonight, as Portia and Miguel roll past, he barks, “Abomination! God sees this perversion and frowns upon you.”

Portia says, “I like to think so,” and blows the man a little kiss.

Miguel scurries along like a frightened rabbit. To him, the man’s words strike like hate, but Portia doesn’t see it that way. For a man to inquire about the state of her soul and not the state of her hole—that’s love, she says. Anyway, hate and love, they’re both expressions of passion, aren’t they? Portia is blessed to have the most passionate fans in the world.

She arrives at the bar in full face. It isn’t like TV, the queens getting ready together backstage, painting their faces at a row of identical vanities. No—there is room enough for only one mirror, and that mirror belongs to Dawn. The position of show hostess comes with certain perks.

Backstage, Dawn is scrolling through Grindr, dragging French fries through ketchup. “Love your new puppy,” she says to Portia. “You’ve trained him well. All that’s missing is the leash.” She taps a ketchupy fry on her fast-food wrapper like she is stubbing out a cigarette. Dawn wears athletic shorts and a tank top so distressed it looks like a pillowcase. Only Dawn’s face is ready for the stage, and even that, Portia thinks, is debatable. Dawn’s makeup is spray-tan orange. She has carrot undertones.

“Thanks,” Portia says. “He’s a rescue.”

“Who rescued who?” Dawn says.

“Me, obviously. I rescued him.”

Dawn puts down her phone, looks to Miguel. “We’re paying you to run lights,” she says. “You know you don’t have to hang around her, right? It’s not your job.” She chomps a fistful of fries, waiting for him to say something.

What he says is: “I need a drink.” He excuses himself, leaving Portia and Dawn alone backstage.

“Portia Control,” Dawn says, “corrupting America’s youth.” She unzips a garment bag to reveal the same lemon-lime swimsuit she wore last Saturday and the Saturday before.

“He’s a sweet kid,” Portia says. “He just needs some guidance.”

“Just fuck him already,” Dawn says, “and be done with it. That’s what this is all about, right?”

Portia’s showstopper tonight is another estate sale gem—a boatneck dress in Scotch tape tartan, hunter green and navy blue. Draped across her shoulders is a burnt orange boa that curls like a telephone cord all the way down to the sticky bar floor. What is the mood tonight out in the crowd? Portia can’t tell if they want what she’s giving. Perhaps she is stiffer than usual now that she knows who wields the spotlight. But why should that matter? She lip-syncs to a mix of rants by unruly drive-through customers, and the tips are meaningful but sparse. Some nights, she tells herself, she cannot grab the Top 40 crowd. Some nights she is only for the enlightened few.

She leaves the stage before her mix is over. Portia is not a showboat; she is not desperate to soak up every last drop of the audience’s adulation. Backstage, congratulatory messages wait for her on her phone. Miguel, who is out operating the spotlight, has sent a series of gushing texts, along with many exclamation points. KILLED IT!!! HOW ARE DAWN’S TOES TASTING BACK THERE?

SALTY, Portia replies.

 

After the show, she takes him to the bar to do celebratory shots of Fireball. He asks what they are celebrating, and she says, “Do we need an occasion?”

On the dancefloor, they dance close enough that it’s obvious they are there together, but not so close that they could be mistaken for anything more than friends. Portia is not wooing him; that is not happening. Miguel, baby-faced Miguel, has been of legal drinking age for how long? Less than a year, certainly. Meanwhile, Portia has been perfecting her drinking for the last decade. Portia is a nightlife professional. She has no business rooting around in this boy’s cellar or letting this boy root around in hers.

Miguel, bless him, has no rhythm. He closes his eyes when he dances, flinging his arms and doing a sorry step-touch. It’s almost cute, Portia thinks. The bump and grind song, the song, is up next. People scream for it; they love the song so much. The song hasn’t even started yet, not really—that familiar synth bassline is only just creeping into the mix—but people are already pressing their bodies against each other and thrusting dramatically to the beat they know is coming.

“I gotta take a piss,” Miguel says.

“How very macho,” Portia says.

“Did you want to come with?”

“You’re a big boy. I think you can manage.”

“Are we going to make out tonight?”

She considers his lips, cracked and peeling, crying out for a coat of ChapStick. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, right. Because I’m just your fucking dog.”

“That was a joke.”

“Yeah, and it’s sooo funny.”

“It is,” she says. “It can be if you’ll laugh about it. Drink some water.”

“Okay, Mom.”

He leaves, and she is alone in the pink club light, surrounded by theatre majors doing the choreography from a pop star’s Vegas residency. Then he fights his way back through the arms and elbows, returning to their spot not with water but with drinks.

“Thank you,” she says, and gives him a pat on the head. “Good dog.”

“What?”

His drink of choice is some ungodly mix of peppermint schnapps and white chocolate, the sort of drink only a rookie goes for, a drink where the burn is disguised by sweetness.

Louder now, so he can hear her over the music: “All I said was thank you.”

“You’re lying.”

She says, “I’m lightening the mood.”

“You’re not, though. You literally are not.”

Portia can’t see his face. The blurry disco lighting at the Closet gets blurrier the more you drink, yet less flattering. Everything looks smudged. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she says. “You’re making it into something way too serious. We’re just cutting up. We’re having a good time.”

As is tradition at the Closet, the DJ starts playing “Last Dance” by Donna Summer to let patrons know the bar will soon be closing. Over their heads, the disco ball stops turning, but the crowd continues dancing as if the night will not end.

“You are such bullshit,” Miguel says.

“It doesn’t matter,” Portia says.

“What doesn’t?”

“What you think.”

The lights come up. The spell is broken. She can see him clearly now—how sweaty he is, how small.

He says, “The audacity to come out here tonight with this crunchy wig. That took guts.”

“You don’t know anything about anything,” she says.

“I know your shit is fucked up.”

“You run lights. You’re nothing.”

“Right,” he says, “I’m nothing.”

“You are. We all know this business school nonsense is a joke. Come summertime, you’ll be riding around in the back of a truck with dear old dad.”

“Bitch.”

“I am,” she says. “A musty old bitch. You didn’t know?”

“Oh, everybody knows, Dustin. It’s actually kind of sad. You come out and do your little skit, and the whole bar takes a cigarette break. A bathroom break. No one wants to look at you.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m buzzed.”

“You need to eat something.”

“I could keep going.”

The bar staff turn chairs over, recite their mantra to the patrons still lingering on the dancefloor: “Love you, but go the fuck home.” There is something shameful about seeing this space so brightly lit, Portia thinks. In the dark, the dancefloor bursts with possibility, then the light comes on and exposes everything for exactly what it is.

Portia offers Miguel a ride home, which he declines. “I’ll walk,” he says, “I love walking,” and then he trips over an object that only he can see.

“Why don’t you let me take care of you tonight,” Portia says. This is more announcement than question.

They drive through Rally’s on the way back to her apartment—it’s the only restaurant still open at this time of night. Miguel protests; somebody told Miguel once that they found a fly in their burger here. “It’s four in the morning,” Portia says. “Lower your standards.” They order off the value menu, value cheeseburgers and value tenders and value fries, whatever sounds good. Does Miguel want the cinnamon apple pie? Portia will buy him the cinnamon apple pie. “I don’t want the cinnamon apple pie,” Miguel says. “Jesus.”

“Cancel the pie,” Portia tells the illuminated menu.

He makes a show of not speaking to her. An admirable effort, a fine performance, but isn’t that his hand in the Rally’s bag, searching for fries? Back at the apartment, she fluffs him a pillow, drapes him in the softest blanket she can find, and still he commits to the bit, horizontal on her futon.

Other priorities spring to mind, priorities that are not Miguel. Water, for one—she goes to fetch water, and perhaps an aspirin. It is imperative that Portia stays awake long enough to sober up. If she falls asleep now, she’ll pay for it in the morning. She can’t bounce back like Miguel can. For her, the carriage will be a pumpkin again soon enough.

The faucet runs. She makes herself keep drinking despite the sour taste on her tongue. On her phone, she finds a text from Dawn: 2 BOTTOMS DON’T MAKE A TOP…

Portia types her reply: LOVE FINDS A WAY. Then, because it’s Dawn: LOSE THIS NUMBER.

The next morning, it’s afternoon. Miguel is gone, the blanket folded into a perfect little square.

She isn’t interested in staging a reality TV reunion episode about it. They don’t need to rehash last night’s stale drama, do they? She goes out to Vintage Wearhouse to find something his size. Lucky her, she ends up finding a gown with serious potential, and on top of that, a ridiculous fuck-off hat straight out of My Fair Lady. Who, she wonders, would give these treasures away to a thrift store like they’re nothing? The hat looks like an elaborate birthday cake. The gown is studded with blue raindrops. Portia brings her discoveries up to the checkout counter, and the cashier says, “Your mom’s lost a lot of weight, huh?”

“These aren’t for my mom,” Portia says. “These are for my gay lover.”

“I knew you were some kind of fag,” he says.

“Incredible detective work,” she says, “truly. Now ring up my items, please. I’m a fag on the go.”

Miguel would rather not see her. He makes that clear. She calls him, and he says, “So now you’re calling me?”

“Yes, I’m calling you,” she says.

“I’ll pay you back for the food.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“What do you want from me, then?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t want anything. I found something in the back of my closet. A gown.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“It doesn’t fit me,” she says, “not anymore, but I think it would fit you perfectly. Can I convince you to come try it on?”

He wants to know what the occasion is. There is no occasion. The gown is the occasion.

The story of last night is that he wants nothing to do with Portia, yet here he is at her kitchen table, his face so close to hers she can feel his breath hot on her cheek. It’s bad luck to try on drag without lashes and lipstick, Portia says. 301s and a cherry lip—those are nonnegotiable.

Miguel is not shy. He undresses when she asks him to undress. She watches his clothes collect on her living room carpet—the corduroy jacket with the fur collar; the unreasonably baggy jeans that make it look like he has no ass whatsoever. Now that he has stripped down to his tiny red briefs, she can finally confirm an ass is there. A pair of legs is connected to it.

“Yeah, I have chicken legs,” Miguel says. “Don’t make fun of them.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Portia says.

“Literally all you do is roast people.”

“Only the people I like.”

“Is that how it works?”

He steps into the raindrop gown, and she zips him, her thumb tracing a delicate line up his back.

The hat is a little much on him, though that does not surprise her. A hat like that—frills and netting and polka dots—you have to wear with intention. But the gown. He needs hips, that much is a given, but already, he is a confection. Of this she is certain. “Walk around a little,” she says. “See how you like it.” Miguel is a terror, clomping around in her heels. He is a tornado, ripping his path through her kitchen. But look—he shimmers any way the light hits him. The gown she bought is covered in stones, hundreds of them. In the gown he is so bright and so brilliant, Portia can only have a glimpse of him before she has to look away.

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Em

This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on September 11, 2019.

I. Sister

For her twenty-first birthday, Kiều’s younger siblings set fire to her bed.

It was intentional, of course, and when she came home from work to find thick black smoke billowing out from under her shared bedroom door, as she stood before the remains of her pitted mattress crackling merrily in shades of red and gold, she wondered if it was time to leave at last.

This was a futile contemplation—they would have to murder her and roll her stone-cold body to a crematorium before she’d abandon them—but in the moment, her pulse leaped in time with the flames, her blood heated till she thought it might combust and melt her into fuel.

“Mai!” she screamed. The culprit could very well have been one of the boys, but no one was capable of stirring up trouble on the level of her little sister.

The pattering of plastic flip-flops reached her before Mai did. “Wow, Chị Kiều,” said Mai, tipping up her face to frown in mock concern. “You don’t look so good.”

Indeed Kiều’s eyes were blistering and tinged crimson from the smoke, and her teeth were bared in a twisting snarl. She stabbed a finger at the fire, which, while burning strong, was unnaturally contained to her half of the room. “Put it out.”

Mai pouted, though her almond eyes were gleaming in satisfaction. “I can’t put out something I didn’t start.”

Minh and Kỳ Lân materialized at the end of the hall, looking considerably more cowed at the sight of both sisters, one towering and furious, the other four feet tall and grinning. “Who?” Kiều snapped. “Which one of you little shits did this?”

Kỳ Lân, the second-oldest at fifteen, opened his mouth first to confess—which meant the culprit was quiet Minh, easily swayed and forever tucked under his older brother’s protection. “Minh,” she said. “Come here and put this out. Now.”

