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The little boy is disgusted by the monkeys but adores the lions as
his peers adore their older brothers and young uncles. Their bodies
seem to spell out words to him, words he cannot understand, words he
has not yet learned, long words that begin with soft esses and ells,
then glide just as smoothly over rough kuhs and hard guhs without the
slightest slip or flaw. They are slow and direct, they cannot be
bothered by the little bugs that congregate near their manes and
tails. They look in the direction they are headed, to the rock wall,
to the water well, to who knows where.

The biggest male lion passes the boy’s shadow through the bars
of the cage, two paws through his outstretched arm, the mane sliding
into his shoulder, the shadows merge for a second, and he is a boy
with a lion across his chest. Then paws stretch out of his ribcage, a
tail brushing past his left hand and his little blue camera.

Judith, his mother, is standing in front of the kitchen sink,
drying her own mother’s china with a tea towel. She feels she has
not seen or touched any of these things—her mother, the china, the
kitchen sink—for a while now. She rubs the plate hard, fast, her
brown hair bucking and swaying from her head as her back and
shoulders join the motion. If her son were there, he would think she
was angry. At the dishes? At grandma? At something his father did or
did not do? Again? But she is thinking about her son this afternoon,
knowing deeply and quietly his wish to be a lion, admiring this
quality in him, claiming it as a result of her influence, worrying
what will happen when he discovers that boys don’t grow up to be
lions after all.

She is the one who has given him his best qualities, she thinks as
she rotates the dish against the towel with short flicks of her
wrists. She supplied the natural creative talent, and she is the one
who nurtures his imagination, who beams and grins and coos over the
paintings and drawings, who has them framed professionally and hangs
them next to the Matisse and Degas prints. Her husband has
contributed mainly time, she decides. Which is certainly valuable, a
good thing for a father to give a child. She has been glad about
their life. Most days around this time, she is at her desk or at a
meeting, and for a second she imagines what they must be doing.

Soon her husband will pick the child up since it is Friday, their
day to “hang” as he puts it. Any other day, he would spend the
early afternoon working, jamming with his musician friends, and pick
the boy up from after-school. They would come home, have a snack, and
he would put dinner on. Then he would retreat to his studio, the
small shed off the side of the kitchen, and work on his songs. He
would start them and stop them over and over, emerging absently only
three or four times throughout the evening: to check the food, to
stir it, to serve it and eat too much once she has arrived, to wash
the dishes and eat some more, maybe to go to the bathroom a few hours
later, and finally to drag his weight up the stairs at three or four
in the morning and heave himself into bed beside her.

These days it’s a love song he’s been working on. She finds
that she is least in love with him when his songs are about love. She
cannot resist the urge to imagine that he is singing about someone
else, some other woman. The “storm of sand after my desert rain”
could not be her. This is someone smaller, with a pointier face and
wider eyes. But when the songs buzzing through the shed walls are
about other people’s products and services, she is inspired to love
him well. He would think, for sure, that this is because the jingles
bring money to the house and make him seem responsible, but that is
not it. She feels these jingles showcase his true talent. He is not
an artist, she feels, so much as he is a riddler. His poetry is
unremarkable, but his ability to arrange collections of words—the
names and phone numbers of carpet outlets, for example—and concepts
like We won’t be undersold! and Our staff is well-trained
and helpful! into short little snippets of song is astounding to
her. During these times, about every other week when things are good,
she is pleased with their life, the balance they have established:
his gigs, her talent, her career, his work, their house, their
marriage, their son.

These days it is a love song, but even so, there had almost been a
moment of tenderness this morning. She woke up and thought for sure
that she was right, that he was off sleeping with someone else
because he was not in bed. She had not heard him lumbering up the
stairs at dawn, she had not felt him sink into the bed beside her,
causing her to roll back slightly in her sleep. She did not smell
anything cooking in the kitchen when she woke up, did not hear him in
the bathroom. He was with his love, his muse, she decided, and she
would divorce him right away. Then when she saw the light on in the
shed on her way out of the house, she was relieved and felt, for a
second, an urge to pop her head into the shed door like a movie wife
or a young girlfriend, to tell him to have a good day, to remind him
that she would be home late, and perhaps even to blow him a kiss. But
the child was almost late for school, and she for work, and the
moment passed.

He is one of only three in his class whose fathers come to pick
them up after school. It is mostly nannies from other countries, or
babysitters. His father is a musician, and he comes to pick the child
up every day from after-school. Some days, like today, Dad will come
early, and the boy will not have to go to after-school where they
feed him stale oatmeal cookies that turn to powder in his mouth on
the first bite and do not let him do what he wants to do. There are
no kids from his class in after-school. The kids here are larger kids
that seem to sweat a lot and talk loud all the time. The teachers
make them do activities, uninteresting things like tying cups
together with yarn and pretending that it makes a telephone. They
will not let him do what he wants to do. They will not let him sit
and draw. They make him do activities that he hates forever. Time
goes so slow that it becomes heavy on him, he gets dizzy, and he
begins to feel that if he does not do something interesting, his skin
will erupt into a blistering itch. This is one of the things he does
not say to anyone. He does not know how to put the feeling into
words, and even if he did, he is not sure he would say them.

There are a lot of things he doesn’t explain to anyone. He likes
drawing mainly because he likes to hold the crayons between his
pointer finger and his thumb, likes to peel away the tan-and-black,
aqua-and-black, magenta-and-black paper in rough rivulets and dig his
nails deep into the wax. It gives him a satisfaction he cannot name,
one that he gets he can’t think where else. Maybe from pressing his
tongue against his gums when one or two of his baby molars tingle and
start to feel loose, or from biting the inside of his cheek lightly
for who knows how long, maybe days, until the skin is salty and raw,
then stopping for a little while, then biting some more. He would dig
his fingernails deep into the colored wax, deep, deep, until the wax
seemed to burrow canals under his nails right into those mysterious
top pads of his fingertips, into his veins, up his arms and right to
a place in the crook of his neck that was rarely ever touched by
anything other than these nameless pleasures of his own making. These
were the greatest satisfactions because on top of the wild tension
and release they brought, they could be nothing but entirely private;
even when he had tried to explain them to people, as he once did to
his cousin Bettina as she was sculpting something that looked like a
porch swing, he did not know the words to convey the feeling. All he
could tell her was that it was very weird and very good. She gave him
a tilted eyebrow look, which she held only for a second before
returning to her clay, and this look confirmed his suspicion that
this was a private feeling that could not be explained, both because
the words were not there and because people could not or would not be
bothered to understand them.

He wonders what makes these lions feel this way, and he is tempted
to ask one of his classmates, but refrains. The class is moving
toward the picnic tables, and he gathers that it must be time for
lunch. He feels it is too early. He has just eaten breakfast not so
long ago in the car with his mother, and he would rather stand here
against the hot metal railing and think about the lions. But
remembering the good ham sandwich his father packed for him, he
decides it is okay that the time has come to eat.

For him, for now, time is an unfathomable expanse drawn in bold
colors: green and brown for trees, brown for dirt, brown for the hair
of his mother and his sister and himself. Red for apples and
farmhouses, blue for water and skies. Time holds all of these things
just out of his reach, just beyond his understanding of the red and
green numbers on the clocks that can never go past a certain point,
never to 67, their building number, or 92, the number of their
street.

Time does hold promises, though. It promises that one day soon
will be his birthday, and that eventually he will be able to tie his
shoes the real way, without having to loop each lace first into bunny
ears and then tie them together. It promises that he will one day
become all of the things he feels for the lion in front of him, that
this is why he feels these things in the first place. He will one day
walk like a lion on two legs, pass between the shadows and keep his
eyes forward, focused on something important that only he needs to
know. Time promises that soon the class will pile onto the bus where
he will sit next to fat Jordan Richard and talk about television
shows. Time promises that they will return to the classroom, that it
will smell the same way it smelled when they left, and that before
long his father will come to pick him up and take him home. He will
not have to go to after-school today. They will stop for Chinese food
on the way home, since this is Friday, field trip day, his mother’s
late night at work.

She does not like her husband’s friends. She runs hot water in
the basin and squeezes the dish liquid bottle hard so that half the
contents spew into the stream and bubbles spring up almost instantly.
Her husband’s friends are all fat, all irresponsible, as far as she
is concerned. None of them have changed since college. None of them
have given up their addictions, none of them have figured out how to
provide for anyone as well as her husband has. They should look to
him as a role model, but she is sure they don’t. They see him as a
buddy, because they are still in the habit of having buddies. They
call him in the afternoon to jam, to play, but really just to hang
out and eat pizza and drink beer. When they can’t reach him, they
call her, though she and he are rarely together because she works.

The one friend, Billy, called her four or five times this morning.
It was a busy morning. She did not pick up the phone. She did not
have time to check her messages before lunch, but by 12:10 she was in
the car, on the phone, driving, dialing, moving dizzily toward home.
She had found it hard to hold the phone, she remembers now, gripping
a clean soup bowl firmly and dunking it into the soapy water. She had
a hard time seeing the numbers on the phone, and knowing whom to
dial. She had trouble remembering how to press the buttons with her
fingers and press and release the gas with her foot at the same time.
She had found herself on the phone with Billy, somehow, who told her
things she hadn’t understood then and cannot remember now, now that
she is home with the bubbles and running water and the china that
refuses to get clean. No matter, though, she will wash these dishes
again, and she will think. She will remember her mother’s advice on
how to clean good china. She will remember her middle name, she will
remember Billy’s messages this morning. Nine-something AM, just
after the start of a meeting, Billy: Wondering where he is, we had
to pitch an idea to someone, he’s late, call back. Closer to
10, Billy: Jude, hey, hoping nothing’s wrong, call back.
Some time later, a message, or maybe many, Billy: Jude, uh, don’t
have your work number, at the house, listen… uh. This she
remembers. She remembers the length of his stammer, the porousness of
his voice as his uhh seeped through the phone, through her
ears, over her mind like coffee over gravel, come, call, back,
come, pick up, shit.

