Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
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From the Archives
Features • Winter 2017 - Cell
If the six-second video gives any indication, it’s a handsome July day in Cedar Rapids. It’s 2015 and it’s caucus season in Iowa, the polls still 7 months away from opening. Amidst the robocalls and canvassers, the politicians are here—in the flesh!— rubbing shoulders with the Hawkeyes. The Clinton campaign has stopped along the banks of the Iowa River. Somebody brandishes a phone. Who knows who it is, really. I imagine a dutiful young staffer, but maybe it’s HRC herself. Surely there’s a digital marketing team, social media specialists, an oblique hierarchy. Nevertheless, the impulse is clear: handsome moments in Iowa don’t go unseen. Not now.
The video they record is short. It opens on a bottled iced tea, snug in an aquamarine koozie. This view lasts for three seconds, just long enough for us to read the koozie’s white lettering: “More like Chillary Clinton amirite?” Flip to the front-facing camera revealing Clinton’s smiling face at that uncomfortably close distance that is as sure a sign of age as there is in contemporary life, of the technologically uninitiated who haven’t spent hours of their young life snapping themselves, scrutinizing their angles on their screen. She is kissed by this Iowa sun and trying to look happy, and maybe she is. Through a smile, she tells herself on the screen: “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.”
From here it’s a matter of tracing the dissemination. The video was posted to the HRC Snapchat Story. A Snapchat follower downloaded the clip and posted it to their Vine account, username “its moi,” with the caption “I love politics.” From then to midway through August, the Vine clip was played over 17 million times—shared relentlessly across a whole variety of Internet channels, remixed, inserted, and expanded by users across the country.
There was something about the clip that made it resonate with people. It seemed like a microcosm of the Clinton campaign’s failure to connect, the sort of square-peg- in-round-hole stiltedness of their branding efforts. The thought process was painfully
transparent. People immediately saw it as an attempt to seize on something they might call “appealing to millennial tastes” in a boardroom. This transparency became genuinely funny when the attempt fell at on its face. The smiling seemed overcooked, the delivery stiff, the word chillin’ alien, like maybe it was the rst time it had come out of her mouth. And this is all cherry-topped by the mention of Cedar Rapids, which, to any Midwestern-illiterate millennial across the country, could only be spectrally project- ed as an unlikely site of chillin’. All this amounted to something deeply recognizable, such that it could become an effective vector of expressing some discomfort that young people felt about Clinton’s campaign. It could say something big and difficult to say, implicitly in the course of six seconds. That is, I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids had become a meme in an election cycle in which the meme reached its political maturity.
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976 in his The Selsh Gene. Everyone’s favorite grumpy atheist Darwinian posited that the human evolutionary path had veered in a different direction because something they had that the other species didn’t: culture. Human survival wasn’t predicated on the same rules of genetic evolution as animals because they had externalized the means to survival. Tools, language, governments —any constituent of culture—made progress that allowed people to keep on adapting without any genomic variation. The onus of evolution began to fall on culture itself. Dawkins made a strong argument that, further, we can do a sort of Darwinian reading of culture, suggesting that it too evolves in the way that species do. The validity of the par- ticulars of such a claim are surely up for debate, but its structure is compelling. The potentially suspect fundamental assumption is that units of culture, like units of hereditary information, seem to display an instinct for conservation and preservation. Their goal is to survive. In biogenetics, the grand structure of evolution snowballs from the rst fact that genes are compelled to survive. Dawkins proposes that culture has a similarly complicated grand structure that too snowballs from the rst fact that units of cultural information have a survival impulse. Dawkins decided to call this unit the “meme” in reference to the Greek root mimeme, its similarity to the word gene, and its relationship to the word memory. He emphasized, “it should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”
Dawkins argued that, again like the gene, the only real criterion for success in the meme is its relative survival value in the meme pool. Fitness is end all be all. And fit memes carry the same qualities that he outlines for fit genes: they have longevity, they’re fecund, and have high copying-delity. In his account, memes have no normative goodness. There is no agenda other than to be recognizable, to infiltrate, to sustain.