He shuffled forward, not meeting her eyes. The smoke parted around him, twined about his skinny legs but never touched, and when he raised his palms, still chubby with baby fat, the fire shrank as if it were a foal being coaxed, and finally sputtered out. “Sorry,” he mumbled in Kiều’s general direction. “I thought it’d be funny ‘cause we didn’t have candles or a cake.”

Kiều hadn’t the slightest inkling of how setting fire to her bed might come off as funny, but she was always softest on Minh—he so often had peculiar notions like these, and it never helped that Mai was there to play them to her advantage—and she’d just come off a ten-hour shift, and her weariness drove bone-deep. The smoke dissipated, inconsequential to their nonexistent alarms.

“Did you eat?” she said at last, addressing all three. The question was habit; it was comfort, a crutch; it signified home.

They all nodded.

“Homework?” It was a Saturday night, but a necessary follow-up. They nodded again. “Then go to bed.”

Kỳ Lân asked, “Where will you sleep?”

She glanced at Mai, at the anticipation and guilt warring across her little sister’s face. She knew Mai had hoped to get a night—tonight, of all nights—of sleeping alone. Minh’s pyromaniac idea had simply been a convenient tactic.

Kiều also knew she could repair her own bed with a wave of her hand and a bit of concentration. But she was exhausted, and her sister needed the space. “I’ll crash on the couch tonight. Go to bed now—we’re up early tomorrow.”

 

In the cold quiet of the living room later, unable to fall asleep, Kiều played with stars. A twitch of her fingers, wiggling them above her face the way an infant discovers its hands, and bursts of light perforated the darkness. Not exactly stars, in the astronomical sense; these were a multitude of colors, the shapes that swam across her eyelids when she rubbed her eyes too hard. Kiều watched them zing across the stucco ceiling. Tiny shreds of magic in a land otherwise devoid of it, a land intent on breaking down people like them. You had to seize such joys when you could. She liked to imagine the little powers they possessed had originated in the depths of an untamed jungle across the Pacific, where tigers ran rampant and spirits ruled the rivers and mountains, and a many-greats ancestor had been blessed or cursed with the ability to conjure fire and stars, and it had tracked their lineage across generations, across an ocean, to provide comfort in this lonely land. Immigrants who might lack in power of the institution, but whose veins ignited with an innate power all their own.

Down the hallway in their split room, Mai might have been doing the same—if she shared the same strange blood that ran in the others’ veins. Mai was their youngest sibling, of that there was no doubt, but she had never been able to raise or quell a flame, conjure sparks at her fingertips, drench a room with sudden rain. She blamed herself—no. She blamed Kiều. Especially on two particular days of the year: today, March 29, their father’s sixth death anniversary, and April 30, their mother’s third.

Kiều wasn’t around often enough to feel that blame directed at her. She blamed herself for that, too.

The photos taped on the wall above the couch crinkled and wailed as they sensed her sorrow. Only the two photos propped up on the altar in the far corner, one portrait for each parent, was framed. Pictures left to hang without barriers of glass or plastic tended to make more noise, audible only to their ears, and none of them could yet bring themselves to un-mute their parents.

“Shut up,” she muttered to the loose photos, and snuffed out the stars, and forced the sleep to draw to her like a rushing tide.

 

II. Younger Than

The temple was a sea of brown. Brown robes over brown skin over brown earth, from monks to nuns to regular Sunday devotees. The sea undulated with the pulse of the masses as people shuffled in and out between two meditation halls and the kitchens, chattering in rapid Vietnamese, bearing platters of homemade and temple-cooked offerings, discarding sandals at the doormats and thumping cushions on the bare wood floors. Usually Kiều would not have dragged all three children to Sunday prayers, preferring to leave them home and drop by before her shift to catch the final chants. But today’s weekly remembrance service would feature their father—and Mai knew her sister was nothing if not a dutiful daughter.

Mai bit down on her protests as Kiều shouldered a path through the crowd, instructing them all to keep their heads down. Orphans drew attention, invited sympathy. Especially at a gathering of a community with too little power and too much to prove. It’s on us to survive, Ma had said. Family means family and no one else. Subtext: dependence was a weakness when exercised outside the bonds of blood. Even Mai had understood that at eight years old. The only thing she didn’t understand was why Ma hadn’t brought her along to the supermarket that day nearly three years ago instead of Kiều, because Ma knew she was going to die, had possessed a terrifying ability to predict the time and place of a person’s death, and Ma knew Mai was not powerless, knew that her youngest daughter had been practicing bringing freshly dead little birds and mice back to life. But Ma chose Kiều—was always choosing Kiều, the hardest worker, the smartest student—and in the last desperate moments of her life, her oldest daughter was unable to save her after all.

By the time the four siblings found cushions in the back row of the meditation hall, Mai was throbbing with fury. The temple always brought this out in her. Maybe it was the constant battle of faith and loss exuded by the devotees’ breath, or the wall plastered with the wailing unframed portraits of late sangha members, or the simple fact that there was no escaping people in general. It wasn’t fair—her older siblings thrived off collective energy, siphoned threads of it to amuse themselves, perfectly at home in the community. Mai could only quash her irritability and anger, the effort blocking any possible concentration needed to resurrect even a fly. She was forever em, the younger and youngest, the pronoun connoting love but also less. Nothing she could do would ever measure up. Well—saving Ma’s life would have, but that chance, too, Kiều had stolen.

As she shifted to stretch out her sleeping feet she noticed a drop of condensation track its way across the floor. Minh brushed his index finger in an idle circle in front of his cushion, and the water answered, drawing from the exterior of cold bottles and the moisture in the walls, slowly pulled to the stirring of his finger. Kiều noticed. Said nothing. The monks leading the chant at the fore of the hall droned on and on.

Another time, Mai might have ignored them both. But yesterday’s attempt at getting Kiều to crack had been far from fruitful and the rising late morning heat broke her out in sweat and all she wanted was for Kiều to punish Minh as she would punish her, for life to finally be fair, and she was so, so close to boiling over.

Crowds and anger were blocks to her power. Fine. There were other cards to play. She was still a child, after all.

With a deep breath she threw back her head and let loose an ear-splitting wail. The intoning monks stopped short. The entire congregation twisted, still cross-legged, to stare at the little girl shrieking and weeping in the back. Kiều’s entire face blotched red. She snatched up Mai’s arm and towed her to the doors, smiling awkwardly and holding up a hand in apology, the boys hurrying after.

To Kiều’s credit, she waited until they were all piled in the battered family van before whipping around and screaming, “What’s wrong with you?”

Mai had ceased her display the moment the van door snicked shut. She glared at her sister, not knowing how to condense all her wild fraying thoughts into words on her tongue, not knowing how to say you’re not being fair, you don’t understand without sounding even more like the child she didn’t want to be.

So instead she yelled back, “I don’t want to be here! I don’t want this! I hate you!”

Kiều just clenched her jaw and faced forward and sat for a long, pregnant pause before turning the key in the ignition. The van was dead silent the whole way home.

 

III. Less Than

Kiều didn’t show her face at the temple for a month after Mai’s episode. And just like all the previous times when Mai had acted out in one way or another, she never brought it up again other than confiscating her dolls for a week. She had no idea how to prevent her little sister from pulling such stunts—in fact, she was fairly sure Mai no longer even played with dolls, but she had no other possessions to take away as punishment.

And so life continued as it had for the past three years. Kiều went to work, six and a half days a week. She’d gotten her AA in accounting from community college last year, and was always meaning to apply for a bachelor’s program, but there were endless bills to pay even though the mortgage itself had been covered before Ma died, and how could she leave her siblings even more alone?

Once every so often a well-meaning woman from the temple would call her, offering to babysit or inviting them to birthday parties. Kiều always declined, politely. She enjoyed being around other families, but she had also been raised to be self-sufficient. Slacking on responsibility was not, would never be, an option.

Their little house was quiet—subdued—for the next weeks, until one Friday night Kiều returned to find a large shaggy dog loping about the living room, barking like mad as the boys laughed and tossed it bits of last night’s beef.

“Mai!” she yelled immediately. “What is this?”

To her shock, Mai dashed out of their bedroom with a wide grin that was pure elation, no malice. “Chị Kiều! Look what I did!”

“What’d you do? Where’d this dog come from? Why is it—”

“His name is Tiger, and look at his left side!”

The dog slid to a halt before her, panting happily. She leaned over to peer at its side and almost gagged. There, sunken in and nearly concealed by its shaggy black fur, were undeniable tire marks of reddish-pink skin. She looked up at her little sister in horror. “Explain.”

“I’ve been practicing for years—just the little sparrows I find in the front yard sometimes, and one time a mouse—”

“Practicing … on dead animals?”

“I’m not powerless!” Mai cried in joy. “I can do what all of you can!”

“None of us can bring back the dead,” said Kiều, even as her mind whirred, dredging up terrible memories she’d worked so hard to bury—the car ride, the final words—

Mai was already frowning, withdrawing, sensing her older sister’s distress rather than the astonished pride she had hoped for. “Well, I can,” she snapped. “I found Tiger down the street coming home from the bus and Minh helped me drag him back and Kỳ Lân got home and screamed a little but I did it, I saved his life!”

“Dead things are meant to stay dead,” hissed Kiều. “We don’t understand how our own powers work—what if it took your life to revive it? How do you think I’d feel, coming home to find you dead or hurt over a dog?” Fat tears brimmed over Mai’s eyes, but Kiều drove on. “Don’t try this again. Kỳ Lân, go put the dog outside. It probably wants to go home to its family.”

“No!” screamed Mai, but Kỳ Lân silently rose and herded the dog to the door. There was no arguing with Chị Kiều when it came down to it. Fear forbade it; hierarchy permitted fear. Mai and Minh and Kỳ Lân were all little siblings after all, em to chi, loved but still lesser.

Mai let out a shriek of helpless fury. “You’re always taking things away from me!”

They all dispersed to separate corners of the house after the dog was gone.

 

This time, the stars were ice. Frost webbed over Kiều’s hands as she manifested the miniature stars, again sleeping on the couch to avoid Mai’s temper, and she welcomed the bite. She considered making up with her sister by getting a real dog from the pound and immediately dismissed the idea—there was no way she could afford another mouth to feed.

Was this destined to be her life? Was she doomed to play guardian to three children who weren’t hers, not exactly, until they grew up, if they grew up? They weren’t an American family, even if their passports, bound in neat navy blue after Ma and Ba passed the citizenship test, said otherwise; she couldn’t just kick them out once they turned eighteen.

A twinkling shard of ice, illuminated from within by a heatless red light, fell on her brow. She brushed it away irritably. A traitorous shred of her heart jumped at the color, even if it wasn’t the exact shade she had come to fear.

Three years ago, that icy winter day, shifting in the passenger’s seat as Ma raced down the highway to get to the supermarket before closing, Kiều’s hands had glowed red. It was sudden—one second she was staring out the window and in the next she’d glanced down and shrieked, because the only other time her palms had shone that violent crimson was when Ba was in the operating room and five minutes later the surgeon had walked out with somber, pitying eyes. Ma looked over at Kiều’s hands and an inexpressible sorrow had clouded her gaze.

“There’s a reason for everything, con,” she’d murmured to Kiều. “I can see a lot of things, most of them things I don’t want to see, but there’s no preventing what’s meant to happen.”

“Ma,” said Kiều, a sick feeling ballooning in her stomach. “What do you mean?”

Ma only gave her a small, weary smile. “Con, nhớ chăm sóc em nha.”

My child, remember to look after your little siblings.

And then the car slipped on ice to the left, into opposing traffic, and the ringing went on forever.

Lying there beneath the twisted metal, Kiều had believed she was paralyzed. But that was only the shock, the doctors told her after, because she’d escaped with not a scratch on her body. She’d never broken a bone or experienced a major injury before in her life—she’d never had an opportunity before the crash to realize she was unbreakable.

Now, with floating ice dotting the living room ceiling, her head spinning years away, Kiều squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of nice things, bland things, anything to drive away the memories: electric bills, grocery lists, Sunday pizza nights, upcoming birthday gifts—

You’re always taking things away from me.