He always said he would have a heart attack. It was a pun to him.
He meant his tortured artist’s soul would be overwhelmed, that his
heart would eventually snap completely out of his control and attack
him for all the love he helped it to produce and forced it to dole
out, much of which, he felt, was never returned, leaving, as he saw
it, holes which would breed anger, which would germinate into little
heart armies, which would eventually overthrow him. He would laugh
about it, and she would tell him to stop smoking, to stop drinking,
to stop gaining weight.

But she cannot think too much about these things because she will
drop the dishes, or she will miss spots of grease and they will not
be clean and she will have to wash them again. People will be coming
over in a few days, and she will need to serve them food on clean
dishes. She has to run the water, she has to scrub, to rinse, to
wash, to dry, to soap up. She does not have to remember what Billy
said, who Billy is, what happened when she turned the corner and saw
her door, her front door, which looked so strange and made her wonder
if she was on the right street, if this was her house after all. She
does not have to remember the date, and she does not have to remember
the time, just for a moment.

 

The nannies have all come. The mothers have all come with their
big smiles and hugs. The fathers have come, but not his. The
after-school children have already gone down to the basement to be
fed powdery cookies and juice from a can. The boy sits on the bench
in the office while they call his mother. He tells them to call his
father because sometimes his mother is at work and does not get to
answer the phone. They call more people, someone, he does not know
who. The big black clock is moving to a rhythm, he has noticed, and
if he pays attention he can move with it. He can click his tongue or
blink his eyes or bite his teeth along with it, and he can predict
where it will be in three bites, four. Maybe his mother will come
instead, he thinks. Maybe she will surprise him, and maybe she will
cook dinner instead of take-out. He would rather have take-out, but
she is a better cook than Dad, at least. Sometimes he wishes she were
the musician instead of Dad, because he likes the way her meat is
soft and juicy and easy to chew, and he even likes the taste of her
broccoli when he dips it in the juice from the steak. But in the
office, the secretary tells someone else he will have to go down to
after-school. He is not surprised, but he is something—mad,
disappointed, let down. Some adult will come, will hold his hand and
walk him down into the basement. He would rather do almost anything
else.

He would rather sit and learn this clock. He would rather rub his
fingers along the ridges of the corduroy bench cushion until his
father arrives. He would rather not have to hold the hand of the
secretary or some other person, a hand that would be huge and strange
and probably cold or sweaty. He would rather not have that hand lead
him to a place he suddenly hates more than anything in the world. He
looks out the window, down the long hallway to the stairwell. He
hates this hallway now, almost as much as he hates after-school
itself. He hates the white line in the middle of the floor, hates the
muraled walls on either side. There are children smiling on these
walls, different colors of skin and shirts. There are people playing,
holding their arms out, smiling to the center of the hallway, but he
walks straight, still looking at the stairwell. He thinks about
putting his hands in his pocket so the secretary will not come up
behind him and grab them, but instead he keeps them to his side. He
walks not slow but not fast, toward his afternoon. No matter the
activity, he decides, no matter the puzzle-making or puppet show, he
will find a way to draw—cameras, lions, rock walls, wells. He walks
straight and thinks of these things.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s fiction has appeared and/or is forthcoming in the anthologies, What I Know is Me, Baby Remember My Name, and X-24 Unclassified, as well as in the literary journals BLOOM, Lumina, The Amistad, Roots & Culture, Black Ivy, and In/Vision.
She’s received honors and awards for fiction, playwriting, expository writing, and teaching from Temple University, The Boston Fiction Festival, New World Theater, the NAACP, and other organizations.
She holds a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. You can reach her at meccajamilah@gmail.com

“Mark…?”

Radio Lung’aho’s whisper rose from the darkness, barely audible over the hissing of cicadas outside in the Kenyan night.

“Are you awake? Do you like fishing?”

Mark lay on top of his bed, sweating in the night’s heat. Somewhere near his ear a mosquito whined. His eyes were open, but the night was so black he could see nothing but a ghost of netting draped around his bed.

He didn’t immediately answer his friend’s questions. He was tired after a full afternoon of playing in the rainforest. Now that his father had tucked the boys into bed and turned off the lights, Mark was sleepily replaying in his head their after-school adventures: chasing one another along Busara Road in the dust of a passing lorry, descending steep paths into the cool of a jungle ravine, and swinging together on a vine high above the forest floor with their bodies tightly entwined.

His friend was sleeping over for the first time. Mark had freed some space in his room by pushing his small desk to the corner along with dirty clothes and half-read books scooped from the cement floor. His father had made a nest of sofa cushions taken from the living room, and Radio now lay atop them, curled beneath the mosquito net the two boys shared.

Mark had never invited a friend to stay over before, not even back in the States. He was an only child, and he felt comfortable alone. His bedroom was where he went to get away from people, not a place to share. But Radio had pretty much invited himself, and now Mark was surprised at how glad he was to have his friend lying on his bedroom floor.

“I enjoy fishing very much,” Radio continued without waiting for a reply. He pronounced the word ‘feeshing.’ “I have fished at Dar es Salaam. It was very good fishing. And swimming, too. When you were in America, did you fish and swim in the ocean?”

“Sure,” said Mark. “Lots of times.”

“I only did one time. When I was seven. My father took me to Tanzania – Tanganyika then. We were on holiday at the coast. I will never forget it.”

“Why? What happened?”

“This is what I am telling you. We were fishing in the ocean in a canoe, a very big canoe carved from a giant tree with a…how do you call it, on the side? Ngalawa…”

“A drawing?”

“Not a drawing. To stop from falling over. What do you say…an outrig canoe?”

“No, an outrigger.”

“Yes, good. An outrigger. But very big. With a sail. Big enough for my whole family, but only my father was fishing with me. And my sister Rose. And my sister Grace. And the two fishermans. My mother and my sister Ruth, they did not like fishing. They only wanted to shop in Dar es Salaam for shoes and dresses. My father woke us in the morning, early early, and all was dark and the fishermans were waiting at the boat and saying, “Hurry, you sleepy ones! The fish are hungry for your hooks!’ And they asked my father, ‘Where are your fishing poles?’ But my father said to them, ‘Why would I have a fishing pole? I live on a mountain.’ I think the fishermans thought we were crazy. But we did have fishing lines, because my father was smart to buy some, and we had our fishing hooks that he bought also, and we had blocks of wood that we borrowed from our host, and we tied our hooks to the lines, and we wrapped the lines around and around the wood blocks, and we said, ‘Ready to go!’”

Mark’s attention was wandering. He enjoyed the cadences of Radio’s voice, but sometimes Radio could go on and on about nothing. This sounded like one of those times. There were some occasions, though, when Radio shared the most amazing tales of growing up at Kwetu Quaker mission. Mark had only lived there a few months, but Radio was born there, delivered by his own father, the mission doctor. Mark’s father was just a teacher, not nearly as exciting. Still, Mark was proud of his dad. Kenya had been independent only a couple of years, and his dad was training teachers for the new nation’s schools. His dad had taken the job with the Quakers after Mark’s mom died. “We must be like Kenya,” his father had told Mark when he announced the news. “We must learn to start anew.”

Since moving to Africa, Mark had already experienced a lot that was entirely new to him. Like playing in a thatched hut with his neighbor, Lily Alongo. Like exchanging kisses with girls at the mission school. He’d even chopped the head off a chicken with Chege Ndegwa, who was not only his cook but, after Radio, Mark’s favorite friend in Africa.

But Mark’s adventures were nothing compared to the tales that Radio could weave, stories that a ten-year-old American boy could barely imagine. Radio had told Mark about watching a leopard kill a monkey in the jungle just feet from where he was hiding in a tree. And he had told of sitting in the dirt of a village hut while an infant died of malaria in his arms.

So this story about a fishing trip sounded boring.

“That’s stupid,” Mark said. “How can you fish without a pole?”

“But we did!” Radio sat up on his cushion. “At first the fishermans laughed at us because they never saw something so funny. ‘Have you ever fished before?’ they asked my father. ‘Oh no!’ my father said. ‘I am a doctor, not a fisherman!’ That made everybody laugh, and one fisherman said ‘A doctor is good luck.’”

Radio paused, as though waiting for Mark’s encouragement to continue.

Mark complied. “How’d you get there?” He sat up too.

“To the boat? We borrowed the automobile of our host. A friend of my father’s. A doctor too, with a new Peugeot, very fancy.”

“No, I mean how’d you get to Dar es Salaam?”

“Oh, that is another story! We took the train from Kisumu. Three days to the coast – what a snail that train was! But it was a very good train ride. All of us in one cabin, and at night we folded our beds from the walls. Three beds on both walls, and my mother slept in the top bed on one side, and I slept in the top bed on the other side, and my father and three sisters slept below. I tell you man, that was a slow train! One day I saw a hippo running beside the train. I think if a hippo and a train are racing the train should win, but I would be wrong. The train was huffing and puffing and chugging and chugging and everything was creaking and rocking back and forth and the rails were clacking and clacking and we went so slow even my grandmother would win the race.”

“I thought your grandmother was dead.”