As a proper wing of culture, politics’ essential meme orientation should come as no surprise to us. If a politician, a party, or an ideology is able to introduce a fit meme into the culture, one that people are compelled to share and recapitulate, then they’ve done their job. In this sense, it’s easy to argue that the meme has had longstanding indispensi- ble political import. The Free Silver movement of the late 1800s, and what bimetallism culturally transmitted to embattled people in the United States, was a meme powerful enough to catapult William Jennings Bryan to a presidential nomination. The meme has always been connected to our politics because it and democracy both operate under the same logic. Fitness is tantamount. The number of people that relate to a message is the most important factor.
If there’s anything historically unique about our period of political memes, it’s that the omnipotence of the Internet has changed the channels of information distribution, which has managed to expand the number of memes made and accelerate their dissemination. This informational flood has engendered serious demands on our attention and the discursive speed warp has dictated that our units of political conversation become ever smaller. Our period of politics is the period of the meme because its conditions have realized the meme’s ideal function as informational vector. There is a sincere necessity to communicate unwieldy ideas in a slogan, a hashtag, a photo, or a brief clip. The meme’s communicative power lies in a moment of recognition. There is some unarticulated soup of a thought or feeling that oats around in your mind, a situation that you endlessly find yourself in, a seemingly inexpressible, but all-too-knowable something that sits on the tip of your tongue, but you cannot find the words for it until you see the meme. You recognize it and it recognizes you. You cannot help but share it because that thing is finally there to be said. And in our political moment, rich in complexity, poor in reflection, this function of the meme is crucial.
One of the groups on the vanguard of understanding the political efcacy of the meme was Kalle Lasn’s Adbusters magazine, which rose to prominence in the 1990s by championing “culture jamming” as a means of political resistance. The magazine was, and still is, a sort of anti-capitalist rag with a spirit of pranksterism that published spoofs of advertisements, casting them in strange lights with different slogans. It was cultural cannibalism, an attempt to subvert capital messages with their own material. Recently, the magazine has come to see their politics in terms of memes. In 2012, they wrote that the world was engaged in a “meme war... in which the decisive battles are being fought not in the sky, nor in the streets, nor in the forests, nor on the high seas, nor even on the battleelds of the Middle East, but rather in the mediums of the mental environment: newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and the Internet.”1 In the meme war, all global citizens are belligerents. Political efficacy is founded on our ability to produce fit memes, to inject units of culture that stick and manage to subvert other memes in their fitness. They argue further in the line of a classic Marxian critique that the landscape of the meme war must be viewed through the dynamics of capital. “Right now,” they say, “corporations control much of the means of meme production and propagation. They wield that power to devastating effect, foisting a few thousand ads, logos, marketing concepts and political slivers into our brains each day.” This is an important move, to see advertising, marketing, and branding, as the wing of meme making supported by capital interest. There too, the goal is to produce bits of culture that stick, all in the name of consumption.2 The financial power that backs these memes makes them even more intransigent. Adbusters concluded that the challenge in “reimagining activism” was to see its job as creating an “insurgent meme factory” that could introduce t memes into the culture that carried a more full-bodied political expression, some valence outside of consumption.
Again, if the idea of building an insurgent meme factory sounds silly and self-serious, Adbusters’ own success in doing so should convince us otherwise. Adbusters was the organization responsible for starting Occupy Wall Street, which we should read as one of the most effective political meme campaigns of our time. Among all of the movement’s successes and failures, it managed to introduce the slogan “We are the 99%,” which quickly became its rallying cry, ideological kernel, and essential contribution to the global political culture. It served the essential purpose of a political meme: to capture this big idea and distill it into a shareable, digestible unit. People could express their dissatisfaction with the complexities of the increasing nancialization of global economies and wealth inequality in succinct, recognizable terms. In creating the 99% meme, Adbusters had arguably done more for the global political process than it had in the history of its magazine. It’s hard to imagine the occurrence of a whole host of events—from Piketty’s appearance on the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list, to the outcropping of support for Bernie Sanders’ campaign, without the meme’s legwork.