In the chaos of the dog, that particular cry had gotten lost. Of course, Mai had meant the dog, or the dolls that had been confiscated—

Kiều recalled how Mai had begged to go to the grocery store that day, how Ma had refused with a firm and knowing glance, had chosen Kiều instead. And Kiều had turned out to be unbreakable, but Mai—Mai had turned out to be a resurrectionist.

Ma had known. Said nothing. What was more, Ma hadn’t needed to bring anyone with her in the car, if she’d known she was going to die.

The great family arsenal of guilt, ancient and brutally effective. Kiều had been drawing from the seemingly bottomless well of it ever since that day. Had used it to keep herself working, praying, moving at all times; had used it to maintain that distance between herself and her little siblings. Nhớ chăm sóc em.

She sat up and got to her feet.

There were things that needed to be said.

 

 

***

Rumpus original art by Dara Herman Zierlein.

***

A note on Vietnamese pronouns: Chị is used to address an older sister or general older woman. Em is more versatile, and can be used to address a younger sibling or general younger person (regardless of gender), though it does tend to carry a connotation of femininity. It can also be used to show affection (a boyfriend to a girlfriend, for example) or to call out a person’s lesser status in a social hierarchy.

Rumpus Original Fiction: All This Will Be Underwater

I had been in a rut for some months. I was working remotely, writing ad copy for a company that was based in Mountain View. I lived with my girlfriend, Hanna, in a house with two other couples in the other two rooms and also the living room had been converted into a bedroom for a seventh resident whom the landlord did not know about. Everyone in the house promised they would do the dishes and smoke outside only they never did. And it was so hot all the time, and our air conditioner was on the fritz. I was drinking too much. I was pretending I was tired when Hanna wanted to talk at night. I kept inventing excuses to get out of the house so I could go eat greasy burgers at the place we had promised not to go because they abused their workers. In private, I wondered if I was the worst person I knew. It felt all the time like something terrible was about to happen. Partly this was due to the general state of the world. The other part was inexplicable, like deja vu.

Twice a week my employer would mail me a package, inside of which would be my assignment. My job was to write reviews of products that made it seem as though I had stumbled onto the particular item myself. I wrote tweets and Instagram posts and blog copy, which would then be plugged into various sites and influencer accounts, masquerading as native content. I had written about self-seltzering water bottles, lip scrubs, wine aerators, depilators, solar-powered cell phone batteries, lotions, serums, and so very many diet teas. I hated the diet teas the most. They were basically laxatives, only they smelled worse. In fact I had long ago stopped sampling them—they were always accompanied by extreme stomach cramps and diarrhea.

My second-most hated assignments were the beauty products, for which I had long ago run out of language to describe. The skincare products all promised to make your skin “glowy” or “luminous.” That pregnancy glow. That orgasm glow. 10,000-watt glow-power. I found myself writing things that I could not bear to say out loud. Hanna would tease me: “Oh you look so glowy. Get over here—I can’t help myself.” The beauty products reminded me of my mother, who spoke often about “aging gracefully.” Sometimes I thought about what I would look like as an old woman, and then about Hanna. I thought Hanna would age beautifully, which gave me a perverse and unearned pride.

I loved Hanna so much it felt like an agony. I knew I was letting her down. I got emails from my boss at random hours. We are pushing natural-grown products. Lab grown = sketchy, aberration. Call me w Qs. I never had any questions.

 

 

On Monday I told Hanna I was going to the dentist for a cavity filling and instead went to a bar across town, where I flirted with the bartender for two hours and got her number. On Tuesday, I came home with a slice of cake for Hanna and me to share. Hanna asked, “Should you be eating sweets? So soon after a filling?” and I accused her of policing me, and then I cried and then she cried and we slept on opposite edges of the bed. On Wednesday I texted the bartender, Tell me your fantasy. She did not respond.

On Friday a city official knocked on our door. She was wearing a yellow hazard vest over her blouse and skirt, and an N95 mask.

“English?” she asked. “Español? Chinese?”

“English,” we said.

She handed us a document.

“It’s all explained in there,” she said. Then she went on to the next house.

The document stated that the area would need to be evacuated. Rising ocean levels combined with new rainfall patterns meant that the city could no longer safely house us in these zip codes, and that we would need to find new accommodations. City services—power, garbage, mail, water (ironically)—would be cut off. After this deadline, it would be illegal to occupy the area. Any questions and we could email this address, or contact this 1-800 phone number.

“This is dumb,” our roommates said. “This is unenforceable. Where are we going to go? They can’t do this. This is just classic fuckery. I mean, who is going to make us leave? The cops? Good luck, evicting thousands of people. Who drank all the beer? Where is the beer?”

I went back to our room and opened the package for my next assignment. Unusually, I had a whole week to work on this single product, a multistep skincare regimen. The package contained three glass bottles with eye droppers in the lids; they were labeled only as 1, 2, and 3 and the liquids inside varied only in the intensity of their lilac hue. They smelled faintly floral and medicinal—like gin & tonic. I was to apply the products, in ascending numerical order, morning and night for one full week. The liquids were said to contain several vitamins, moisturizers, and emulsifiers that would brighten; tauten; and yes, give a healthy glow to the skin. Florilux was the brand name.

I took one look at the bottles and I got on my knees and begged Hanna to get me out of the house.

“Okay, but only if you promise to dial it back, like, two hundred notches,” she said.

When I first met Hanna she’d been hovering, quite literally dangling, above my head. Strapped into a device for painting high walls. I was walking below and saw her sneakers, then her lovely shapely legs. She was an angel! She was an employee of the city, commissioned to paint a mural. I asked if I could buy her a drink. Two months later we’d moved in together.

 

 

That evening after I got the Florilux shipment, we went to the bar down the street that we loved, a skanky punk bar called Eddy’s. The bar looked rough outside but led way to a starrily-lit enclosed patio. The fence had a texture like fish skin because so many people had nailed their N95 masks to it—in an act of protest, or perhaps boredom. It was crowded that day, and someone was sitting in the booth we normally liked to sit in: a man about our age with a long beard and chipped black fingernail polish.

“Mind if we join you?” we asked.

“Makes no difference to me,” he said. We seated ourselves far down the table from him and got situated with beers.

Unprompted, he cracked his knuckles and announced, “Feels like the sunset of civilization lately.”

“You’re fun,” Hanna said.

“Do you mind not bumming us out?” I said.

“Hey, fuck you. I got evicted today,” he said.

I said, “Isn’t that just classic fuckery? How are they going to evict ten thousand people?”

“They’re sending us from the frying pan into the fire,” he said darkly.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Get this app. I created it, full disclosure. You can search any location and see what’s coming.”

He held up his phone and showed us Eddy’s. A little animated water line sloshed around above the building roof. It was surprisingly cutesy, for what it was conveying.

“Are you for real?” I asked.

“Ever heard of climate departure? Ever heard of the methane clathrate gun?” he asked.

We moved to a different table.

When we got home, I stared at the Florilux bottles, all lined up on the dresser. I felt like a fraud. Just a skincare regimen! Just one hamburger, just one ride on a plane! Hanna was on the bed on her phone, and when I turned around, she showed me our place, with a little water line dancing around and an animated fish swimming past our window.

“You downloaded it?” I asked.

“Look at this,” she said, and swiped the screen to show a stick figure clutching its neck and drowning. Its eyes turned to Xs.

“Say we move inland,” Hanna said. She fiddled with the app again, and now the stick figures were running from cartoon flames.

“This guy’s a sicko,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m deleting it,” Hanna said.

But then she didn’t say anything else for a long time. I opened the Florilux bottles and quickly, roughly applied the product to my face. One-two-three. I hated myself for finding pleasure in it.

“Are you okay?” I asked Hanna.

“I know you’ve been texting other girls,” she said.

I sat down. I didn’t bother denying it. I said, “It doesn’t mean anything.”

She scratched the blanket with her fingernail, back and forth. She said, “I don’t want to have to always be asking you to do the right thing.”

“You won’t,” I said.

“Anyway, just because the world is trash it doesn’t mean you can do bad things,” she said. I wondered if she knew about the burgers. I put my hand on her thigh.

“I know. I’ll stop,” I said.

Her face was turned away, but she curled her fingers around mine.

“I feel like shit,” she said.

“Now you sound like me,” I said.

“Shut up,” she said. “You don’t have a premium on despair.”

I kissed her over and over. I tackled her back onto the pillows. I pushed my face into her lap.

“Don’t,” she said, giggling. “You smell like an old lady.”

The next day I did not work on my assignment, instead staying in bed all day watching TV. And I didn’t work on it the next day, or the next, or the next. I tried, but instead I found myself walking to the coffeeshop I liked in the morning and sitting in the shop for the time it took to drink my coffee and then by the time I got home all I could do was get into bed. I threw a T-shirt over the Florilux bottles on my dresser. They made me think of too much: my mother, standing at the mirror, pulling her brow taut with her hands. Flowers. Springtime. Hanna when we first started dating. The curl of her hair, the tawny patch of down on her navel. It was objectively insane to love someone this much. In the evenings, I’d meet Hanna at her BART stop and walk her home. I did not text other girls. Soon a week had passed; I missed the deadline for my copy and I received a professional-but-concerned email from my boss, with her boss copied on it.

Noticed your copy did not come in last night. Everything okay? We can give you a one-week extension, but do hope that you’ll get something to us soon.

I read it once and deleted it.

 

 

On Saturday, our roommates informed us that there would be a protest to the eviction down at the lake.

“What time will it be?” I asked.

“Ten or eleven-thirty,” they said.

“And what are we protesting?” I asked.

“Eviction,” they said.

“How is that going to help?” I said.

“Shut up, you boot-licker,” our roommates said.

We put on our walking shoes and made our way down to the lake. It was crowded; it stank of algae. The heat rose off the pavement in wiggles. I thought of the man’s app, wondered what grisly animation he had cooked up for the lake. He didn’t strike me as an expert. There were many people in the crowd, pent up and angry, wound like springs. They held signs with various admonishments. At the fringes were the slower walkers, the families; I saw a girl bend waveringly to tie her shoe, her mother putting her hand like a cap over her head.

We approached a stage built up in front of the courthouse. There was a speaker up there, a woman with long, gray hair and black taped Xs over her nipples. She was otherwise topless. She had a megaphone, and she stood in front of several others who also had Xs on their chests.

“My name is Justine,” she said. “I have been ringing the alarm bells for fifty years. And, boy, are my arms tired.”

My phone dinged. Assignment overdue, it said.

Justine was still speaking, though the persons around her had laid down on the stage in the pose of corpses.

“Extreme heat at the equator plus existing humidity is already causing staggering numbers of deaths due to renal failure. A wet-bulb temperature of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit—temperatures we are already seeing regularly in places with such humidity—is lethal within hours.

“At three degrees of warming, we cannot even be certain that there will be clouds,” she said.

Hanna squeezed my hand. “I want to go,” she said.

“Right now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

We went home, we went to our room, we sat together on the bed.

“How soon do you think it’ll be?” Hanna said. “What do you think it will be?”

“What is the ‘what’ here?” I asked.

“Death,” she said.

I pushed her shirt up to uncover her perfect belly, round and tan. What the French called the “cheese belly.”

“There simply aren’t any satisfying answers to that question,” I said.

She turned away from me, and I could tell she was crying.

“Hanna,” I said.

“You’re the doomer,” she said. “So just tell me, so I can expect the worst.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She wiped her nose on the sheets and said, “I want a sea burial.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “A what?”

“I want a burial at sea. Actually, I want a Viking burial,” she said. “I want you to put me on a raft and push me out to sea, and then shoot a flaming arrow.”

“I have really bad aim,” I said.

“You can only get into Valhalla if you die in battle,” she explained.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s go down fighting.”

I loved her so much. I told her, “I love you so much.”

Then I asked her if she wanted to get very drunk.

We went to Eddy’s. I felt a sudden and intense conviviality towards every single person around, my fellow humans. I wanted to make love to everybody all at once. We went to our booth and Hanna put her forehead on the table. I bought drinks and returned.

“To your health,” I said, tapping my glass against Hanna’s.

She slurped at hers. She pointed to a booth at the back where people had begun to pile sundries: blankets, bags, jugs of water. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED read a sign taped to the wall above.

“It’s like everyone already knows it’s an emergency,” Hanna said.