“She is!” Radio giggled at his own joke. “That is how slow the train was! And at every stop, many, many people are selling things. Chickens and shirts and fruits and sugar canes and Fantas and anything you want, so when you come to a station you must only lean out the window and grab whatever you desire. My father would put coins into people’s hands and somehow, like a miracle, the right coins would find the right hands.”

Radio lay quiet. Mark stared into the darkness, waiting.

“Night time was best,” Radio continued. “The lights would go out and I would sit on my father’s bed and I would rest my chin on the window, and if the track curved a little I could lean out and see the engine car far away in front and the sparks shooting out the chimney and climbing up, up in the sky. Finally my father would say ‘Go to bed I’m trying to sleep!’ and I would climb over him and over Rose and into my bed with my nose almost touching the roof and I would lie there in the dark and imagine I could see right through the roof into the sky, all the way to heaven where the sparks turn into stars.”

Radio paused again. Mark leaned over and could just make out the boy’s shape in the darkness, the ridge of his bare shoulders catching the hint of light that seeped beneath the closed bedroom door. His friend was now on his stomach, gazing out the window as though searching for sparks in the night.

“Stars don’t come from sparks,” Mark said.

“No? Then where do they come from?”

“The kitchen. You make ’em with a cookie cutter.”

Radio laughed. “Yes, like Christmas cookies! Did I tell you about the kitchen?”

“What kitchen?”

“At the doctor’s house. What a house! Not a house, a mansion. With a driveway that went around in a circle, and palm trees and banana trees and everything was white plaster and blue tiles. And when I entered the house, the temperature dropped like an ice box! What luxury. And that kitchen! Bigger than your whole house, I am not joking. That is where we cooked and ate my fish.”

“What fish?”

“I’m telling you! That’s my story. I caught a fish! Not just a fish. They called it a changa. What a monster! Bigger than my arm. And with only my block of wood and fishing line, eh? The fishermans were jealous of me. The biggest fish of the day, and caught by a boy with a block of wood!”

“I caught a halibut once,” Mark offered. “In California. It was so huge I thought my hook was caught on the pier. My dad had to help me pull it in.”

“Yes, like that! The changa was so big the fishermans had to help me too. One of them pulled on the line, and I wrapped it around and around my block of wood. I could see the line cutting the fisherman’s hand when he pulled, and when the fish decided to fight some more, the line would slip through his fingers and more blood would flow. My father helped pull too, but he was smart and wrapped his hand in a handkerchief to protect it. But my sisters? They were no help at all, squealing and getting in the way. Everyone was having a great time. Except the fish.”

“How’d you get it in the boat?”

“Just harambee! and over the side. But getting that hook out? No way, man! That hook was a wrong hook, I think. My father bought the biggest hooks he could find in the shop. Too big, but it was a lucky mistake. That hook went into the fish’s mouth and back out its eye, so there was no way that fish was getting loose! But also no way that hook was coming out either. So one fisherman was sitting on the fish and he was calling to the other, who was steering the boat, and he was shouting in Swahili, ‘Bring me a knife! Bring me a knife! Kisu! Kisu!’ And when we were telling the story to my mother at dinner, Grace said it sounded like he was shouting, ‘Kiss! Kiss!’ Which is funny, because that’s what they did.”

Mark was already struggling to follow the thread of Radio’s story, but this last comment threw him.

“Who?” he asked. “Did what?”

“Kiss,” said Radio, seeming to enjoy Mark’s confusion. “The fishermans.”

“What do you mean?”

“On the way to shore. We had gone far out to sea, and it was a long way back, so we passed many small islands and one of the fishermans said, ‘Let us stop for lunch and a swim.’ So he sailed up onto the sand and we ate the food we brought and we drank our Fantas and my father said I’m taking a nap, and my sisters went walking one direction and I went walking another direction and then I went swimming and, oh man! The ocean was blue like the sky. You put your head under the water and too many fishes! The water was so clear you could see to the bottom. The bottom was like a jungle in the ocean with giant plants with long arms to catch you and fishes everywhere, hundreds all swimming together, first one direction, then another, swimming in the ocean like birds in the sky, like big, beautiful flocks of fishes.”

“Schools.”

“What?”

“They’re called schools of fish.”

“Why schools?”

“I don’t know, they just are.”

“Schools…” Radio tasted the word. “Schools of fishes. I like it! Schools of fishes all the colors of the rainbow. Wait! Did I tell you about the rainbow?”

“What rainbow?”

“Another story! In Dar es Salaam I saw a double rainbow. Did you know there was such a thing? I did not. One afternoon, it was sunny on the doctor’s patio, and I was looking over the ocean where it was raining, and between here and there I saw them: two perfect rainbows reaching from ocean to ocean, one rainbow inside the arms of the other rainbow like a mother and a child.”

Mark had never heard of a double rainbow, and it sounded cool, but he just wished that Radio would stick to one story at a time.

“What happened with the fishermen?”

“What fisherman?”

“C’mon Radio. What do you mean they kissed?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I was out looking at fishes, and where I was swimming I could still touch my feet on the bottom of the ocean. I could stand on my toes and keep my nose above the water. I could put my eyes right on the surface like the top of a table and I could look across the water forever. Above me the sky was bright blue and filled with flocks of birds, and below me the ocean was blue also, with schools of fishes flying through the underwater forests.”

“Ray!”

He laughed. “I know, I know. You want to hear about the kissing, yes?”

“No, I just want you to finish the story.”

“Be patient, brother! So I am standing on my toes on the bottom of the ocean, like this.”

Radio swept the mosquito net aside and stood on his toes on top of the cushions. His skinny body was a shadow in the darkness. Mark could make out the white of Radio’s underwear against his black skin.

“You better get back in bed before my dad catches you.”

“Let me finish my story. So my eyes are looking across the water and what do I see? The two fishermans come walking down the shore and they are holding hands and I am thinking: That is nothing, men are always holding hands. But then they stop and they are hugging, and I am thinking: So what? Maybe they are just good friends. And then what do you think? They are kissing!”

“Kissing how?”

Radio paused a moment, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “You would not believe your eyes! Kissing like a husband and a wife! Like the fisherman is a …I don’t know how to say it in English. Shoga? Msenge? Basha? What do you call your cook, Chege?”

“What do you mean?”

“When a boy likes a boy, or a girl likes a girl?”

“You mean queer?”

“Is that what you say? Okay, this fisherman is queer like Chege.”

“Chege’s queer?”

“Of course, man.”

“No he’s not.”

“You don’t know this? It is a secret, but everybody knows. Even so, you must never tell anyone or he will be in very big trouble.”

“He’s not queer.”

“How do you know if he is or if he isn’t?”

“How do you?”

Radio laughed. “Okay, forget about Chege. This is my story, not his. So I see these fishermans kissing and I am thinking they must not see me or they will beat me. So I got out of there fast! I go under the water and I swim and swim until I am going to die and then I come up to breathe and I am far away and out of sight.”

“Did you say anything?”

“Do you think I am crazy? They are very big men and could snap me in two pieces! But I told my sisters. It was very funny at dinner! My mother cooked the changa and my father told the story about how I caught a big fish with just a block of wood. Then he came to the part where the fisherman is calling for his knife, and my sister Grace said in a high voice, “Kiss! Kiss!” and we are laughing so hard my mother and my father think we have gone completely mad!”

At this, Radio burst into laughter himself. He wrapped his arms around his bare belly and collapsed, giggling, on the cushions.

A click at the door sent both Radio and Mark scurrying under their sheets. A sliver of light widened to reveal Mark’s father standing in the doorway. His red crew-cut glowed from the living-room lamp behind him.

“Boys? Time to settle down. Mark, do you hear me?”

“We’re just telling stories.”

“I know, but enough’s enough. And Raymond? Can you get back under the net, son? You’ll get eaten alive.”

“No sir, I can’t.”

“Excuse me?”

Radio hesitated. “I’m sorry. It does not reach.”

Mark’s father opened the door and a pool of light spilled into the room. He went to investigate the mosquito netting. He stretched it out over the cushions where the boy was lying on his back. The net fell short of reaching the floor.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I did not want to trouble you.”

“And you’d rather get sick? That would be a fine mess, wouldn’t it? Sending the doctor’s kid home with malaria? You’ll have to get on the bed with Mark and share. We are not fooling around with mosquitoes. And boys…?” Mark’s father paused in the doorway. “Knock off the horseplay, it’s time to sleep.”

The door closed and the room returned to darkness. Mark listened to his father’s footsteps fade. Somewhere near his head a mosquito whined, closer and closer, until it buzzed right near his ear.

“Shit!” Mark slapped at the net and bolted upright. “Damn it, Radio! You’re going to let the mosquitoes in!”

“Such curses from a Quaker boy! Shall I tell your father?”

“Just shut up and get on the bed. Hurry!”

The boy lifted the net and slipped beneath the sheet. His body was warm next to Mark’s.

“Do not be afraid like I am a fisherman,” Radio whispered.

“What’re you talking about?”

He put his mouth near Mark’s ear. “Kiss! Kiss!”

“Shut up, Radio.”

“I am Chege, come to cook your food. Kiss! Kiss!”

“Stop it!”

“I am only joking with you.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Yes it is. ‘Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!’”

“Shut up!” Mark gave the other boy a shove. It was meant to be playful, but he pushed harder than he intended. He turned his back on his friend and stared at the wall. Mark was keenly aware of Radio’s body so close to his in the darkness. He wondered, was it true about Chege? Mark had certainly heard about men kissing men, but he’d never known anybody who actually did it. Chege was his friend. The cook hugged Mark everyday when he got home from school – what did that mean? Did it mean anything that Radio told Mark about the fishermen and held him so close on the jungle vine? And was it weird that they were now together in the same bed? For a long time Mark lay without moving, feeling the warmth of his friend’s body and listening to the cicadas outside.