As we sort through the wreckage of the 2016 presidential election, the inuence of the political meme has been criminally underexplored. Throughout the year, memes that grew up in communities across the Internet took lurid political twists. For instance, there was Pepe the Frog, a popular “reaction image” of a cartoon frog that’s appended to posts that engender especially strong, often melancholic, “feels” was appropriated by white nationalist segments of the “alt-right” Internet community. In months, the cartoon became a nihilistic hate symbol. The Anti-Defamation League was compelled to add the meme to its Hate Symbols Database. In September, the Clinton campaign posted their own “explainer” of the meme in question and answer format to their official website, criticizing Trump for posting images of the frog on his Twitter account. One exchange read:
“Let me get this straight: Trump’s presidential campaign is posting memes associated with white supremacy online?”
“Yes.”
There’s a way to read the unfolding of the whole election as a meme war, of the Trump campaign’s great success in meme making and Clinton campaign’s repeated failures. The election’s contours even followed many of the patterns that we recognize in Internet meme making communities. Trump launched his political career from Twitter, playing one of the quintessential online archetypes: the troll. The troll is inflammatory for inammation’s sake. He normally lurks anonymously, taking potshots at whomever just because he can. But Trump was identiable, already a celebrity on his veried account, and before the 2016 election was even something we could have conceived, he was questioning President Obama’s citizenship, demanding to see a birth certicate and stoking a hypernationalist re, all by acting like some of the people who run rampant around Reddit and 4Chan. Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s Twitter account would remain an essential part of his campaign. It was a constant stream of publicity and its content seemingly didn’t matter as long as it could drum up some fervor. There was some sort of irreverence and confidence that spoke the language of the Internet that Clinton could not.3 Trump didn’t flinch to say he was chillin’ in Cedar Rapids. Instead, on Cinco de Mayo he sat in his office in Trump Tower and posed for a photo to be posted to his Twitter, sitting behind a taco bowl, giving something that can be scarcely described as anything other than a devilish grin, putting one thumbs up. The tweet came with caption “Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!” The tweet prompted outrage from detractors and laughs from his supporters. But it really didn’t matter: the message was on brand and, by the time of this writing, it has been retweeted over 85,000 times and liked another 120,000 more.
The Clinton campaign was furiously trying to keep up with memes that had grown organically on the Internet, but the attempts reeked of the same cloyingness of the Brands Saying Bae phenomenon. There were her multiple Ellen appearances, each time coaxed into doing the popular Internet dance craze du jour with DeGeneres. And there is something so distinctly painful about watching these segments now. Clinton tries her best to perform these dances, the Nae Nae, the Dab, popularized originally by a vein of Internet hip hop meme culture, and she is embarrassingly bad at them. But this is the conceit of the segment. We know she is going to be embarrassingly bad at them, her campaign knows, the Ellen producers know, even (or, especially) HRC knows, but she goes forth with it perhaps because that’s the joke, perhaps because they all don’t know how else to make a meme. It might be best distilled in Clinton’s appearance as a guest on a popular New York hip hop radio station talk show called “The Breakfast Club.” Toward the end of the segment, one of the hosts asks Clinton if there’s something that she always carries with her. Without missing a beat, she replies “hot sauce.” The hosts look truly shocked, wondering if she’s making a reference to Beyoncé’s recent popular song “Formation,” with the line “I got hot sauce in my bag, swag.” One pipes up: “Now listen. I want you to know that people are gonna see this and say ‘Ok, she’s pandering to black people.” The room laughs and Clinton labors to joke along with him, “Is it workin’?” The Clinton camp’s last attempt to jump on a viral meme trend happened just days before the election. They lmed their version of the “mannequin challenge,” a meme that was just exploding in which groups of people stood still, as if mannequins, to the tune of hip hop duo Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles.” The Clinton challenge takes place on the campaign plane and, as the camera makes its way down the aisle, we see Clinton standing frozen at the back of the crowd as Sremmurd’s Swae Lee croons, “That girl is a real crowd pleaser.”