I didn’t say anything. My phone dinged: another email from my boss. We stress the urgency of you turning your assignments in. Failure to comply with deadlines will result in probationary status or, if misbehavior continues, termination.

I downed my drink. I reached out and took Hanna’s hand.

“I’m going to be better,” I told her.

We arrived home tipsy and as we went into our room I nearly knocked into our dresser.

“Steady, cowgirl,” Hanna said, giggling. She pulled at my clothes.

“I have to send my thing,” I said.

“Do it later,” she said.

“I’ll be so quick,” I said.

I got out my computer and stared at the Florilux bottles. I opened one and that herby, lovely smell leaked out. I took a tiny drop and put it on my tongue. It was gaseous, like perfume. I imagined downing the whole thing. Glug! Hanna bit my ear and I batted her away.

I typed, Are you aging? Are you tired and worn? Do you spend all your time fretting about the fine lines on your face and how they foretell the slow and steady march toward death or, worse, that moment when the world will turn its eyes from your old & unbeautiful face? Do you wake in the morning with an aching in your knees and wonder if there will be any dignity in the end? If so, Florilux^TM is for you.

Then I hit send.

 

 

That night I dreamed of my mother, I dreamed of her swimming laps in the pool at the Y like she did three times a week. When I was younger my sister and I would go to the daycare but when we got older we would do our own thing, swim sometimes ourselves or play in the gymnasium or, once we reached middle school, go on the ellipticals. We all went together to the locker room and while my sister and I would undress in the bathroom stalls, my mother would strip alongside all the other middle-aged-to-old ladies, and put on her navy one-piece and swimming cap. I could picture her body even better than I could picture my own, even still, her long skinny limbs and her soft round belly, the appendectomy scar she had that looked like chewing gum, the freckles on her shoulders and back, the nodules of her spine. She fretted about the changing of her body into something spent. “Youth is its own beauty,” she would tell us.

 

 

In the dream, she was already in the pool, cutting back and forth across the water like a blade. She turned her face every three strokes to breathe: slice, slice, slice, breath. But as she swam, only the lane she was in began draining, and she didn’t seem to notice, she just swam doggedly on, even until her knees and elbows were knocking the pool’s bottom and finally she was on her belly. Only then did she get up and move to the next lane to begin again. I woke before the entire pool had emptied.

Unsurprisingly, my copy submission had elicited a curt response from my boss, which read simply: Come to office ASAP. So I showered and dressed and declined a portion of the eggs Hanna was cooking for breakfast.

“I have to go to Mountain View,” I said.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“If you wait like fifteen minutes I can walk with you to BART,” she said.

“Actually, I think I’d like to go alone,” I said. “Trying to get my head right.”

The train that day was standing room only. It moved above and below ground, finally descending under the bay in a pop of darkness. We rattled along there down below. Everyone around me was distracted, wearing headphones or scrolling on their phones or staring at their feet. It felt like the waiting room at a hospital. Still, it was sort of a miracle, traveling under the water like this. How had they built a tunnel underwater? How did you do that without it flooding into where you dug? There was so much I didn’t know.

At Millbrae I switched to an aboveground train. I kept checking my phone, wondering what sort of trouble was waiting for me at the office. Or maybe I would just be fired. I tried to summon alarm at the thought, but none came. I saw a billboard with two beautiful golden people tongue-kissing in a club. I wondered if I was the worst person I knew.

At the office, I checked in with the receptionist and was led to a room to wait for my boss, Jules, a scary, beautiful, and severe woman whom I’d once watched eat sushi by stabbing pieces with a chopstick. I got out my laptop and futilely typed some notes: Florilux: so luxe it’s in the name. Floral = flower (??) Flowers are nature. Smells great! Jules marched in, her tight skirt gripping her thighs.

“You think this is funny?” she asked, holding a printout of the copy I’d turned in yesterday.

“It’s not meant to be funny,” I said.

She sat down. I could see her working to compose her face.

I said, “Do you ever think about how we’re ugly little cogs in a terrible machine?”

Jules pressed her lips together. “You’ve picked a funny time to grow a conscience,” she said.

“It’s recently come to my attention that our days are numbered,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. The world is falling apart and we’re writing ad copy for lip gloss. I’m not stupid, you know. But you can’t eat self-righteousness. So do your job,” she said.

She slid the paper across the table to me and left the room. She had drawn a big black X over my copy. I thought of the people from the rally. I typed, Florilux: You’ll need your skin in tip-top shape for when the clouds disappear and we all irradiate.

I hit send; I waited. A few minutes later, I received Jules’s reply.

“Do again,” it said, “or you’re done.”

I pictured the bottles, their floral smell. I thought of Hanna and her Viking burial. I thought of my mother washing her face. I considered that Florilux was in many ways a perfect product. It promised not only beauty and youth but also something more fundamental, the idea of preparing for a future that would surely come and would be better than the past.

Florilux: for those of us left, I wrote. Then I hit send and I went home.

 

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Rosie Struve

Rumpus Original Fiction: The Litany of Invisible Things

Sleepless, you have started thinking of the little shop at the end of Dhamijah Street. For five hundred dollars, its slender wall-propped mirror reveals—what do they say the wizened shop owner calls it?—your “onye ndu.” The being (or beings) with whom you are guaranteed a lifetime of happiness. You have started thinking of this little shop even though you and your husband of eight years promised never to enter it: You do not need magic to understand what your hearts already reveal.

 

 

Sleepless, you think, too, of Ebenezer, who (until last year) lived in the adjacent apartment. He played full-volume porn at 2 a.m. and never picked up after his teeth-flashing pitbull, dried clumps of feces lining the path from his front door to the building elevator. One evening, long before his departure, Ebenezer returned from the wine bar down the block, staggering as usual, his words slurred but oddly gleeful. With some effort, you discerned the jubilance of his syllables: “She exists! She exists!” You knew then that he had made a pit stop enroute home. Strange to think, even now, that he had glimpsed another’s face in the shop’s burnished silver. A soul that was his. It should have proven the mirror’s fraudulence, but no, barely a year afterward, Ebenezer’s finger sported a glittering oversized diamond. You and your husband were soon kept awake, not by sultry post-midnight moans, but by the patter of tiny feet, the sound of shattering ceramic, his cursing, his wife’s too, but that light and playful sort of cursing, the kind that says, “My darlings, you can break every mirror, steal the coins from our wallets, even set us ablaze, and we would still love you forever.” When they moved away last year, the duo and their dog and their three rugrats, a silence took over their late-night reverberations. It is this silence that keeps you up and turns your thoughts toward that little shop at the end of Dhamijah Street, even as your husband snores beside you.

You have always overwritten the moonlight’s quiet with a hierarchy of forthcoming melodies: first the wailing, day and night, of your flesh-and-blood, yours, yours, then the twisting of gums to sound out Mama–Mama before Dada being non-negotiable—then their slow and measured reading from large-font picture books, the world discovered in nouns: rainbow, fish, sun, sky, love. The sound of love discovered in you: the stifling of tears after a bad day at school, your fingers wiping salt off their cheeks; the laughter following a sixth-grade Spelling Bee contest, not because they won, but because they did it at all, braved a march onto that podium, faced those strangers with a tall back and said, Throw your fiercest words at me; the patter-patter-patter of their aching heart thanks to that boy in eighth-grade Geometry, and the flutter in yours when you watched your husband hold them close, watched him whisper, “Let the patter lead you to love. ‘I like you’ is only three words and three seconds. It’s how your mother became mine.”

 

 

The sound of love: you and him. Once upon a time.

The sound of life: the silence at the doctor’s office after “male infertility.” That night, instead of drowning his sorrows in your ears—like you two had promised you always would—he chose a bar—Ebenezer’s, funnily enough—and a bottle without end. He passed out in one of those alleyways that makes you think of bat-wielding strangers and lit cigarettes and evil intentions. Gargled on his own vomit, and who knows where he would be now but for that Good Samaritan, some passing nervous teen on a bike who called 911 even though it was past her curfew, and she surely got in trouble, like you imagined your own angel would someday, imagined your letting them know that you were disappointed but also so very proud, and even if they hugged you all quivering or stormed up the stairs and violently slammed their door, the loudness of their existence was all you would ever need.

After the hospital discharge, he apologized.

“Don’t,” you said.

He apologizes still.

Daily.

You know he means it. You hear it in the hiss of the oil when you return from work, the scent of your favorite chicken curry welcoming you. You hear it in his clatter of fork against plate—timid, slow-moving—as he asks about your day, seeking even the littlest moment of yours that he can make his. You hear it in the rustling sheets when the lights dim, and he snuggles his back against your chest because he likes when you hold him, your dear husband, likes how your arms tangle around his midriff until the snores start. But then it’s 2 a.m. and he is gone; you are not. There is laughter in your head, a chorus. After all this time, you can’t tell if it belongs to Ebenezer’s rugrats or to yours, the ones that don’t exist, except up here in your head—and perhaps in that mirror that you can’t stop thinking of. In that mirror, do their faces show? You know so little about how it works. Maybe they even speak.

So, the next day, while your dear husband is at work, you call in sick and make your way to the little shop at the end of Dhamijah Street. You wait sweltering in line for hours, ignoring the patrolling hawkers selling strawberry yogurts, paperbacks, umbrellas, love trinkets. Once inside, you push the creased notes into the shop owner’s liver-spotted hands. You let her position you this way and that until you’re standing at the perfect angle. You expect to see yourself staring back—and maybe there would even be immeasurable relief in that; maybe the mirror is just a mirror, no answers to be found—but the glass is already steaming, distorting. From its mist, a blurred shape forms. It is not them. It is your husband, unspeaking, his pixelated smile uncertain. Is there any surprise? The universe crafted him for you. The universe knows that he can be enough. Still. Listen to your heart, how it sinks at this revelation.

When you return home, the door is unlocked. He is clad in his sea-green apron, sprinkling diced peppers onto a pan of fried eggs. He kisses you on the forehead. Enquires about your day despite a knowing in his eyes. Trembling, you fall into him, your face against the jalapeno fragrance of his chest, and you tell him that you want a divorce.

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

Rumpus Original Fiction: Run, Sister

The brother and sister stand in the garage, looking at a corkboard wall with an array of tools dangling off pegs. The tools are the father’s, the father who no longer lives in the house, the father who hasn’t seen the kids in several years. The sister remembers once hearing the mother say on the phone—in reference to the tools—He just put them there for show. He couldn’t fix a damn thing if his life were at stake.

“Pick one,” the brother demands, and the sister searches the wall. She hates this game. It’s one of her least favorites, but she knows there’s no getting out of it. She looks at the collection—saws, drills, wrenches, pliers. Her eyes land on a hammer. A hammer seems like it would hurt less than a saw, less than pliers. She points to it.

The brother walks closer to the wall. “You better start running,” he says, as he takes the hammer from its peg. “Your lucky hammer!” he yells.

The sister runs. She doesn’t want to die at 9 years old. She doesn’t want to be beaten with the hammer, cut with the saw, tortured with the pliers. She knows her brother is faster than her. She knows he will find all her hiding spots.

 

The girl wants her mother, but it is Thursday, and on Thursdays, the mother sleeps at her boyfriend’s house. The mother does hire someone to watch the children—a well-meaning, sweet older woman who shares a twin bed at night with the sister, their two scared bodies smushed up against each other, clinging to one another until morning. Both of them terrified, both of them weaker than the brother. The woman is scared of loss, and lightning, and swimming, and taking showers during thunderstorms. The girl is scared of her brother, and the man she’s never seen who lives in her house, and of being abducted and murdered like those news stories she sometimes sees behind her mother’s shoulder while she is cooking dinner. The sister loves this older woman so much, more than anything or anyone, but deep down she knows that this woman isn’t physically strong enough to protect her, knows the older woman would try but also knows that the older woman would be killed before she could. Still, the older woman is the only one who sides with her, believes in her fear, the only one who seems to need comfort as much as she does.

On the occasion that the ‘game’ will end up in the house, the older woman will yell, Danny, please stop! My blood pressure, my blood pressure! Or I’m gonna call the cops, Danny! Or Let her alone, Danny! Stop being so fresh!

The sister appreciates this valiant effort but knows that the brother will not listen to the woman because he is not scared of her. He will continue to chase the sister.