“I’m going to sleep now,” Mark finally announced. He still didn’t move.

“Okay then,” Radio replied. He rolled away from Mark and onto his side. The boys lay with their backs to one another. Radio’s breathing slowed, and after a while he yawned and curled his legs into a ball. The sole of one foot brushed against the back of Mark’s calf and rested there. Mark’s impulse was to pull away, but the foot was cool on his skin and he let it remain.

Drowsiness gradually overcame him. His thoughts quieted. His breathing matched the slow pulse of cicadas and the rhythm of Radio’s breaths. His friend’s story lingered, softened, and its images finally carried Mark toward sleep: a canoe slicing through crystal waters, schools of flying fish, stars rising like sparks over a slow-swaying train, and a perfect rainbow held in another rainbow’s arms.
David Sanders has had his short fiction published in journals and anthologies that include Baltimore Review, The Laurel Review, Sycamore Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Philly Fiction, 2000 Voices, and others. He was a winner of the 2006 Third Coast national fiction competition and a finalist for the Crescent Review’s Renwick-Sumerwell Prize, the SLS International Fiction Contest, and the New Letters National Fiction Award. Excerpts from his novel-in-progress have been published in literary journals and broadcast on WXPN?s ?Live at The Writers House,? and his short plays have been produced by InterAct Theatre Company and Brick Playhouse. David lives with his wife in Queen Village.

I do not know him and never will: old spitting man, man in
suspenders. Anyhow, everyone’s grandfather is like this. He has
some yellow teeth and some are missing. He wears ball caps from
extinct teams, one ear tucked in and one folded out at a perfect
right angle. When I turned fourteen, he gave me a model of the
Liberty Bell, mistaking my curiosity about him, my questions about
his soldier days, for patriotism. He admired citizens, not
granddaughters. The bell had a tiny brass clapper that rattled in the
dome like a mint in a candy tin. I attached it to the dog’s collar
and let her be the patriot between us, the one who stayed with my
grandfather in the long afternoons and licked his knuckles.

The day they lifted him up and carried him from our house to the
stretcher on the porch, I put my arms around the dog to keep her out
of the way. She smelled of kitty litter. She reared her head, so I
grabbed her ears and pulled hard, watching the skin on the top of her
skull slide back like a hood. A red ambulance light swept through the
room. My parents exchanged irritable commands, saying, “Get his
arms up! Take off his hat!” My grandfather held onto the front door
molding and had to be pried away by a male EMT. The EMT smoothed
Grandpa’s forehead, murmuring, “There you are, there you are,”
like a mother after a bad dream. “Moron,” Grandpa said, but they
were already out on the driveway, and someone was yelling something
about retrieving his kicked-off shoe.

 

That’s when our house was painted a funny yellow color, like the
feathers of a bird at a pet store. Before Grandpa left, my mother was
like a visitor. She slid between politeness for my grandfather’s
sake and the sort of despair where you start a hobby. She collected
miniatures, but not dollhouses. She had oriental carpets the size of
postcards and a claw foot bathtub where we put our soap. After
Grandpa left, she packed up room after tiny room in a red tackle box.
I watched her fit porcelain cakes under minuscule lounge cushions,
wrap lamps in the cloth napkins she used for guests. She put on
mascara and squinted at herself in the mirror the way the girls at
school did, as if the image made her heart sick. She didn’t have a
car, so Dad and I drove her to her pilates instructor’s house where
there was a hot tub and a futon for her in the garage. I thought she
would cry. I wanted her to cry, so we could all feel her long inertia
was worth something. Instead she went right over to the hot tub and
stuck her finger in, rolling her eyes to the ceiling and clicking her
tongue. She took my hand and dunked it in the water, saying, feel
this.

Before Grandpa left, our street was called Fifth Avenue South, but
after he was gone it changed to Green Mountain Road. They put in a
golf course in the field next door, with putting greens like round
carpets and a sprinkler system that watered our garage. Within a few
months, all our neighbors sold their houses to real estate brokers
from the Cities. Kitty Roster, who’d been my friend since we were
babies together, called the brokers The Hippie Hitlers because they
had moustaches and sandaled feet. The Rosters sold their stucco house
and bought a mobile home on the lake, with a dock on floaters and a
pontoon boat. A sign in the shape of a mountain appeared where their
house used to be.

 

The last time I talked to Kitty was Memorial Day. The Rosters
invited me for a ride in their new boat. They were sorry for me
because my father was too proud to sell our house, even for twice the
money Grandpa paid for it. When I got to the lake, the Rosters filled
a cooler with Diet Cokes and we sputtered to a place in the water
where the lily pads thinned. Kitty’s mother rubbed oil on our
backs. Kitty’s brother and father squinted silently at fishing
lures. Kitty and I dangled our legs in the lake, watching skiers
hunch over their handles and sprawl into nests of foam. After a
while, I touched Kitty’s greasy leg. “I’m hungry,” I
whispered to her. She spread herself out flat on the green felt
floor: “Then eat.”

“What?” I asked. “Your dad’s crawdads?”

She looked at me like she’d raised me from a child, and only now
did it occur to her we weren’t related.

 

On Green Mountain Road , my father still dragged out screens in
the spring to replace the winter storm windows. When the golfers came
after lost balls, my father shook out the screens in the sun and
waved a single hand at them. They prodded our tomatoes with their
clubs. My father looked at them like he was sorry they were alive. He
climbed up a ladder and pulled out the storm windows one by one,
opening up the house as if it was nothing at all, as if it was a tent
he could dismantle if he chose to. He had me stand beneath the ladder
and take the panes of glass he passed down: heavy, smudged by the
dog’s nose, cold against my face. My arms were barely long enough
to span the width of them.

I was fifteen years old and ninety-six pounds. I had a long, long
neck covered in a fine white down and big red hands like a
middle-aged man. That summer my father put me to work, dragging the
lawn mower over the dandelions and painting the house white. I liked
the bright chemical scent of the paint, the way the brush made a
kissing sound on certain surfaces. Up and down the block,
construction crews were driving bulldozers into our neighbors’
houses. Like the golfers, these men wore sunglasses and gloves. It
embarrassed them to see a teenaged girl with a paintbrush and a
sunburn. They said to me, “Where’s your daddy?” and “Shouldn’t
you be at camp or something?” And once, “We should get one like
that for ourselves. Do you think the boss’d go for it? A little
girl?”

That summer, I let my father buy me a used bike, and crouched with
him while he unstrung the chain and ran his finger along its greasy
knobs. I didn’t tell him the girls from school had begun sneering
at bikes, had begun talking about the cars they would drive when they
got their permits. I let my father take me to his barber, where a
parrot with blue claws perched on the mirror and said, up up and
away. The barber did my father while the barber’s son did me.
He seemed sorry about what he would do. He said, You’ll be
alright, putting one finger on the very top of my head as if
determining my axis. I liked how his breath smelled, and later when I
saw my reflection in the car window, I decided it was fine. I looked
like one of those angels you see on Christmas cards: serene, boyish,
alien.

In early June, my father took me for coffee. We sat at the counter
in a room called Gary ’s that was a café in the morning and a bar
at night. After coffee, my father wanted eggs and Cokes, and then we
left and crossed the river bridge so he could show me the place on
the courthouse steps where an Indian cut off his hands. To keep from
being shackled, my father said.

“Problem was, after he got one hand off, what’s he to do with
the other? Think about it. Same hand’s got to chop and be chopped.”

I knew I needed to be brutal and clever all at once. My father
fought in Vietnam and understood the necessities of mutilation. “He
threw the hatchet up in the air and let it fall on his wrist.”

He shook his head. “Cassie. This isn’t a movie I’m talking
about.”

He turned and walked up the stairs.

“Okay, then.” I caught up with my father. “Mr. Indian, he’s
fingering his hatchet and thinking, ‘how do I kill these two birds
at once?’ Wait. Who let him keep a weapon, anyway?” The marble
was so white with sun, I stumbled and missed a step.

“Come on,” my father said.

“I’m coming on,” I said back.

It wasn’t that he was scornful. He was just busy unwrapping a
grey stick of gum. I think a teenage daughter must be like one of
those lawn ornaments everybody has, one of those grotesque little
gnomes that is so useless and absurd you don’t even need to look at
them.

“How about this. He propped the hatchet up and fell on it.”

“Cassie,” he sighed. “You’re not thinking of it right.”

 

That was the summer one of the girls from high school slit her
wrists in a port-o-potty by the river. She was one of those skulky,
quiet kids who was so tall she made the teachers nervous. They had
talked to her sharply, impatiently, as if she had been insubordinate
by growing so large. After her death, they felt bad about this,
saying, she had such a marvelous mind. They remembered how
she’d been good at math, how she’d taken the city bus to the
technical college after homeroom. “We shall never know what she was
capable of,” the principal declared at her memorial service. He
paused to adjust the microphone on his collar, making the room ring.
I sat next to my father, who was opening and closing a Bible on his
knee.

My mother was there, too. She remembered Anon fondly from when she
babysat me and Kitty Roster. My mother met us outside the funeral
parlor, dressed for a summer outing in a blue skirt and high heels.
She had skin-colored tapes beneath her eyes that didn’t match her
face, which was red and tight from all those hours in the hot tub.

“A shame,” she said, tugging the skin between her fingers.

My father kissed her cheek and walked to the car.