Throughout the Clinton campaign’s oundering Chillin’-In-Cedar-Rapids-attempts, the Trump campaign was paving a road to the White House with effective meme making. “Build the wall!” was a meme that was able to capture the resentments of an appar- ently sizable group of people and express their political fervor in a sharable clip. The logistics and funding (Mexico will pay for it), the intricacies of migration policy, the effectiveness of the wall-as-border, none of it mattered – it was all fuddled and in flux. The Trump campaign’s watershed meme moment, their “We Are The 99%,” was undoubtedly “Make America Great Again.” Its terms weren’t novel. Surely the sentiment has been the nub of American conservatism at least since Reagan. But the branding was impeccable. Hundreds of thousands of people roamed the country with hats bearing the phrase. It could be worn, tweeted, shouted. What mattered was its athleticism: the speed with which it could be shared, the imposing strength of its claim, its ability to make an agile impression. It suggested nothing specific so it could be applied to anything. Yet, it was just specific enough to tap into the necessary demographic. It was the vague frustration of a certain type of American, distilled into its essential ethos. It provided millions with that moment of recognition. And it worked. The memes didn’t win it all, but they didn’t hurt.
Even beyond the election, there’s early indication that Trump will run the presidency as meme maker, or at least it’s become clear that inammatory tweets won’t remain just a tactic to draw attention as a vote-seeker. In the month’s since his election, Trump has continued to tweet furiously in his classic style and has already used the platform to comment on minor crises of international affairs. He’s given us the meme take on the Russian hacking imbroglio and following diplomatic response from Putin (33k retweets): “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!” The Iran Deal (34k retweets): “The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” Military strategy meeting (13k retweets): “I met some really great Air Force GENERALS and Navy ADMIRALS today, talking about airplane capability and pricing. Very impressive people!” All such posts have been covered in the press as official presidential statements of the past and the Trump administration intends for this to be the status quo. Incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer, has stated in interview that the Trump administration will “absolutely” use Twitter to make official statements on policy. He even went on the offensive: “I think it freaks the mainstream media out that he has this following of over 45-plus million people that follow him on social media, that he can have a direct conversation. He doesn’t have to have it funnel through the media...The fact of the matter is when he tweets, he gets results.” Perhaps we’re even to be subject to meme governance, four years of our world affairs encapsulated and disseminated in 140 characters or less.
So where do we stand on the left? Perhaps to make our own memes with the boldness of the Trump campaign. We are compelled to no longer flail behind pop culture, to think that our endorsement from celebrity and corporate media will be enough to translate into fit memes. We turn to that process of recognition, to understand what we demand from our politics and to know how to share it such that others recognize themselves in our demands. Memes need to be a vector to transmit the pathos of a true left ideology. If we actually believe that left politics are more benecial for the embattled people of postindustrial America—not taking for granted here that the tepid ailing of Dem’s approach might suggest that many establishment liberals haven’t bothered to build this conviction—who Trump swung with memes, then we are compelled to meme back. The question is: can the left nd its memes? Will we uncover our Drain the Swamp, our Build the Wall, our Make America Great Again in the next four years? The future of our politics might depend on it.
1 If this sounds potentially naïve or high-minded, that’s because it is. It’s hard for me to imagine explaining to people engaged in warfare in the Middle East, from any side, that the true battles are only being fought in the mind. That said, their point is well taken. Our politics do seem to be engaged intensely in this cultural war, the currency of which is memes.
2 It bears noting that, in our period of meme acceleration, marketing strategists are also engaged in a race to co- opt memes that develop organically within Internet communities and use them in advertising campaigns. This too is a relatively omnipotent trend around which an important body of criticism has already developed. Doreen St. Felix’ s [“Black Teens Are Breaking The Internet And Seeing None Of The Profits” from The Fader](http://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee-meechie-viral-vines) is essential reading here. A great Twitter account called, [@BrandsSayingBae](https://twitter.com/brandssayingbae?lang=en) catalogues these instances.
3 Another important aside is required here before diving too deep into this. It’s important to consider the role that implicit gender politics might have contributed to the candidate’s diverging success as meme makers. The same sort of coded gender dynamics that assailed Clinton’s ability to be seen as “charismatic,” for example, were at play here. This irreverence and confidence that it seems to take to be an effective meme maker carry strike me as carrying a masculine cultural weight that Clinton was doomed to be unable to project. Not to mention, we know that many influential communities on the Internet that dictate lots of sharing and remixing of memes are infamously inhospitable to women.