And it’s not like if the mother were home, the game would have ended either. There have been many times when the sister tried to tell the mother what had happened, but the brother raced to the mother first, spun a story about how the sister was antagonizing him. The sister would be so frustrated that she would scream, and cry, and yell and the mother would say, Enough of this! Both of you!

And that would be that.

 

The sister runs around to the other side of the house and crouches in a bush. She doesn’t want to die, feels like her life hasn’t even started yet. She prays, like a child does, for simple things. She has an ice skating birthday party next week, and she prays to live long enough to attend. Ice skating always hurts her feet because she never learned how to balance on the skates. Instead, her feet turn inward, and her ankles roll, but she loves it despite this, and she prays to be able to live another few days so she can attend the ice skating party, even though she knows her feet will hurt after.

Sometimes, she bargains with God in these moments—I really want to go to the ice skating party, but if you don’t want me to go, I won’t. Just please let me say goodbye to my dog, goodbye to my Hebrew School teacher, goodbye to the older woman in the house who is sitting and watching her programs, who would try and protect me if she knew what was happening but who couldn’t protect me if she tried.

“Where are you? Where are you?” the brother sings. “Got your lucky hammer here!”

The boy is laughing, and the girl is terrified. She tries not to breathe, not to move, not to blink. He rounds the corner of the house and pretends not to see her hidden behind the skeletal shrub. He plays dumb for a moment, and she exhales. Then he turns to face her.

“Think I didn’t see you there, did ya? You better run!”

The girl bolts. She runs in zigzags, does anything she can to get away from him and the hammer. As she runs, she starts to second-guess her choice. A hammer can break bones. A hammer can bruise skin. An axe has a flimsy, wobbly blade. Her feet ricochet off the pavement. The beautiful new pavement that was just poured the other the week. The sister remembers the urge to lie in it and make a snow angel, or to write out HI! in footsteps, or to carve her initials, at the very least, but she fought that urge. It was taped off with yellow ribbon and two wooden sticks, and even though she could have very easily stepped over the makeshift boundary, she didn’t. She likes to do what she’s told.

 

The sister runs up the steep slope of the driveway. She’s tired. He’s behind her. She knows he’s letting her lead, that he doesn’t want the game to be over yet. She keeps running and running and running—the prayers on a loop in her mind: please, please, please, please, birthday party, ice skating, at least say goodbye.

There are nights, most nights, the vast majority of nights, when the mother is home, where the sister crawls out of bed and shuffles to the hallway outside the mother’s door. She does her best to avoid every creak in the carpet, never bumps the doorframe with her shoulder. She stands, breathless, terrified, unsure if it’s worth waking her mother but too scared to imagine an alternate option. She wishes the older woman were here in these moments, that her mother slept out more often, that someone tried to protect her instead of forcing her to sleep alone. She knows if she goes back in her room, her brother will sneak in, and she’ll be murdered or tortured by him or a home invader or the man who has been hiding in her house that she’s never seen.

Even though she checks under her bed, in both of her closets, opens every drawer though she knows a body could never fit in one, she’s convinced herself that there’s still a man hiding somewhere and that the day she finds him will be the day she gets no more birthday parties, or trips to the Burger King drive-thru, or Hebrew School music classes, or hugs from her mother, or hugs from the older woman.

She stands there, soles of feet stuck in place, waiting, waiting, to figure out what to do. She knows the mother will be mad if she wakes her up. You’re 7 years old, 8 years old, 9 years old, when is this going to stop? You should be able to sleep in your own bed by now.

The girl hates disappointing the mother, hates feeling like a coward, like a baby, like she’s not normal, like it’s not normal that she cries in the middle of the night at sleepovers and has her friend’s parents call the mother to pick her up and then is equally scared to sleep in her own home, like it’s not normal that she watches the clock at Hebrew school and prays for it to break, to stop, to get extended one more hour, one more minute, so that she doesn’t have to go home and stand on the carpet between her and her mother’s room, scared and stuck and holding her breath and paralyzed by the fear of disappointing the mother but equally paralyzed by the fear of going back into her bedroom and sleeping alone.

 

The brother is gaining on the sister. They are both up the hill now, and she is making a left, running on the sidewalk. “Lucky hammer,” he chides. “Don’t let it hit you. Don’t let it smash you.”

If she were older, she might understand that if the brother really wanted to do something, he could have done it ten times by now. She might connect the dots and realize that they’ve played this game a dozen times and that he’s never actually used the weapon on her. But she’s not older. She’s 9, and the only thing she can think about is running as fast as she can so that she can go to Hebrew school on Monday and sing the silly song about trains and Matzoh Ball soup, so that she can go to the birthday party and watch with envy as the girl opens her gifts and blows out the candles, so that she can hug her mother, and her dog, and the older woman, and say goodbye to her Hebrew School teacher, and the boy at school who once cut a lock of her hair, and the bus driver who gives out little foil-wrapped chocolate hearts on Valentine’s Day. All of these things overwhelm her with such longing, such a deep desire to live, that she runs and runs and runs and can’t conceive a reality in which her life is not in jeopardy.

 

Most nights, after the girl has checked the closets, and the bathtub, and the drawers, and under her bed, but before she stands in the hallway, holding her breath outside the mother’s room, she lies awake, looking at the popcorn ceiling of her bedroom, eyes open and mind racing, and she prays. These aren’t formal prayers she’s learned in temple. These are the prayers of a child, prayers specific to her. When it began, years ago, it was a simple prayer: I pray to God to protect me and my family and those people are my mom, my dad, my brother, my dog, and the older woman. Overtime, the girl added to the prayer. It started with her cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles. It continued with her Hebrew School teachers—each one she’s had since kindergarten—and her grade school teachers, and her bus drivers. It morphed into every person she could think of, every kid in her grade, every member of the congregation, every friend she used to have and their parents and their siblings, and the doctor and the dentist, and her old dance teacher and her old soccer coach. It became obsessive, more and more and more names, and if she didn’t say them aloud at night, everyone she forgot would be dead the next day, and it would be her fault, all her fault. After the list of names came the hand gestures, and the snapping ritual, and the rubbing of her fingers together, for she convinced herself that if she didn’t do these trivial things, that this too would lead to the demise of a loved one or of anyone whose name she said or didn’t say. This would take hours, and the girl would be sick with the false sense of control she was burdened with but didn’t want.

 

The sister continues to run on the uneven ground of the sidewalk, one foot in front of the other, noticing the tiny pebbles embedded into to the chain of squares. She has a pain in her side, a shooting pain, and she knows it’s a cramp, which a British girl at her school calls stitch. Stitch, stitch, stitch, stitch, stitch. She spells out the word in her head to the rhythm of Aretha Franklin’s, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”  S-T-I-T-C-H. S-T-I-T-C-H. She can’t go on like this much longer. She keeps sing-spelling the word, trying to distract herself, trying to keep running.

The brother is an arm’s length away. She thinks about the older woman, how she’s just inside, how every year on her own birthday her only wish is for this woman to live forever. They cling to each other at night. They are both scared.  She knows the older woman can’t protect her, really. Knows if she runs in the house to tell her, the woman’s blood pressure will go up, a risk she’s not willing to take.

She’s thinking of the woman’s scent—Dove soap and hair spray—thinking of how nice it would be to hug her, or to lie in bed clinging to her.

And that’s when she trips.

There’s an especially uneven slab of sidewalk. The toe of her shoe gets caught. She lands on the concrete and smacks her lip on the hard pseudo-earth. She curls up in a ball, protects her head with her arms, scrunches her eyes. “Don’t. Please please please please please.” In this moment, she’s not thinking about Hebrew School, or the birthday party, or the older woman. She’s not thinking of anything. She’s acting like an animal, utilizing instinct to protect herself.

She braces for the impact of the hammer. She feels a swift, blearing pain collide with her shin, but the texture is rubbery, not cold like metal.

It was a kick. He only kicked her.

“You’re such a baby. Get up,” the brother says. “I won’t break your bones this time. Gotta leave room for another game.” He laughs.

The sister laughs too. Her laugh is maniacal. Her eyes are wide. Her shin throbs and her mouth tastes metallic. The brother leaves her there, sitting on the sidewalk laughing, and retreats to the house, probably to play a video game or to get a snack.

The sister looks around. Her hands press on the gravelly surface, and she pushes herself to stand. Her legs feel light and wobbly. Blood pumps in her ears. Her eyes adjust to the bright, bright sun. She stares down at the cracked frame of the basketball hoop at the sloping end of her driveway in a daze. She’s taking it all in—the gentle breeze that spawns goosebumps on her skin, the smell of dewy grass, the squeal of birds flying overhead. She stands still, detached, in a state of amazement and awe for all that exists and doesn’t exist.

After some time, she runs toward the house. She gets to go to the birthday party, gets to see her mother again, gets to go inside and hug the older woman, and smell the hair spray and Dove soap, and feel the soft comforting jiggle of the woman’s stomach rolls as they hold each other throughout the night.

 

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

Rumpus Original Fiction: Country People Work

Irving Campbell became a dentist. When he graduated from the University of the West Indies, his mother attended the ceremony. She wore her best church hat, and her scented powder had the essence of melon.

Are you proud of me? Proud: cocoa, tea.

The taste of words formed at the back of the tongue were swallowed and digested when spoken. Irving Campbell told only his mother when he began to taste his words. He could not quite recall the exact age at which he shared this with her, but he knew it was of a time where there was comfort to sit at a mother’s lap. Words like “comfort”: plum, just almost overripe. Antihistamine: bitter, metallic, like licking the rim of a car. Words like “fuzz” made an itch, a tingle, stalks of wild grass planted in the pit of his stomach. Church, like scotch bonnet pepper sliced, sautéed with onions, scallion, and callaloo served on plates that displayed dancing hummingbirds somewhere above the sea. Irving explained this to his mother as best as he could. His trepidation tasting stale: breakfast cereal left in the cupboard too long.

“Someting nasty grow, take root, yuh’ve got to dig it out, with your bare hands if necessary. But that’s left to you and God, that’s where I leave you,” his mother said to him after he finished explaining. She said nothing more and didn’t say much more to him ever again. Me tink some of his wires got crossed, somewhere along da way, Irving had overheard her saying to a woman from church. And me cyaant save him now.

In bed that night, Irving put three fingers into his mouth and clawed at his tongue. Something nasty grow, take root, yuh’ve got to dig it out, with your bare hands if necessary. 

He vomited his fear, which tasted like communion bread and wine. Another sign he reasoned that something evil had made its way inside of him. And only a devil could do that.

 

 

So Irving Campbell became a dentist. To look inside the mouths of others and dig out all the devils. It was a job he found most responsible, most rewarding, most dignifying. It was a job for a respected and trusted man. It was the job for the type of man who he had wished could have pressed a cool cloth to his forehead, put the weight of his hands on to usher him into bed, the kind that told stories for sleep that could have held truth, the playful kind of truth that balances delicately between what is lived and seen and what could be. Father: star anise, boiled in broth for soup. Dead: chicken bones, chewed for marrow.

Irving had pulled eighty-one teeth throughout the years he had been hired by various schoolhouses across the countryside. Though the checks were often mailed to him months later, for amounts that did not match his quote, he agreed to visit the schools each year. The children and their parents would have severe decay, the kind he knew came from country people work. Which meant canned foods instead of toothpaste, only the occasional baking soda rinse. He would offer his recommendation of extraction, much to his delight. A delight which came from a work, a duty, bestowed onto him by God. A secret shared between them. Something watched over, tended to, something whispered, in the release of the gums as he pulled: devils, with his bare hands. When the blood came, he would point to a mop bucket just beside their chairs, where he asked them to spit.

Irving would read about his condition, the taste of words, later on in his life, and knew somehow that the discovery would kill him. Synesthesia. He saw the word in a medical journal while sitting at the rusted metal desk in his office. He thought then of his reputation, a reputation which had taken him years of medical practice to build, and therefore, as things work with time, could not be undone. A reputation that he had spent most of his career underestimating. That is, until more recently, the day of the girl who refused to open her mouth.

“Me know what yuh do to us children! We all know yuh pull out all our teeth, and we must eat porridge for the rest of our lives! Well, not today, not me, sir,” the girl had said before she clamped her jaw shut. The strain bulged the veins at her neck.