The next girl people talked about was a senior, and she just
disappeared for a while, so there was speculation about pregnancy,
anorexia. I saw her again in July, brittle and pale, wrapped in a
beach towel outside the new pool. I heard she’d been ferocious and
unpopular in school, winning track races and scholarships for
college. But when I saw her that summer—outside the pool, nibbling
bagels in the coffee shop—she looked fragile and spent. All her
parts were so delicately fastened, her wispy hair, her new wasted
limbs.

Pneumonia , people said, she coughed up blood for weeks.
The senior girls decided to dedicate the first summer pool party to
her.

 

One of these seniors, a girl I used to play softball with, stopped
me at Eller’s Market in July. Adrian was working the checkout line,
and I didn’t recognize her until she set a cabbage on her palm and
made a wind-up gesture. I lifted up my hands. She grinned and put the
cabbage on the scale, nicking a few buttons with her fingertips.

“So, Cassandra.” Her eyes slid up from the register. She
looked tired, her curled bangs catching on her eyebrows. I couldn’t
remember what color her hair used to be, but now it was maroon as a
plum. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much.”

“You’re starting high school, right?”

“Yep.” I nudged at the sweat on my lip. I was pitiful to her,
I knew, with my fraying cabbage, with my backpack and my dollar
bills. I paid and looped plastic bags around my wrist.

She wouldn’t let me go. She was smiling in an expectant way, and
for a second, I thought she wanted me to do something for her. She
said, “So. See you?”

When I didn’t answer, she wound her hands up in her apron like a
muff. A line grew at the register.

She shifted tactics. “Seriously, Cassandra. We should,
like, hang out or something.” She waited for me to agree, and when
I didn’t, she went on, almost irritably. “There’s this pool
party for Julie—you know Julie?—tomorrow. Everyone will be
there.”

She raised her eyebrows. I couldn’t understand why she was
smiling so hard. I stared at her for a second, and it was then that I
understood we were playing a game: the one where girls defeat and own
each other through public acts of kindness.

I gripped my bags. “I’ve got work.”

“Come after!” she persisted.

I stood my ground, shrugged.

She was offended. “You should see Julie!” she accused. “She’s
so sick she can barely lift her head!”

 

By midsummer, the neighborhood was quiet and dense with new
houses: ranches with three-car garages, Greek columns on the front
stoops. The contractors packed up their bulldozers and trailers and
got out of town. Realtors in tight skirts wedged For Sale signs
in the mud. They parked their tiny, foreign cars on the street,
snapping pictures with digital cameras. From the roof of my father’s
house, I could see them cleaning their heels on the black tar
driveways. They never looked up at me. I crouched by the chimney with
a crowbar, red scabs on my knees. I plucked out flat nails one by
one, then shoved the crowbar deep into the tarry skin beneath the
shingles. I liked ripping away great swaths, shingle grains sliding
off the roof, warm tar oozing at the edges. By the end of the day,
blisters inflated my palms. My skin grew so slick with sweat, my
clothes slid and drooped on my body.

In the evenings, my father climbed the ladder and inspected my
work. He walked the ridge of the house, pointing out nails to hammer
into place or little curls of shingle stuck in the gutters. He worked
as a pole climber for the telephone company so he was excellent with
heights. My balance was not so good as his. I scuttled after him on
my haunches, crab-daughter with blackened hands. I could see
mosquitoes quivering like TV static at the edges of his arms. They
probed me as well, and I stopped still, letting them fasten on.

We didn’t talk much inside the house. I made a dish with cabbage
and onions, and my father spooned it on toast. The dog arranged her
spine against the door, rolling her skull again and again on the
knob. She missed my grandfather. I tried to explain he was gone,
talking to the dog the way my mother used to: in complete sentences.
Once years ago I caught my mother explaining to the dog the concept
of weekends. She said, On certain special days, honey, we sleep
late. On those days you get to stay in your crate and dream a
little longer. I remember my grandfather walked in and rolled his
eyes. For Christ’s sake, she either pees herself or doesn’t.
My mother frowned. She said to the dog, Well, doesn’t that clear
things up? Pee yourself, honey, go right ahead. I’m sorry to
bother you, let me get out of your animal way.

I know that talking to the dog can be a sneaky way to talk to
someone else.

To Nellie at the door, I said, “It’s just us for now. We’re
good enough.”

My father said, “Don’t forget Orson.” Orson was the cat.

One night the power went out, and Dad stuck some birthday candles
in a loaf of bread. They were the only candles in the house, and we
hovered over them expectantly. They made rippled skirts of wax on the
crust of the bread. Dad rolled a battery from a broken flashlight on
his palm. Outside the dark windows, I could feel the beautiful empty
houses rise up, nudging the trees with their rooftops. Then the last
candle snuffed out, and my father was so humiliated he sat silent in
the dark. I couldn’t see him until he shifted in his chair,
emerging from the general blackness.

 

When I met my mother for lunch, she wanted to know what my father
said about her. I didn’t want to say nothing at all, so I
told her other things that were true: he didn’t eat as well, he
slept poorly. My mother, beaming, took these as compliments. We ate
lunch at places she couldn’t afford, cafes near the new golf course
where we chose salads from the appetizer list. The salads were
composed of complicated, pretty foliage. We shivered in the air
conditioning.

“He doesn’t know who he is,” she insisted. “He doesn’t
know he doesn’t know.”

My mother had gone to work since I’d seen her last. She’d
started selling cosmetics at a department store, and she was
experimenting with her face. The tape from her eye job was gone, but
the skin was puffy and orange with makeup.

“Listen,” she said, setting a lacy leaf on her tongue. “He’s
got aspirations, doesn’t he? He thinks, this is what I am, a son.
He’s been that all his life. He’s acting like child.”

“Sure,” I said. “He misses Grandpa.”

“Of course he misses him!” My mother glared at me. “But it’s
not as if the old man’s on a fishing trip or something. Your dad
keeps working at that house like he’s going to surprise his daddy
when he gets back.”

I thought of all the windowpanes I’d scraped and painted. The
new white door. “I think it’s nice. He’s fixing it up.”

“For what? For a dead man?”

I squeezed my cloth napkin. “Grandpa’s not dead.”

“Not yet. If your father visited Ron more often, he’d know
better than to fix up a house for him. I visited him.”

“Grandpa?”

“That’s what I’m saying.” She sucked from her straw and
looked at me. “I sat by his bed and watched him open and close his
mouth. Like a fish.”

The waiter came by with a tray of pie slices and dessert breads.
He was charming and effusive, calling me lady but talking only
to my mother. He wanted more from us than salads.

When he left, my mother whispered hopefully, “Do you think he’d
give me a ride someplace?”

“The waiter?”

“Dad.”

She was forever coming back to him, if he was our one mutual
friend and we had nothing else in common. I splayed my hands out on
the white tablecloth. They were stained black with tar from the roof.

“You’ll have to ask him about that.”

“What’s wrong with your hands?”

I spread my fingers further out. They looked like something that
lived in a swamp. I wanted to be chastised for bringing them to a
fine restaurant.

But my mother was busy wiping a crumb from her lip with her pinkie
finger. She was writing out the check. “Did you hear about that
burned girl?” she asked. “Awful.”

I pulled my hands back to my lap. Breezily, “She got fucked up.”

 

The burned girl had been one of Julie’s new friends, a year or
two younger than the rest, but with a bigger chest than any of them.
I’d seen her linger after the pool closed, helping Julie carry her
magazines and clothes. On the street, she was the one boys yelled at
when they drove past in their cars. She could blush like no one I’d
ever known, her skin a flash of red like something switched on, a
buried bulb. After she was burned, her face was slippery and
translucent and not really any color at all.

Her boyfriend said she put her head in a candle. He said, they
were sitting in the dark, and she dipped her face down as if taking a
drink, just a little sip and her hair was on fire.

The burned girl wasn’t pitiable like Julie. She broke people’s
hearts, made people uncertain of themselves, as if she’d accused
them of something. Three weeks after she was burned, she walked hand
in hand with her boyfriend in the park, petals of skin crinkling off
her face and catching in the breeze. She made people feel guilty for
having faces. Boys, the ones who used to jeer at her from their cars,
followed her around when she went shopping with her mother. They were
busboys, they were baggers. They bowed their heads and silently
opened doors for her. They rummaged around in bins and found the best
fruit: sleek apples, kiwis dripping with ice. They wanted her to
touch them with her hand, to forgive them and bless them with her
lipless glance. She took their fruit, but would say nothing. She only
had one expression. I’ve gone away, it said, to a place
too treacherous for you to bear, so stay back with your little pears,
your longing glances.

When the seniors asked Julie to sign a sympathy card for the
burned girl, Julie refused. “It’s insulting,” she said (I heard
this from my mother’s friend at the pharmacy). “I’m sorry, but
she did it to herself.”

 

From my father’s rooftop, I could see down the street and into
the golf course pool. That’s where Julie lay, surrounded by her
most loyal girls. Their bright towels on the white patio chairs
looked like the flags of nations. Adrian was there, with her plum red
hair, and Kitty Roster, white and bonier than I remembered. Julie, in
the center of them all, fanned herself with a fashion magazine. She
made the healthier girls nervous and guilty (the ones splashing in
the pool) so they climbed out of the water and didn’t swim as many
laps. They set straws between their teeth and sucked juices. They
coughed when Julie coughed.

 

By that time, I’d nearly finished the roof. I spread tar paper
over the smooth boards on the rafters, making a clean, black
landscape up there—one I couldn’t touch in the afternoon because
it was so hot. It seemed like the surface of another planet, black
and baking with underground fires. I liked how foreboding it was. My
father planned to hire professionals to put the shingles down, a team
of Mexicans from a company in town that did a roof a day. I told my
father I could do it, but he looked at me like I’d made that joke
before and it wasn’t funny. He wrote me out a check instead. In the
space for my name my father wrote Cash.