Fiction • Spring 2014
We’d been living in Madero for months of silent siege when I got a toothache on the right side of my mouth. It hurt like hell. I chewed only with the left side of my mouth for ten days while I tried to find a dentist that would take the insurance that Katherine got through the school. Most places didn’t take it because it was cut-rate. You’d think they’d give teachers better benefits. I started to worry that the right side of my face would become sallow and emaciated from lack of use. I knew it probably wouldn’t, but I grew out a beard just in case. I hadn’t grown a beard in several years, and when it came in I was surprised at how much gray was in it. I shaved it right off. I did eventually find a dentist that took the insurance, but his office was in a little town called Venero. It was a half an hour away, in a valley up in the mountains. The only opening was on Friday morning that week. I would have to take a whole day off of work to go. I spent that Thursday framing a house with my foreman Eric. A guy from a neighboring town had done the plumbing the day before, because I was Eric’s only employee and didn’t know how. Eric didn’t like being called the foreman, but I thought it was funny. I liked working construction even though I had to wake up so early. There was something peaceful about the rhythm of it. I liked it much more than wait- ing tables, or tending bar, or moving furniture like I had done in California. When I told Eric that I wasn’t going to be able to come in the next day because of my appointment, he wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing to do. It wasn’t as if I was playing hooky to have fun. Venero used to be a mining town. The mine was still there, but it employed so few people it wasn’t really reasonable to call it a mining town anymore. At least that’s what Eric told me when I asked him for directions. I had never been. His uncle used to work in the mines, he said. They mined molybdenum, but his uncle didn’t know what the company used it for. To him, it just looked like the lead in pencils. Molybdenum is mixed with steel to make it stronger. I looked it up in the library a couple years ago. When I came home from work that Thursday, Katherine was sitting in the living room. The house was cold. We were in a standoff; neither of us wanted to be the one to turn on the thermostat for the winter. As I sat down on the couch, she got up and walked into the bedroom and closed the door. I went into the kitchen and began making as much noise as I could but she didn’t come out and eventually I got tired and stopped. I sat down at the kitchen table. She came into the kitchen a little later and poured herself a glass of white wine. As she walked back to the bedroom, she spilled a little wine on my sleeve. I knocked the chair over as I stood up. She said it was an accident and that if I was going to yell I could leave the house. I smiled and said that it was fine and then I shut myself in my office until she had gone to bed. That night, my tooth hurt too much to sleep. I tried every trick that I knew of to drift off. Nothing worked. I massaged my cheek with my fingers, which seemed to help, but my hands were so cracked and dry that my cheek began to chafe and so I stopped. I had given up trying to use lotion to make them better, because the lotion made my palms soft and they would rip open when I worked. Katherine didn’t like the lotion. She preferred it when my hands smelled like sawdust. I sat at the kitchen table the whole night, with only a candle for company, but it burned down to a nub and died out. I was left in the silver light of the moon. We’d been fighting a lot. They weren’t loud and fiery fights like we used to have in the old house. I never hurt her. Several times I flipped the kitchen table over onto its side. The first time her grandmother’s vase was on it. The subsequent vases that she put in its place were cheap and from secondhand stores, so breaking them didn’t mean anything and I stopped flipping the table over altogether. I moved on to all the other stuff that made our house our house. When we moved, we didn’t take any of the things we owned. They were all replacements. They didn’t mean anything to us. Our new house is bare. It only has the furniture it came with. These quiet fights were worse though, worse because they were slow and deliberate. Katherine was a master at fighting like that. Not me though, it ruined my digestive system. I didn’t have the nerves. I want to blame Katherine’s drinking for our fighting but that isn’t fair. It wasn’t why we were fighting, and she really only started seriously drinking after we moved to New Mexico. She handles drinking much better than I do. I wasn’t drinking back then; I’m making up for it now. This is how it went: half a bottle of Chardonnay before dinner, half a bottle with dinner, and half a bottle after dinner. Out there, the air was so dry that the chilled bottles didn’t sweat and leave little wet rings when she took them out of the fridge and left them on the table. She was very regimented about it; she didn’t let it affect her career. She woke up every morning, right when I was leaving for the construction site, to get ready for school. The