The girl threatened to bite if Irving were to touch her, and so he didn’t. Her schoolteacher escorted her out. Ornery pickney, she mumbled.

 

 

The girl’s mother was the one who brought her back. At the end of the school day. She held the girl’s shoulder and squeezed until she sat down in the chair across from Irving.

“Me know that she have tooth rot, she holler so bad biting into dumpling me thought me would have to take it out right then. Cyaan take not another one of her antics. Lord! Now, Yvette, apologize to Dr. Campbell.”

“Not necessary, child.”

“Yvette. My name is Yvette, and me want you to know that this will be allowed today against my will,” the girl said crossing her arms. Her mother slapped her across the back of the head.

“Sincerest apologies, sir,” the mother said. “I don’t know where she gets these tings in that head of hers. She got some spirit inside her.”

On the day that Irving read about his condition later on in his life, at his desk, in his office, he whispered a prayer to all who he had caused unnecessary pain and shame. He knew most of them would never get the gaps filled. He thought most of the steadfast girl who would grow into a young woman, and seek love, seek desire, who would not know whether or not these things could be found if she were to smile, smile so in the ways of love and desire, revealing the open rawness of her gums. Forgive me, Lord. Forgive: ripe pomegranate, split, juice sucked from the core.

It would be just a few days later, after the discovery of his condition, when he sat again at his desk, in his office, that Irving would notice his office had suddenly become identical to his childhood bedroom, and instead of his desk, he sat at the edge of his childhood bed. He felt as though his mother were in the room just beyond, sleeping, as she had slept before, when he gagged on his words quietly so as not to disturb her. He gagged again, as he had then, his tongue feeling bloated; his teeth, which he ground into one another, felt somehow frail, like in this way they would be whittled into a nothingness, leaving only the bloodied flesh of his gums. He called for his mother, which came from the emptiness of his mouth in a squeal, incomprehensible, much like an infant. He felt this all just before collapsing backward and hitting his head against the wall where his diploma hung, just slightly uncentered.

He thought he heard something. And so he thought it was his mother, hearing his cry, finally, in some way, understanding him, and so, appearing before him in this time of need. His mother, in her appearance, took the form of a child, hovering just above him. Though what he heard was not his mother, but his own voice, from before. And it was. It was his own voice, from a time before, repeating what he had spoken then, into the now. His jaw, slack, curved into the fat of his neck, so the words came not from his own mouth, but the mother-child.

It won’t be a problem after today, the mother-child said in Irving’s voice. It is what Irving had told the stubborn girl. He would pull straight from the source, all her cantankerous. Cantankerous: nutmeg.

 Now open and let me see that little devil.

Wider.  

Wider.

Irving Campbell did as he was told.

 

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Dmitry Samarov

Rumpus Original Fiction: Career Day

Take Your Parent to School Day. Future Day. Capitalism Day. Career Day.

Lucy’s dad had lots of names for the two-hour period in which all the available parents came to class to talk about their jobs to a bunch of nine-year-olds with their fingers up their noses before lunch. After the parents had explained the ins and outs of their job at the bank, the mall, the post office, the precinct—that’s when the important part would begin. That’s when Lucy and her classmates would get to spin The Wheel of Fate.

Technically it was a button you pressed and not a wheel you spun, but when you pressed the button, the wheel would spin and then the slim rectangular screen below it would light up and your future career would flash, like: VETERINARIAN. FULL-TIME PARENT. GRAPHIC DESIGNER. LAWYER. MARRY RICH.

No one knew where The Wheel of Fate came from, just that it worked.

Lucy’s much older sister Aria—a professional poker player in Vegas, just as The Wheel had predicted—told Lucy about the boy in her class years ago whose result was INCONCLUSIVE. He stayed local for college, graduated with a philosophy degree, and drowned in the lake when his boat flooded at age twenty-four. He’d never learned to swim.

“He certainly wasn’t going to be an Olympic diver,” Aria said, clicking her teeth on the phone. “Wouldn’t even walk the mile in gym—forged a doctor’s note,” she snorted. “Put Dad on. I want to make sure he’s not going to embarrass you.”

Lucy wanted to work at the aquarium, like her mom, cataloging fish and supervising private feedings. She liked how cool it was inside, sitting on a bench watching sharks do lazy loops in the dark, their teeth tucked safely in their mouths. Sometimes she wanted to touch their fins, stick her hand in the water and feel a creature touch back. Her mom mostly did paperwork, but she got to learn about new additions, new species entering their inventory, before anyone else.

Mostly, Lucy liked the dark. It was the bright lights at school and the sunny playground she hated. She liked sleepovers with her friends and camping in the backyard, telling scary stories into a flashlight and twigs snapping beneath her bare feet.

“What was that?” she’d ask her friend Maria S.

Maria S., her favorite of the Marias in her class, liked scary stories too. She’d open her mouth, lower her jaw, and make a creaking sound with her throat. Then they’d belly laugh and howl in Lucy’s tent outside until it was late, until Lucy’s mom would call out the second-story window, “Girls, it’s enough!” And Lucy’s dad would grumble, “It’s too much, you ask me.” 

 

Lucy’s teacher Ms. Hatcher placed The Wheel of Fate on her desk. It was big and bulky but not heavy. It had small scratches at the edges from years of wear. Ms. Hatcher was in her early forties and wore large gold hoops and dresses with full skirts. Today she wore a special dress. She called it her Future Dress, and it was lined like notebook paper. Each line had the words Carpe Diem in cursive, as if handwritten. One long sentence repeated: CarpeDiemCarpeDiemCarpe.

Maria S. passed a note to Lucy. They sat one seat apart. It said: What does her dress mean? Lucy stage-whispered, “I think it’s a kind of fish?” Lucy had worn her lucky bracelet, which was hemp and had a shark tooth—a gift from Aria. A wild thing for a wild thing, the paper gift note had read.

“Class,” Ms. Hatcher said dramatically, “welcome to Career Day. This is my favorite day all year: when your future reveals itself to you.” The kids let out a collective gasp. “I know,” Ms. Hatcher beamed. “Your parents will be here soon, and in the meantime, I’d love to know what careers you have in mind for your future. Anyone?”

Maria B. shot her hand up from the back of the class. “ACCOUNTANT!” she shouted.

“Please wait to be called on,” Ms. Hatcher said. “But nice, thank you, Maria B.”

The shorter of the two Kyles raised his hand. He was barely visible behind the taller Kyle, but Ms. Hatcher saw his fingertips and said, “Yes, Kyle L.?” He wanted to be a basketball player. A few kids laughed, but Ms. Hatcher said, “You never know! Only The Wheel knows.”

After a few others stated their dream careers, Ms. Hatcher told the story of the very first Career Day that included The Wheel of Fate. It was hers. “I sat right here in this room, like you,” she told them, perched on her desk, facing the class. “When it said TEACHER, I knew. This is what I was meant to do. I hope for a similarly exciting fate for all of you.”

“Ms. Hatcher,” the taller Kyle said, about to ask the same question every kid wondered at some point for all the years fated by The Wheel. “What if I don’t like what I get?”

Ms. Hatcher smiled. She closed her eyes, nodded, sage. “My teacher told me: You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” Lucy’s eyes widened. Ms. Hatcher went on: “I didn’t know if that was an instruction or a threat.” She chuckled. Lucy thought it might be both.

She thought about INCONCLUSIVE. And then the parents arrived at the open door.

 

Lucy’s mom was busy taking notes on a new school of fish, so only Lucy’s dad came. He told the kids how fulfilling it was to own a hardware store. He said, “I don’t know how much I believe in all this Wheel business, but I know I love what I do and any of you can, too.” It was inspiring, even though Lucy found it embarrassing. Maria S. whispered, “Cool,” with genuine excitement when he mentioned he could get hammers at cost. “Remember,” he said to the class, winking at Lucy, who cringed, “you can be anything.”

The taller Kyle burped. “Almost anything,” Lucy’s dad said. Most of the kids laughed, even Lucy.

Ms. Hatcher thanked him for sharing and Lucy’s dad sat on the windowsill with the other parents. Maria S.’s mom talked about being an optometrist and handed out mini eye exams for the kids to take home. Isabel, who sat in the front row, nodded along as one of the parents talked about being a beekeeper. Maria S. was allergic to bees. The idea of keeping bees on purpose was enough to give her hives.

When it was time for The Wheel of Fate to do what it did best, Lucy felt faint. She counted her fingers and toes in her head, thinking about the aquarium and whether her mom had visited the stingrays yet today. She loved to watch them skate by, flat and perfectly gray. She yelled at anyone who tapped on the glass. “There’s a sign,” she’d say, like her mom told her. She wanted even the most captive creatures to be respected and cared for, to feel at home.

The taller Kyle went first. His sneakers squeaked to the front of the class, where Ms. Hatcher waited beside The Wheel, like a magician’s assistant.

“So I just . . . press it?” he asked, looking down at the floor. Ms. Hatcher nodded. He hovered his thumb over the black button, looking back at the parents. His mom wasn’t there. She couldn’t get the time off from her job at the supermarket. He wanted to be a painter, but couldn’t say it earlier to the whole class. He only told his mom, who said maybe The Wheel would give him something that came with health insurance.

He pressed the button and squeezed his eyes shut. He stood in front of it, blocking the screen from view. “Move over!” Isabel shouted, and the taller Kyle said, “Shut up.” He sounded like he might cry. But he took a step to the right, so the screen was visible to everyone when it lit up with the words ANIMATION. He blinked.

“What is that? That’s not a job,” Maria B. said.

“Yeah, it means like, movies, right, Ms. Hatcher?” Maria S. asked.

The taller Kyle was relieved. Whatever it meant. It didn’t say DOCTOR or FAILURE, but he worried about what to tell his mom. He could lie, but he would one day inevitably become ANIMATION, and so what was the point?

“I believe so,” Ms. Hatcher said. “I think that’s terrific. Kyle R., you can sit down. Congratulations on a great spin!” Push, Lucy thought. Press.

From there, more kids became VIOLINIST, POLITICIAN, PHARMACIST, ACTOR, and THERAPIST—the last one given to Kevin, a boy who could write very well but never spoke in class. He had a note from a doctor that said he didn’t have to do any public speaking, just written assignments.

There was no dreaded INCONCLUSIVE. When Lucy’s turn came, her dad announced, “You can do it, Luce,” and she actually wished he could hold her hand as she pressed the button. As if The Wheel of Fate would look kindly on a kid with parental authority attached. But she didn’t ask him to. She looked back at him, both of their expressions soft, like they were in a hospital waiting room instead of school.

Ms. Hatcher nodded at Lucy, it was her turn, she could do this. Lucy read the cursive lines on Ms. Hatcher’s dress and thought about the fish her mom supervised and studied, the glass that always kept them apart. Away from her, maybe even safe from her.

She pressed the button and, instead of closing her eyes, she looked back at her dad. But he was looking at the screen, suddenly afraid of it. Even as he claimed not to believe in its power as some kind of oracle. It was just a thing from nowhere, really, and what did it know about Lucy? About any of them?

And then. WEREWOLF.

Ms. Hatcher narrowed her eyes. She shook her head, hard, looking around the back of the desk, like The Wheel must need a reboot. But it had no cord, nothing to look back at. A couple of the parents gasped.

“Is this some kind of a goddamn JOKE?” Lucy’s dad barked. No one responded. None of the kids laughed. It was only funny if it was a joke and The Wheel didn’t joke. Did it?

Maria S. yelled, “IT’S OKAY, LUCY! I’M GOING TO BE A DOCTOR! I CAN FIX THIS!” Or maybe Lucy only thought Maria S. was yelling because Lucy felt dizzy, because her head was heavy and she felt the ground spinning toward her. Did she need fixing?

 

It was like a movie, the kind Kyle R. would one day animate. Lucy opened her eyes to the crowd standing over her, her dad’s hand waving above her face. He was saying her name over and over.

That’s how Career Day ended: WEREWOLF, then fainting, then the silent car ride to the diner, where her dad ordered curly fries for them to share and told her, “It’s just a stupid wheel, Luce. It doesn’t mean anything. How could it know who you are?” She thought it wasn’t so bad, considering she could’ve been INCONCLUSIVE. A werewolf instead of doomed.

She sipped a peanut butter chocolate milkshake. Career Day wasn’t supposed to go like this. There was no one for her to shadow, no adult to show her how to be a werewolf. She would have to teach herself and hope for the best.