The day the Mexicans came, I climbed up in the neighbor’s
sycamore tree and watched them unload supplies. They had jeans and
bare backs; they didn’t speak Spanish; they all wore long, scraggly
ponytails, like a family of Amish sisters. On the roof they did not
scuttle or crawl. They strode across the black surface as if it were
the land where they were born, familiar as the backyard where they
peed and buried animals. From time to time, they lit cigarettes and
lifted their ponytails up, airing their necks.

By noon , they’d nearly covered my black planet. They sat on the
front yard grass and picnicked, sipping from water bottles and beer
cans. They giggled at the dog, who came at them with her hackles up,
dribbling urine. I climbed down from my tree.

“Well look,” they said. “Such a pretty squirrel.”

“You shouldn’t drink on the job.”

“A pretty evangelist. Honey, you got bathroom?”

“Nope.”

“No? We roofing a homestead or something? You take a piss with
the dog in the grass?”

One of them opened a hand for the dog to sniff. He ran the other
hand down the ridge of fur on her back, so slowly the bristles
settled before he touched them. The dog leaned her jaw into his palm.

I said, “My dad doesn’t trust you.”

“What, he’s a racist or something?”

I took the dog by her collar. “He’s a narrow, small-minded
man.”

 

My father doesn’t have any stories about Vietnam, so I made up
one for him. It’s not even a real war story. In it, he’s just
sitting on a bus in the middle of some city, staring out a dirty
window at the bikes and meats and goats. He’s sliding around on one
of those vinyl seats — the kind on school buses and café booths —
and this Vietnamese woman sits down next to him. She has nothing in
her hands, no purse or bag or suitcase. She’s pretty, but maybe
she’s been crying or something, because she’s too tired to hold
up her head. It rolls onto my father’s shoulder. He starts to move
away, so she murmurs something to him in her language. I think he
likes how her voice sounds. I think her head on his shoulder feels
like a thousand pounds, and he wants to let her hold him down so
he’ll miss his stop, so he’ll miss the war in the jungle, and the
flight back to his father: the canary-yellow house, the storm windows
he’ll have to put in and take out, the daughter and wife, the
humiliating waste of effort.

He reaches for the woman’s hair, but she has only one word for
him in English—yes?—so he freezes, pulls back. He lets her
fall asleep. He props her up against the window and changes seats, he
gets off a stop early.

My father is a good man, but what do you do with all the good men
in the world? There are too many already. My father is also cruel,
but not very.

 

The burned girl came to high school orientation. I hadn’t even
realized she was in my class. I tried to think back to all the rooms
and playgrounds we might have shared: the desks in rows, the tests so
quiet you could hear the air conditioner. She sat in the bleachers
with everyone else, though the people around her sat too close in
order to seem like they weren’t avoiding her. People had started to
say she was creepy since she didn’t act damaged. I could see the
knuckly lobe of her ear, the patchy sheets of skin on her jaw like
new bark. Her hair was growing back, bristly as a military cut, and
as severe.

When her sweatshirt slipped between the bleachers, no one offered
to get it for her. I half-expected her to hobble, but she picked her
way around backpacks and bodies, stepping carefully onto the
basketball court. Her breasts bobbled under her t-shirt. I wondered
where her boyfriend was, the one who walked with her while her face
drifted off in the park. Maybe he was older. Maybe he’d grown
resentful of her like all the rest, like the boys she wouldn’t
blush for now, like Julie in her lounge chair counting vitamins on
her thigh. People said Julie had invited the burned girl to her
family’s lake cottage, but the burned girl wouldn’t come. Julie
called her a snob: “It’s not nice to snub people’s
pity,” she said.

In the high school auditorium, the cheerleaders taught us the
school song—Y-E-L-L-L-O-W-J-A-C-K-E-T-P-R-I-D-E—and then the boy
scouts brought out the flag and wedged it between some folds in the
theater curtains. The principal wanted to talk about the Pledge of
Allegiance. He said, “It’s important, in these controversial
times, to remember why we make this oath to our country.” I hadn’t
seen him since the summer funeral, and he looked tanned and well fed.
“Wouldn’t it be a shame,” he said, “if because of those two
words—‘under God’—they called it a prayer and took this away
from us too?”

The burned girl hadn’t returned to the bleachers. People kept
glancing down between their shoes, looking for her.

“You are citizens, and sons and daughters, and students at this
school. How you coordinate these duties is your supreme
responsibility.” The principle scratched his nose. “It’s going
to be an exciting year.”

A boy tossed a soda bottle through the basketball hoop. Its neck
snagged in the ropes. The principal sipped from a milky glass of
water. Beneath us all, the burned girl crawled in search of her
sweatshirt. The room shook with sophomores standing up.

When the mascot climbed on stage, his bulging bee head under one
arm like an astronaut’s helmet, he put a hand on his belly instead
of his heart. I put my hand on my belly too.

 

When I got home from school, my mother was sitting at the kitchen
table, four rolls of cotton in her mouth and her chin streaked with
drool.

I said, “Mom?”

She said something plaintive, but all I understood was holes
and mouth. My father, washing dishes at the sink,
explained. She’d gotten four teeth extracted and was worried she’d
be too woozy to take the bus. In a few weeks, she was getting
corrective surgery on her jaw and braces.

My mother said, more clearly, “He was late.”

My father turned off the sink and dried his hands on a paper
towel.

“Ry dod en tong.”

“What?” I didn’t like looking at her. She pinched the bits
of cotton from her mouth, slowly, like she was extracting the teeth
all over again. Lines of drool thinned and broke, and she set the
bloody wads on the table.

“Everybody went home, all the little girls with their mothers.
They closed the place up. I sat on the curb waiting for him.” She
spat into a tissue.

My father said, “Watch out with that.”

“I’m bleeding,” my mother whined. I could see the
sparkly blush on her cheeks, saved for occasions like these when
people got very close to her face and examined her. She complained to
my father, “I can’t feel my mouth!”

My father didn’t say anything else. He stayed close to the
appliances, where there were small and continual tasks to perform
with rags. He wiped crumbs and checked the bulb in the stove. When my
mother said, “I feel like half my face is gone!” my father
remembered a leak that needed fixing in the bathroom. My mother
stared at him, crestfallen, as if he was abandoning her in the middle
of their date.

She watched Wheel of Fortune with the dog, and I sat on the
front steps and watched our new neighbors move in. They had a long
white truck with a gaping door like the mouth of a deep tunnel.

 

Later, much later, my father came out of the bathroom and found my
mother dozing on the couch. She had a small wad of tissues on her
lap, arranged like a bouquet. My father stared at her for a second.
Then my mother woke up and said, “Gabe!” blowing a bloody bubble
of drool. My father looked horrified and sorry, which is something
like love, maybe, so my mother was very pleased.

 

When she moved back in at the end of the summer, my mother didn’t
bring her miniatures in the tackle box. She brought cosmetics in
plastic purses and cleaning equipment for her braces, tiny wire
brushes and picks. My father was as wary of her as always, but he
showed her the new spackle on the wall and the garbage disposal he
installed for my grandfather. He flicked the switch and said,
“Careful, careful. Okay?” My mother likes grinding things up, the
gurgle and crunch of half-eaten fruits, the quick disappearance of
leftovers. She jumps and shrieks when she turns it on, as if it might
take her hand down into the blades, as if she always wanted a sink
with that sort of power. She says to my father, “Then you’d be
stuck with me. Then you’d have to do the dishes while I watched!”

She holds up her perfect hand, and he steps back.

She laughs. “Sandra, Sandra, just look at him!”

I don’t. I’m looking outside the window now, where the
neighbors’ lawns are going brown in stripes. Someone drags a
sprinkler by a hose, wearily, never looking back. We’ve done this
all before. My father is searching for a way out of the room, and I’m
thinking, coward. I’m thinking that riddle about the Indian
is easy to solve. He just turned to the person with the hatchet next
to him—someone he said he loved—and said alright then.

But I don’t think that’s an impressive trick, not really.
After the hands are gone, someone puts shackles on your feet and
you’re back to where you started, only you can’t eat soup or play
cards. There’s no escape in that. If it were me—! If it were me,
I’d just sit tight and let the bailiff or whoever lock the shackles
around my wrists. I’d let him lead me into the courthouse and away
from the soldiers who caught me in the fields, away from my buddies
behind their painted shields, away from my family, who’d admire and
pity me without hands, who’d promise to feed me the rest of my
helpless life. I’d let the bailiff lead me down the stairs into the
dark cell under the courthouse, beneath the city, and that would be
the trick: that I’d go willingly and never come back.

Outside, the neighbor is arranging a line of sprinklers in his
grass. I open the door, and the dog leaps over the spray like fences,
one after another after the next.

Emily Fridlund grew up in the Twin Cities and earned her M.F.A. in fiction from Washington University in Saint Louis. She has published work in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Quick Fiction, The Portland Review, The Great River Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

We walk into the corner store drooling for shoelace licorice. My
best friend in the whole world, even though he’s a boy, leads me
through the too-close aisles, and almost knocks over a rack of Philly
Inquirers. His summer buzz cut is so short, he’s almost bald, bony
shoulders poke out of his Bruce Lee tank top, cut-offs, no socks in
his black Kung Fu shoes. The dog choker chain that holds the two
pieces of broom stick together swings back and forth in his back
pocket, clanking when he walks. Manny stops in front of a round rack
of key chains. He turns the rack, key chains swing, crashing into
each other. I stare, hypnotized by the different plastic animals that
hang from the key rings. He asks which one I like. I like the monkey
best. 

Manny lifts the monkey, pointer finger through the key ring, holds
it above my head and asks the viejo how much. The viejo
leans on the counter over the sports page, chin in hand, looks at us,
I try to concentrate on his good eye, the cloudy one gives me the
creeps, and says fifty cents. Manny thanks him and puts the key ring
back on the rack. Then, one quick look at the owner reading the
paper, and Manny snatches the key ring and stuffs it in his pocket.
My stomach could fit through that key ring right now.

It happens like a swing and a miss in stickball, so fast that I
don’t know what’s happening till it’s too late. We pay for our
shoelace licorice and leave. Halfway down the block, my best friend
reaches into his pocket and holds the key ring, swaying, in front of
my face. “For you,” he says. I’m stunned, even more scared than
when we were in the store. Any minute now the police are going to put
us in jail. I feel wrong accepting it, but not taking it would hurt
his feelings. 

The only time I took something that didn’t belong to me, I ended
up confessing it to God because I was afraid lightning would hit me
or something. I took a Hot Wheels car from a kid at school. I thought
it would be like getting an ice cream cone when I didn’t expect it,
but I didn’t have fun playing with it. The next day I dropped the
car in the back of the classroom by the kid’s lunch box. At the
time, I thought maybe it was different when you stole something and
gave it away like Robin Hood. Maybe that made you feel good. I wish I
didn’t see Manny take the key ring.

Manny drops the monkey key ring in my palm, I stare at it and
thank him. I know I won’t tell on him. I never tell on him; when he
took his mom’s broom stick and sawed it in half to make chocko
sticks, I didn’t say nothing. 

We walk home slurping shoelace licorice like spaghetti, Manny Kung
Fu chops the air into pieces. “Who you going to beat up with those
Kung Fu moves?” Manny takes out his chocko sticks and starts
swinging them from side to side, he comes too close to my face. “You
never know who’s in the shadows.”

“Manny, that’s only in the movies.” I take the chocko sticks
out of his hand. “If the cops see you with these, you’re in
trouble.”

“I’m too fast for them.” He jumps up, kicks his foot above
his head and yells, “YEEEAAAAH!” He lands, his hand right in
front of my face in what he calls the death grip. 

“You don’t really know Kung Fu. You’re going to hurt
yourself.” I give back the chocko sticks, he puts them in his back
pocket.

We come around the corner and these older boys are waiting in
front of Manny’s house. “What are they doing there?”

“They’re my friends.”

“Since when?”

“Don’t worry about them, they won’t do nothing to you.”

“Manny, they trashed the school last year, remember?” 

“Yeah, that was funny.”

We get closer to the three guys, they nod at us, Manny nods back.
Manny turns to me before we get real close, “I have to go.”

“With them?” I want to hit him over the head with his chocko
sticks.

I’m sitting on his porch steps watching him act like a goof ball
with those stupid dorks. All of them karate chopping each other and
laughing too loud. They walk down the street pushing each other
around. I put my hand on my forehead to shade my eyes so I can see
them better. They go down the block getting smaller and smaller, and
then they disappear. He told me to wait for him. The sun starts
burning my scalp and the street looks liquid. Like I could swim in
the black of it. My head starts hurting and I squeeze the key ring so
hard it leaves a dent in my palm. I hold up the key ring, the monkey
has this dumb grin on his face. 

Myrna Rodriguez was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently resides in South Jersey. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in January 2007, and is presently an adjunct instructor at several local colleges.

Dad just came home from Boston like he does when he can. He drove up to the house in his rental Mustang and beeped his horn, and then he clunked his car door shut. Last time his Mustang was red. This time it is blue, and there is no wing on the trunk. It looks clean, and it is still running and sounds like deep metal glugging through my window. I like the noise, and when I run outside, Dad picks me up and spins me in the driveway. “I missed you, David,” he says. He hugs me, and my legs float out like a helicopter. I laugh because it makes me dizzy.

Mom stands on the porch with her arms crossed like she is cold. Dad puts me down and says hi to her, and she says hi back. Dad reaches into the car, turns it off, and puts the keys in his front right pocket. When he follows her inside, I run after them. I want to sit with them at the kitchen table, but they send me upstairs to play.

In my room, I start to build a house on the big square grass Lego piece. I use the holes in the Lego man’s feet to stick him in the front yard of the house. I remember last week when Mom told me Dad was coming to visit. She just got off the phone in the kitchen. I was excited and asked her what day he was going to be here, and she said, “Next Wednesday.” I wasn’t sure if I could make it until then.

Today I waited all day in school, and Mrs. Hubbs yelled at me for not paying attention in math. I just wanted to see Dad because it had been so long, and I had a lot to tell him since last time. I rode home on the bus next to Sandy . She was talking about her dog and Lindsay’s birthday party. After I walked home from the bus stop, I had to wait another three hours and twelve minutes until Dad finally got here.

But now everyone is finally eating dinner together just like before Dad left. Mom and Dad are eating quietly, and Dad tells Mom the chicken is good. They let me do most of the talking, but after a while Mom tells me to slow down. Dad says, “It’s fine. I want to hear it.” It makes me smile. I tell him about things like school, classes, and the largemouth bass that I caught with Scott in the lake. The bass was silver and muddy-green, and Scott let me hold it by its lip, which was all scratchy like sandpaper.

Dad asks where Scott is now, and Mom tells him, “Scott took a later shift so you could spend time with your son.” Dad says, “How considerate of Scott,” and no one says anything for a little while. When Dad takes another bite of his cheeseburger, ketchup drips onto his plate, and then he takes a drink from his silver beer can.

We are finished eating dinner, and Dad is sitting with me on the couch, and we watch television and share popcorn. Mom sits on the cushy chair and watches with us. It is almost like it used to be, but not really the same. I remember Mom and Dad used to sit together on the couch. They would play with each other’s hands while I sat on the floor by their feet. That’s how we watched Zorro for the first time. That weekend, Mom and Dad took me to a toy store and bought two plastic swords, a black mask and hat, and a cape. Dad called me Don Alejandro and I pretended to cut his shirt in a Z.

And sometimes I would lie across them on the couch. I would put my head on Mom’s lap and stretch my feet across Dad’s lap. Dad always tickled my feet, and sometimes Mom would help him and tickle my stomach and my armpits. I kicked and wiggled around until I thought I was going to throw up from laughing so hard. If I fell asleep later, Dad would carry me upstairs to my bed.

 

When it is time for my bath, Mom runs the water for me, and I get in the tub when it is almost full. She leaves me there and tells me to come down and say goodnight to Dad when I am done. I sit there for a while and play with the submarine. The bubbles are ice and the submarine breaks through and makes a trail when it moves on the surface. Then I shampoo my hair and make my hair into a spike. The television is loud downstairs, and I slap the red washcloth on my back and some water splashes out of the tub. It is not much water, and I rinse off and climb out of the tub. My feet make wet marks on the bathmat, and I wipe the water off my skin with my towel. I push the brass lever by the faucet, and the water falls out of the tub and spirals like a tornado near the drain.

I go downstairs in my pajamas, and Mom lets me stay up for an extra hour, and I don’t even have to beg. I hug Dad and say, “Goodnight Daddy,” and I am brushing my teeth when I hear his Mustang start up. From my window, I see the headlights bump out of the driveway away from the house, and when they turn and look up the road, a glob of toothpaste drips from my mouth onto the windowsill. I wipe the glob off with my thumb. I walk back to the sink and spit, and then I get into my bed and wait for Mom to kiss me goodnight.

Mom comes into my bedroom and sits on the edge of my bed. My eyes close when she wipes my hair back from my forehead. Mom asks me if I’m happy to see Dad, and I tell her I’m very happy. She kisses me on the forehead, and I ask her if she’s happy to see Dad too. She says, “I am happy because you are happy.” Then she takes a deep breath and says I need to get some rest. Mom doesn’t read me a story, but it is okay because I am too tired anyway.

 

I wake up, and it is Thursday. When I walk up the street to the bus stop, Harold Morrison is waiting there already and reminds me that we have a half-day in school today. I almost forgot. Half-days are always fun because the teachers don’t mind that we talk in class, and sometimes there is an assembly. It is very nice outside, and we are excited because winter is finally over, which means spring is here and summer is coming soon. The bus is blinking lights back and forth two streets down, and I kick a maroon stone into the sewer grate.

The day goes by pretty fast, and we only have three class periods before the assembly. We all go into the auditorium, and there is a performer on stage named Amazing Nathan, who is really funny and calls Lindsay up to the stage because it is her birthday this weekend. Everyone worries when Amazing Nathan gets dark blue ink on her shirt, but soon it fades away. We laugh when he keeps making things disappear and reappear, and after a while Lindsay is not so nervous up on the stage. When she sits back down in the third row, she is wearing a birthday hat made of pink and white balloons. Lindsay said into the microphone that pink was her favorite color.

It is twelve-thirty, and everyone is pouring out of the school toward the buses, and I am so happy to see Dad by the flagpole. He rubs my head and says he has a surprise for me. I worry for a moment, but when we get to his car he hands me a new baseball glove. It is a little stiff, but it is better than the glove that Mom bought me last year. I put my hand into it and cover my nose and mouth with it, and it smells like new leather. Dad laughs at me, rubs my hair, and tells me to throw my bag in the trunk and get into the car.