 

During dinner, Lucy’s mom cried. She couldn’t help it. She also wanted Lucy to work at the aquarium with her, though she’d never said it out loud. She didn’t want to force her into anything. But now that WEREWOLF was in their house, she let herself cry. Even as she did, she told Lucy, “It’ll be fine, don’t worry, you can’t possibly be a werewolf.”

Lucy was confused though, the more she thought about it. “But didn’t you say I could be anything?” She looked at her dad.

“I mean, within reason. Come on, Lucy.” He was getting agitated. A werewolf? She honestly thought she could be a werewolf?

Lucy went to her room and shut the door. That’s when she called Aria, who said, “I’m not worried about you. But I don’t know what you…do now. You know?” But Lucy was far away, thinking about the books and movies that could help her figure out whatever it is that werewolves do all day. Or all night.

She called Maria S.’s house, and her mom answered and said, “I’m so sorry, Lucy, I heard about—” But Lucy cut her off, said, “Yeah, thanks, is Maria around?” She asked Maria S. if she wanted to come over on Friday night and camp in the backyard. She said maybe she could practice. Maria S. didn’t even ask what she meant. She knew. They were best friends.

 

The rest of the week passed slowly. Lucy managed to find a book on the macabre in the school library, but it was badly illustrated and old, so old. It was hard to figure out if it was meant to scare her or educate her. It read like a fable. She asked the librarian if she had any books like this in the nonfiction section. The librarian said, “That’s only for things that are true.” Lucy didn’t understand the distinction. She just wanted to know what werewolves ate, how long they slept, whether they were allowed to watch R-rated movies.

Behind the librarian there was an inspirational poster that said: BE YOURSELF. EVERYONE ELSE IS TAKEN. Lucy took it to mean she should be whatever kind of werewolf she could be, not whatever kind of werewolf was hidden inside a book she couldn’t find.

On Friday night, her parents thought Lucy was moving past whatever she’d been going through since The Wheel of Fate. They ordered pizza, Maria S. came over, they all watched a movie about a family that goes on a road trip where everything goes wrong.

The whole time, Lucy was thinking about her tent in the backyard, the flashlight that had different discs that could shape the light into ghosts, pumpkins, skeletons, bats. Maria S. brought a dog whistle from her brother’s closet and a box of unopened Oreos. They were ready to practice Lucy’s new career. WEREWOLF flashed in both of their minds.

With her parents upstairs in their room, Lucy turned to Maria S. in her tent, held a flashlight under her face, and whisper-growled, “Are you ready?” Maria S. laughed, but then she said, “What are you going to do though?” Lucy turned her palms up, like, No clue.

And then she started howling. From deep in her stomach, a low sound emerged long and full, like it had been there all along. Awakened. Maria S. stared at her, unsure whether she should start howling, too. She didn’t. She watched her friend open her mouth wide, crouch down on all fours, and make sounds like a wild dog.

Lucy’s dad rushed to the window, afraid that what he thought he was hearing was indeed what he was hearing. “You can’t make any money as a werewolf!” he shouted down from the window, almost begging.

Maria S. called back, gently, “It’s okay, Mr. Peters, I’ll give Lucy some money when we grow up!”

He smacked his head with his palm. “Just SHUT UP, would you, girls?” He slammed the window shut. Lucy quit howling and laid down on the floor of the tent, curled like a woodland creature.

“How was I?” she asked Maria S.

And Maria S. said, “Really good, I think?”

Lucy tried to tear open the box of Oreos with her teeth, but it hurt her mouth. Maria S. opened it for them, but Lucy pawed at the silver paper inside until it tore and three cookies fell out. She leaned down and scooped one up with her mouth, chewing loudly, messily. Maria S. laughed. She held one in her hand and ate like a human.

“Do you want to be a doctor?” Lucy asked.

Maria S. shrugged. “I don’t really care. I like the idea of a white jacket. I wouldn’t have to think about my clothes as much, I guess.” She thought for a moment. “Plus, I feel like I’ll get to see a lot of blood.” They nodded at each other. Blood was kind of cool.

“Do you want to be a werewolf?” Maria S. asked Lucy.

Lucy took a breath and let out three short growls, a staccato howl. Some questions didn’t need an answer. They needed to be felt in the body and released. Maria S. blew the dog whistle, but Lucy couldn’t hear it. Maybe one day she would.

 

Over the next week, all Lucy could talk about was being a werewolf. It was driving Maria S. nuts. She wanted to support her friend, especially because like Lucy’s dad said, there was no money in being a werewolf. Lucy needed her doctor friend to help her in the future, probably.

But Maria S. needed her friend now, too. And what if Lucy couldn’t really become a werewolf? She’d be disappointed.

Maria S. was suspicious—of The Wheel of Fate itself. Like Lucy’s dad, Maria S. thought, logically, that The Wheel couldn’t possibly know everything. Did she even have to become a doctor? Or was fate dictating itself, turning its own unseen wheel, moving class after class of kids forward?

If Lucy hadn’t been distracted by her own predetermined future, she might have wondered if INCONCLUSIVE could’ve had a different destiny.

Maria S. decided to steal The Wheel.

A week after Lucy’s first werewolf practice night, Maria S. stayed after school to ask Ms. Hatcher some questions about the math homework. Ms. Hatcher thought this strange, because Maria S. had been pretty good at the current lesson. Some of the questions were even a little stupid, though she’d never tell a kid that. Maria S. asked her so many questions that eventually Ms. Hatcher needed to use the bathroom. When she left the room, Maria S. took The Wheel of Fate from the big bottom drawer of Ms. Hatcher’s desk and shoved it into her backpack. It barely fit, but it fit.

“Thanks for answering my questions,” Maria S. said, a bit too quickly. “Career Day really got me. I’ve been distracted.”

Ms. Hatcher said she understood. It was a lot to take in, especially at such a young age. She gestured around the empty classroom and said, “I didn’t know I wanted this until The Wheel told me who I was supposed to be.” Something about that didn’t sit right with Maria S. DOCTOR seemed as good a fate as any, and much better than INCONCLUSIVE. But she knew without a doubt that TEACHER wasn’t for her. For one thing, she hated writing on the chalkboard. The dust made her cough. How many kids were heading toward careers they might not want if given a choice?

 

Tell her I’m not home, Maria S. mouthed to her mom. Lucy was on the phone, wanting to come over and practice getting around on all fours, more howling. Maria S.’s mom did as her daughter asked, disappearing back into the kitchen with the phone.

Maria S. sat on the floor of her bedroom, cross-legged on the blue rug she’d spilled root beer on the summer before. She set The Wheel of Fate down and pulled herself back, away from it. Staring into its blank screen, she wasn’t sure what to do with it now that it was here, hers to break or interrogate. Would just pressing the button be enough? What if it just said DOCTOR again? What if it got angry and gave her something worse?

She thought of Ms. Hatcher in the empty classroom, living a life she hadn’t chosen. It didn’t make her life bad. It didn’t make her life anything other than what it was, which in her case was TEACHER. That’s what TEACHER looked like on Ms. Hatcher. What would DOCTOR look like on Ms. Hatcher? What about WEREWOLF?

Maria S. bent forward again, held her open palm against the button, her other hand covering it. Like she was preparing for an explosion. She pressed it. The wheel spun.

BEEKEEPER.

Maria S. gasped. She took The Wheel in both hands and shook it, shouting, “I’M. ALLERGIC. TO. BEES.” But The Wheel didn’t care.

She pressed the button again. LAWYER.

Again, faster. ACTOR.

Faster. INCONCLUSIVE.

“This thing is RIGGED,” she hissed. She shoved The Wheel away and smacked her clammy hands against her thighs, enraged. But her anger quickly turned to confusion. Then, an idea. “This thing is rigged,” she repeated quietly. Or, what if, what if—

“MOM!”

 

In Lucy’s unfinished basement, the same room where they once superglued their hands together during a sleepover, Maria S. put The Wheel of Fate at her friend’s feet.

“I’m telling you, it’s not fate, it’s a lie—” Maria S. said, her voice breaking. “It’s a toy.” She pressed the button repeatedly, the screen lighting up with several possible futures, though WEREWOLF never reappeared.

After a long moment, Lucy opened her mouth, but closed it without a word.

Maria S. stared at her, waiting. She drummed her fingers on the concrete floor. “Well?”

Lucy looked away.

They told her she could be whatever she wanted.

She thought she wanted to work with her mom. That future made sense. It was possible, logical. Predictable. She could study the fish and record every movement the stingrays made.

But after Career Day, she realized she would never know what it was to be the creatures at the aquarium, locked inside their finite universes. Tap, tap, tap. Whole ecosystems contained by humans. Controlled by them.

She pressed down on her palms, lifting her seat off the ground. Hunched over, she opened her eyes and started to growl. Spit pooled in her mouth.

She looked at her friend, but didn’t see her.

“You don’t have to do that—that’s what I’m saying,” Maria S. said, startled. Lucy dropped back into her seat and pounded her palms on the floor. “Are you listening to me?” Maria S. croaked, hot tears forming. She picked up The Wheel and slammed it down. The screen cracked, splintering like a spiderweb.

It was too late for Lucy to be whatever she wanted. All she could do was be herself.

Lucy bared her teeth and lunged.

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Elly Lonon

From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)

This was originally published at The Rumpus on September 13, 2017.

 

 

No. It’s my mother’s favorite word lately.

Did they feed you?

No.

Are you happy here?

No.

Do you love me?

No.

 

It’s a Sunday at the tail end of fall. The autumn scents of pumpkin and cinnamon have vanished somewhere with the last of the dying leaves. Above my mother’s bed, skinny leafless branches tap at the glass window in slow rhythmic movements. My mother shifts to her side and draws her blanket close to her face, balling her fists tight under her chin. She shivers like a page caught in a gust of wind.

“No,” she says, although I haven’t said anything. It’s no longer a word, but a sound that’s not meant for anyone but herself. It’s her second day here at Saint Martha’s Nursing Home and although she can’t communicate anymore, I can tell she hates it. Projecting, my husband Jerry said yesterday when I told him about my suspicions. Well, he didn’t say this; he exclaimed it, like a detective would after finally putting together all the clues. He decided I hated Saint Martha’s, I hated leaving my mother here and—as usual—I was making this about myself. Projecting. He was loose with the tongue because he has nothing left to lose: he’s been sleeping on the couch for about two months now, surrounded by his model airplanes and ships. The subject of divorce has been lobbied between us more times this month than a volleyball at the beach.

My mother shakes so much I’m thankful for the rails on each side of the bed. There’s no thermostat in the room, just an absurd antique iron heater that would look out of place except that this whole facility looks like the setting of a Victorian-era novel. Perched on a mountaintop, the structure of Saint Martha’s dates to colonial times when it was used as a lookout during the Revolutionary War. It was abandoned after the war ended and left to rot and ruin, until the late 1800s when it was renovated by Catholic nuns and converted into an asylum. In the 1900s, most of their patients were elderly people with some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s, which led to their decision to turn the asylum into a home for the elderly. This building is so old that all the heat is turned on at the same time—winter. No thermostats; you just open and close the heater’s valves.

I know all of this because I had an argument yesterday with one of the nuns, Sister Frances. She’s in charge of the wing my mother is in, the Alzheimer’s and dementia section of the facility, where they place the residents who suffer from severe forms of these diseases. The ones who repeat the same words over and over like a prayer; the ones who need to be fed and bathed and have their diapers changed.

Sister Frances and I argued because I wanted her to turn the heat on in my mother’s room. She gave me the Saint Martha’s history lesson to explain why she couldn’t do that: it would be too expensive to turn the heat on for the whole building before winter. I told her with what they charged monthly my mother should have her own private sauna if she wanted one. The compromise we arrived on was extra blankets, but even this would take an extra day or two because they “didn’t have any extras.”

I hate to admit it, but Jerry was right about something: I hate this place. But that doesn’t change the fact that I think Mom doesn’t like it either. I like to imagine she’s pretending to be cold, to shiver so much, just to let me know she doesn’t like it here, because that would mean she’s still in there somewhere. I only put her in this place because she’s always been such a devout Catholic. I thought being around nuns and crucifixes might trigger some memories, make her feel more at home, but I’m not so sure anymore. I also didn’t realize these nuns actually operated with amenities from the 1800s.