We drive down the highways with the windows down, and the wind tries to throw my red hat into the backseat. The wind is strong, and it makes my ears sound like black-and-white television static. Dad is laughing at me for closing my eyes and listening to the fuzzy noise, and he says something to me that I can’t hear. He puts my window up, and then he tells me I look like I am stuck in a wind tunnel and that my cheeks are getting blown all around. I miss the wind, and I tell him to put the window back down. Dad laughs again and turns up the radio. The music sounds like it could be pretty, but I can’t hear the words because of the wind. My hand rides waves out of my window.

It takes us forty minutes to get there, and the stadium is alive. There are people everywhere, and it is quiet only for a moment because there is less wind. Soon I can hear men yelling “Tickets!” and a whole bunch of other noises. There are laughing women and kids, and there is sizzling smoke floating sideways through the parking lot. Dad pays ten dollars, parks, and rolls the windows up. We get out of the car and walk behind a group with a man wearing a Chase Utley t-shirt. I point out the shirt to Dad because Chase Utley is my favorite player. Dad buys us two tickets, and we walk inside the busy stadium. I worry that I will get lost, but Dad is right next to me.

The game is so fun even though not much happens. Dad gets a beer and a hot dog, and he buys me a hot dog and a Coke. In the bottom of the fourth inning, a foul ball from Ryan Howard comes in our direction and hits the man sitting in front of us right in the shoulder. Dad almost catches it, but it goes two rows behind us. I drop my hot dog, but by then it is mostly bun anyway. Sometime around the fifth inning, I have to pee, so Dad takes me to the bathroom. On the way back to our seats, we stop in the souvenir shop, and he buys me a ball with Ryan Howard’s picture and signature on it. It is in a clear plastic case with a gold bottom, and it cost almost nine dollars. “It’s for the one I almost caught,” Dad says. In the end, the Phillies win by two runs, and everyone claps and talks and yells loud when we are leaving.

 

We drive back just the way we came, with the windows down and the music quiet in the wind. We stop at a Wawa for gas, and Dad buys me an Icee. I am just finishing it when we get home, and the straw slurps on the bottom. We pull in the driveway, and Mom is angry, grabs my arm, and drags me out of the car. She kneels and hugs me in the driveway and then starts yelling at Dad. She yells things like “Where have you been?” and she yells other things I won’t tell you. I am worried about them fighting like last time, but then Scott walks out on the porch and comes over and hugs me too. He stands up and shakes Dad’s hand, but he doesn’t say much besides “You should have told us.” Dad looks small next to Scott. They know each other from when they used to work together at the newspaper.

I am standing with everyone in a little circle in the driveway, and everyone is angry but me and yelling at Dad for taking me to the game. It was a good day, but nobody sees it that way, and I start to wish I never went. I get my bag out of the trunk and bring it inside while everyone is still standing by the car, and then I come back out with the Ryan Howard ball and my glove. I show Mom and Scott, and they pat my shoulders and say, “Those are very nice, David.” They tell me to go back inside, and I ride my Matchbox cars on the carpet in my bedroom.

 

When I get tired of Matchbox cars, I go downstairs and turn on the television. When the screen lights up, the television is showing the best parts of the Phillies game, and I yell to everyone outside when I see Dad and me on the screen. They don’t hear me, so I sit there alone watching the lady on the news laughing at the man who got hit in the shoulder with the foul ball. She doesn’t know him but laughs and makes fun of him anyway, as if the man can’t hear or isn’t watching. I turn the television off and wonder if any of my friends at school saw me on the news.

Soon everyone comes inside and apologizes, and I tell them about Dad and me on television. They say they are sorry they missed it, and I say they showed me dropping my hot dog and everything. Mom and Scott stand in the kitchen, and Dad walks into the family room and hugs me goodbye for now. He says he will see me tomorrow or the day after. Dad keeps his left hand in his pocket, and he waves with his right hand to Mom and Scott in the kitchen on his way out. I hear Dad’s car start up, and his music is loud but I can’t hear it, like when we were in the wind.

It is around seven o’clock when Mom calls me to eat dinner, and I am happy because Mom made chicken fajitas. Mom puts the chicken, peppers, onions, and mushrooms in the tortilla wraps for me, and then I get to put whatever I want on top. I pile so much lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese on my first fajita that it is really hard to eat. The brown liquid slimes down my forearm. Mom wipes it for me with a paper towel.

We sit where we always do. Mom sits across from Scott, and I sit at the end of the table. It is really quiet in the kitchen, and everyone just eats their fajitas. Mom starts to say something. I can tell she is about to cry, but Scott calms her down. I get up from my chair, and Mom asks me where I am going. I tell her I want another fajita, but I can get it for myself this time. Mom tells me she will get it for me and takes my plate. I watch her spoon more stuff into another wrap, but when she turns, she drops the plate on the floor. It breaks, and pieces of food and the plate go everywhere. Scott rushes over to help, and I get up out of my chair too. I pick up the pieces of chicken that rolled under the kitchen table, and I think how it would be nice to hide under the table for a while just like the chicken pieces. I put them into the trashcan and hug my Mom. I tell her I am sorry for leaving without telling her, and she hugs me really tight and cries. When she lets go, I walk back up the stairs to my bedroom. I am building the house of Legos, and Scott brings me a fajita with everything on it just the way I like it. He says to be careful not to spill, and he tells me Mom is just tired and didn’t mean to cry. I thank Scott for the food without looking up from my Legos.

I go to bed around nine-thirty, and I am really tired. Mom comes in and kisses me on the forehead while Scott stands by the door. I ask Scott to do the thing with the flashlight, so he grabs the flashlight out of my dresser and points it all over the ceiling. Scott says “Goodnight, Kiddo,” and I giggle because no one says that. When they turn off the lights and leave the room, I stare up at the bright glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. I have counted them a bunch of times. There are fifty-three—twenty-one big ones and thirty-two small ones.

 

On Saturday after breakfast, Scott mows the lawn, and Mom works in her garden. I watch a few cartoons then go play with Harold and his little brother Jonathan. We play with water guns, rollerblade in the street, and throw a green and yellow Nerf football in Harold’s yard. Mom calls me in for lunch, and she makes me grilled cheese and tomato soup. The meal is warm in my stomach, and the heat makes me sweat a little bit. When I am done, Mom gives me an orange popsicle, and I run back outside.

Harold and Jonathan are still inside eating, so I sit on our front porch and eat my popsicle. I chew on the wooden stick for a little while, but then Mom takes it away because I’ll choke. I see Jonathan come out of the Morrison’s house first, and I wait for him and Harold on my front lawn. Harold and Jonathan stand in their yard and I stand in mine, and we throw a baseball back and forth across the street. Harold says my new glove is cool, and then Jonathan complains that he wants to throw the ball too. Harold lets him throw the ball to me every other time, but Jonathan’s throws bounce in the street and scratch the ball a little bit each throw. Then we make a small triangle in Harold’s yard so we all can play.

We race each other around the Morrisons’ house, first me against Harold, then Harold and Jonathan, then Jonathan and me. I love when I am running. I can feel my heart like it is going to bust through my chest. My throat feels scratchy, and I can’t get enough air. It is like I am moving faster than anything else, and I speed past hedges and around trees and make sure not to trip on the hose. The race is close against Harold, but Jonathan says I won. I run slower with Jonathan, but I make sure to win at the end. After we are done running, we all lie on the Morrisons’ front yard, and I rest my hands on my chest and feel my heart beating.

Dad’s car turns loud around our corner, and we sit up to watch it pull into my driveway. I walk back to my house, and Dad gets out of his car. There are parts of a mountain bike showing in his back seat, and he pulls the parts out one at a time. Dad says, “I bought you a present” and starts to put the pieces together with a wrench from his pocket. He is really focused on the bike, so he doesn’t really look at me. I ask him what the gift is for, but he doesn’t answer right away. Then he says one day I will come visit him and Marilyn. They have a nice house, and there are a lot of fun things to do in Boston . Dad looks up and smiles, and he says that one day I will know why. That’s when I know he is leaving for Boston again.

Mom and Scott are inside eating lunch, and I call them outside. Dad has the bike all put together by the time the two of them are on the front porch. The bike is really shiny and blue like Dad’s Mustang, and it looks really fast. Dad even got me a matching helmet. I hate wearing bike helmets, but Mom says I have to until I am thirteen. So I put the helmet on and clip the snap under my chin.

I try to get up on the bike. It is too high, and Dad has to adjust the seat. Finally the seat is the right height, and I pedal the bike on the street in big circles while Harold asks if he can try riding it next. There are gears and little levers by the handlebars, and I am really excited. I pedal around the cul-de-sac, and Jonathan chases me but isn’t fast enough to catch me on the bike even when I try to go slow. On the way back, I look at the house and Scott has his arm around Mom on the porch, and they are both happy. Dad is smiling and leaning on his car in the driveway.

They look like a picture in the afternoon sun, and I wave to them before I bike right past the house and up our road. I hear Mom yelling from the porch when I turn the corner onto the big street. I pass Lindsay’s house, and there is still a tent from her party. When I pass Sandy ’s house, water from her sprinkler hits my leg. I pump my legs as fast as I can, and then my right foot slides off the pedal and I scratch my shin. I put my foot back on the pedal, and the wind blows past my ears. My shin is throbbing pain like my heartbeat is in my leg now, and it is going to bleed. My thighs burn, and it feels like I am going a hundred miles an hour down the street past houses and barking dogs. I am out of breath, but I don’t stop because I can’t. No one can catch me on these two wheels. The bike is fast, and I am a blue streak flying down the big street toward somewhere else.

George Jacob completed his undergraduate studies at Penn State University , thanks to his parents? willingness to accumulate debt. He plans on pursuing an M.F.A. at his own expense, which will most likely be obtained from a more reasonably priced institution. George is a graduate assistant in Rowan University ?s writing program.