My mother turns on her side, now facing me. She looks at me through the silver strands of hair that fall across her face.

“No,” she says. Her face is as thin and sharp as I’ve ever seen it. Her eyes are set in deeper than I remember and dark bags hang heavy under her gaze.

“No what, Mom?” I say, standing up from the red cushioned chair next to the bed and walking towards her.

“No.”

“Are you cold, Momma?” I take a measured step forward.

“No,” she says, still shivering.

“Are you hungry?”

She looks away from me and stares at the ceiling as if trying to solve a puzzle. I haven’t been this close to her in a while. For the last month she’s been confusing me with someone else. She’d look at me and turn red and either cry or claw at me. During one of these instances she called me “Marie,” during another she called me a whore. I have no idea who Marie is or was—I don’t even know if she ever existed.

I miss hearing her say my name. Monica, she’d call from downstairs when dinner was ready. Monica, honey, she’d whisper if she found me crying in my room after school. I place one hand on the bed rail and I slide the other into hers. I never get used to the feel of her wrinkled skin, the fluid movement of bluish veins under my thumb, the warmth it radiates. I feel like a child again. I feel like my mother’s daughter for the first time in months.

“Momma,” I whisper.

She stares at me for a few seconds. I think she’s trying to connect the dots. Get the gears grinding. I fear she’s going to see “Marie’s” face in mine. But she looks away. She stares at the wall and coos like a bird.

“No,” she says. “Coo.”

 

By the time I leave Saint Martha’s, the sun has set. Rain falls hard and angry from the dark gray clouds hiding the hundreds of stars that can be seen from this hilltop on a clear night. On the drive back home, I feel cheated. The first time my older brother, Gabe, and I visited Saint Martha’s was during its open house last spring, when the trees were heavy with green and flowers scattered through plains like wildfire. We drove up the gravel path that cut through the green hill like a scythe through tall grass, unprepared for the beauty we were about to see. Saint Martha’s during springtime looked magical: surrounded by flowers and greenery—the whole color spectrum on top of a hill.

Gabe flew in to Massachusetts from California, where he pretends to be too busy “working” to come help take care of Mom. He calls himself an actor, despite being forty-three and only having two infomercials and one tiny non-speaking role in his portfolio, or whatever actors call their résumés. I practically forced him to come so he could check out the facility where Mom was most likely going to end up. I even paid for his airline ticket. He had lived here in Greetlebay and worked as an English teacher at a local high school for about fifteen years before having some sort of identity crisis and deciding he was going to make it as an actor. Coincidentally, this sudden burst of passion happened at the same time Mom started getting worse, when she started misplacing memories and faces as often as she misplaced her keys. I don’t know why I made him come. Why I spent that money. I didn’t really have to bring back my brother, who didn’t really want to be here. Maybe it was my last attempt at keeping the family together—at having a family at all. In the end, his contribution to the decision-making process amounted to, “This place seems fine.”

My house looks unfamiliar under rainfall: a black and blue silhouette in darkness, unwelcoming and eerie. I sit in my car and listen to the engine run lazily, a soft murmur under the wash of rain. I don’t know when exactly it transformed from a home to a house. The blinds are shut, but I don’t need to see inside to know that Jerry is either slumped on the couch eating macaroni and cheese and watching television or he’s hunched over the dinner table, working on one of his model airplanes, or a tiny ship in a bottle. He finds comfort in repetition, in rituals. He’s built the same ten or twelve different models over and over again because he knows them by now and won’t find any surprise or complication in the process. Among his favorites are the F4U Corsair with its tiny yellow-tipped propellers, the American Airlines Boeing 767 because it’s the only airline he trusts, and the red 1917 Baron Fokker Triplane, with its three sets of wings and the black cross on its tail.

For our last anniversary, I gave him a custom-made model set of the very cruise ship we were on when he proposed, the Carnival Liberty. I had to do a lot of research to get the details right, online searches and many calls. Decks on the ship: 16. Balconies: 28 (all on the 16^th deck). Length: 855 feet. Guest capacity: 2052. On-board crew: 920. Emergency lifeboats: 24 (12 on each side). The model is still in the white and red box it came in, gathering dust next to the model planes and ships and bottles. He gave me a scarf that year. One he knew I already owned, because, as he pointed out, “It’s your favorite scarf, but in a different color!” I wish I’d returned it that very day instead of wearing it to work to protect his feelings.

There’s a finished model of a WWII fighter jet gliding in place over the glass dinner table, its target apparently the cheesy white china plate. No Jerry. For half a second I expect to find a note clinging to the model plane (a grey Messerschmitt Me 262) the way he used to let me know he ran out for a quick second to buy more crazy glue or a magnifying glass because he lost another one.

The model plane is dainty and fragile. They’re always lighter than I expect them to be. I hold the Nazi jet by its wings like a baby bird or a dead moth and push with my thumbs until one of the little wings snaps. I consider breaking the other one as well, but settle for one and leave the jet right where it was before I go to bed.

In the morning I hear Jerry creep into the room. He shuffles socked feet and slides closet doors gently, trying not to make a sound. I pretend to be asleep, because I don’t know what I would say or ask if we talked right now. For the first time in years—in our marriage—I don’t know where he spent the night. I know he didn’t come in last night because I got up after midnight to get a glass of water, and where I expected to find a fat blanketed lump on the couch, I found nothing. I shift to my side but pretend to still be sleeping and he freezes for a moment. I hear him open a few drawers and pick up a pair of shoes before leaving the room.

I get out of bed and walk out of the room after I hear Jerry’s car driving away. If someone asks him what his job is, he’ll say he’s a writer. In reality, he works a nine to five in a government building, writing little blog posts about public health and safety. He’s never written a short story or a poem that I know of, and I’ve never seen him writing outside of work. But he likes to pretend things are better than they really are. It’s his way of life: repetition and denial.

Later, at work, my mind is elsewhere, nowhere near the insurance forms I should be filling out. My mind is in Los Angeles with my deadbeat runaway brother; it’s at the top of a hill in a cold ancient building, watching my mother coo at the walls; it’s wherever my husband was last night, watching him do all the things he could have done with a prettier, younger version of me.

Still, it seems absurd—logically—to be angry with him. Even if he was with someone else last night—why should I be mad? We’ve talked about separation many times, called each other many things we can’t take back and put all our belongings in some intangible mental list of division. Most of these conversations ended the same way, me trying to think of new things we could try—marriage counseling, sky-diving, swinging, something, anything—and Jerry saying he’s tired of trying, or that there’s nothing even left to try because we’ve tried it all. Jerry gave up. Jerry is done. He’s been looking at apartments for a month now. We’re only together on paper. Yet, whenever my mind wanders off I picture tiny model planes set ablaze and soaring through the sky or tiny ships in bottles crashing into jagged rocks, pushed by violent waves.

After work, I drive fast to Saint Martha’s, a little recklessly, because I’m eager to see my mother. I’m eager to be in her quiet room and sit by her side and hold her hand while I talk and she listens. I’m eager to touch her hair and tell her stories—her own stories about her own life—and maybe I’ll even sing to her, like the doctors have recommended or I’ll hum, since I don’t have a singing voice. Maybe I’ll finally tell her about my failed marriage.

 

Crossing the threshold of Saint Martha’s entrance feels like stepping into a different world, where time moves at the same pace flowers bloom and the general atmosphere is perpetually that of a wake. I pass by portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, rosaries hung from their top corners; residents who smile at me, who say hello and hi and good morning (despite the sun having already set), who smell like piss, who look lonely. Some of them seem healthy and alive—more so than my mother. And I can’t help asking why not them?

The Alzheimer’s section of the building is one of the farthest from the entrance. When I’m about halfway there, Sister Frances intercepts me.

“Excuse the intrusion,” she says. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but do you know who Jerry is?”

“Jerry?” I’m surprised because Jerry’s never come to visit my mother. “My husband, Jerry?”

“Oh,” says Sister Frances in a tone that would seem grave, if she didn’t dip every word in the same tenor. “Your mother has been calling for a ‘Jerry’ all day.”

This is odd. My mother was never a fan of Jerry. In fact, when I told her that I was pregnant with his child and that I was planning on marrying him all those years ago, she begged me not to do it, not to have the baby—this was the first and only time I heard her say anything so un-Catholic. It was also the moment I realized how hard it must have been for her to bring me up by herself. It had nothing to do with Jerry, but with how young I was and how hard she’d worked to get us to where we were. I was seventeen and she had raised me by herself, during a time when a single mother was treated like a leper. One day she threatened to poison both our meals if I didn’t abort and promise not to marry anyone until I was at least twenty-one. She was joking—maybe half joking—but it never had to come to that, because I had a miscarriage seven months into the pregnancy, a little after Jerry officially proposed.

 

“I’ll have to tell Jerry. I’ll bring him with me next time.”

“About that,” Sister Frances says as she fixes the black veil pinned over the white coif, “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you about this during your first visit—transitions and all of that. We find it’s best—this is completely optional and up to you of course—but we find it’s easier for the patients to transition into living here if their families give them space for at least the first one or two weeks.”

“Space?”

“Yes. We encourage families to—”

“Are you asking me not to visit my mother?”

“Well no, it’s just—”

“My mother is seventy-eight. And she’s frail. She could get a cold and die tomorrow.”

“Oh dear. I think I may have upset you.”

“I think you may have,” I say, more coldly than intended. Before I can say anything else, she bows her head and walks away.

 

I imagine telling my mother, “They don’t want me to visit you for a week or two.” She would be sitting on her bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, a crossword puzzle or a book in her hands. She’d lift a pen to her mouth and pinch it between teeth, the way she always did when stuck.

“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.

I tell her I don’t know without really thinking of an answer. I’ve made her younger, somewhere in her late twenties. The silver from her hair shed away to make room for a glossy black. Her wrinkles have disappeared and she wears light pink lipstick and blush. For a second I envy her beauty.

“What’s wrong?” she might say and look at me.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” I’d say, knowing this answer won’t work. My mother could always tell when something was wrong. She always knew exactly what to say to get me to talk.

“I know you better than you know yourself, Moony.” She only called me Moony on special occasions, particularly when I was sad and didn’t want to talk—post-breakups, job losses, and all the other little failures of life. Days like today.

“Why were you calling for Jerry?” I might ask her.

“Oh, I just wanted to spit on his face one more time, just in case.” She would wait for me to laugh. And I do.

“We’re getting divorced.” Even in this imagined scenario my voice cracks.

“About time!” she would say and maybe throw the puzzle in the air or tear it up. “You’re too good for him, Moony. Too good for anyone! What did I always tell you?”

I know what she wants me to say, but I wait in silence. I want her to say it. And in this scene, she does.

“It’s just you and me in this world. It’ll always be just you and me.”

 

My mom is asleep when I enter her room. I sit next to her in the red-cushioned chair and I’m glad to find she has an extra blanket wrapped snugly around her. I want it to be like when I was a little girl, when I would walk to her room in the middle of the night and crawl into her bed. She’d wake up and she wouldn’t even say anything; she’d just stroke my hair until I fell asleep next to her, feeling safe by her side.

“Mom,” I say, already feeling guilty about waking her up.

She opens her eyes and stares at me without saying a word.

“I’m getting divorced,” I say, and for some reason I wait for her to say something back. She looks over at the wall behind me.

“I’m sad, Mom. I’m so, so sad.”

“Coo,” she says. “Coo.”

 

I come home to find Jerry has moved out most of his things. His underwear and sock drawers are empty, his work shirts and pants are missing as well. The model planes and ships have flown and sailed away from the windowsills and shelves where they once resided. I hope to find the cruise ship I gave him has also floated away, but of course he’s left it behind—he has no need for it. I pick up the dusty red and white box from the floor and open it on the dinner table. I spill its contents over the glass and marvel at the infinitesimal pieces that need to be put together. The bright orange lifeboats stand out among the many dull pieces and for a moment I picture myself sitting alone on one of these lifeboats in the middle of the ocean slowly rocking from side to side, letting the ocean currents guide me blindly to my next destination. I hunch over my dinner table inside my new home and I start building the model set of the place where it all began. Coo, I whisper as I begin to put the pieces together. Coo.

***

Rumpus original art by Mark Armstrong.