children at school didn’t call her by our last name. They called her Ms. Katherine. When the sun crested the mountains I went into the bedroom to change my clothes and brush my teeth. I wanted to leave before Katherine woke up. She was asleep, but she didn’t look peaceful. Her lips were pursed and her brow was furrowed. When we first met, she kept a dream journal, but she didn’t both- er anymore. She said that she had the same dream over and over—so many times that she had stopped keeping track. I told her she should go see someone about it, but she never did. She said she didn’t dream when she drank. She told me once about the dream. It wasn’t unpleasant. The road to Venero went through the foothills. It went up and down. I had to go as fast as I could on the declines to build up speed for the climbs. My car was little and old and I was worried that it would die. It wasn’t used to high elevation. At the beginning of the drive, at lower altitudes, the aspens which were interspersed with the pine trees had yellow leaves, but as I climbed, they became barren. It seemed to me as though I was driving outside of time, and I didn’t mind the idea of going on forever, climbing and climbing, until everything turned white. As I drove, I thought about how my older brother and I used to hop the fence around the orchards in the fall when the branches were heavy with apples and the leaves were yellow and red. We tried to catch the falling leaves as they zigzagged through the air. We climbed the trees and picked apples to fill our shirts with. We ate until we were swollen and had bellyaches. Then, we would lie under the trees in the dappled afternoon light and drift between napping and talking. Later in the fall, when most of the apples had fallen off of the trees, we would take turns pitching the partially rotten fruit to each other and batting with a branch. My brother’s swing was all wrists. He would cushion the apple with the stick and then flick it, whole, up into the blue afternoon. I didn’t have any finesse and every time I hit I sprayed chunks of apple everywhere and they coated our clothes and it drove our mother crazy. My brother passed away a little while before Katherine and I moved from Menlo Park. It was nothing dramatic. He didn’t even live in the town. One minute he was there in my mind, then the police called and he was gone. It was a stroke. I hadn’t seen him for years, and if they hadn’t called, he would have gone on living in my mind forever. I waited a week or so to tell Katherine. When I did she put down her book and walked over and hugged me from behind. At first I tried to brush her off but she hung on, like she was riding a bull. Suddenly all the fight in me, all the stubbornness, left and I let her hold me. She never said anything about it after that, but when I wanted to move I think she understood. The house, our childhood home, was unbearable for me after he died. I thought that Madero would be the perfect town for us to move to. It was small and quiet. There were mountains and a river. Katherine got a job at the local elementary school and I worked construction. But I didn’t realize how dry it would be and how empty. The sky was huge out there and blue, but the earth was flat, except for the mountains, and there were times, when the wind whipped up and I looked out the window at the expanses of sagebrush and the lonely mountains, that I felt as if I were the only person in the world. The air there was too light and arid, and it almost felt like there was no air at all, that each breath was futile. I arrived in Venero fifteen minutes early for my appointment. The only buildings on the main drag were a couple of houses, a gas station, and a liquor store. At first I thought that I had arrived at the wrong place. The office was in a doublewide mobile home that sat on the ground. It didn’t look like a dentist’s office, but it was the right address. I opened the dusty glass front door and a bell chimed feebly. I don’t really know how to describe the place. There was a small reception area, stocked with old magazines and a slumped couch. Through one door a dentist chair and tools were visible. An old woman sat reading a fading magazine behind the receptionist’s desk. Cages and tanks that were full of small animals occupied the rest of the office, which was most of the space. The carpet was green and there were wood chips everywhere. I remember that the office smelled of disinfectant and cedar and animal urine and the combination stung my nostrils and made me nauseous. I stood in the doorway surrounded by falling dust particles that were illuminated by the beams of light that streamed through the door. The receptionist looked up and greeted me. Her face was deeply wrinkled and her black hair was held tightly back in a bun. She wore shabby clothes and spoke with a thick New Mexican accent. Her teeth were perfectly straight and white. She asked me to fill out some forms but she didn’t have a pen and neither did I. I asked her about the animals and she told me that the dentist ran the only zoo in Venero. She told me too that I was welcome to look at the animals while I waited. Other than us, the office was silent. The cages were stacked against the faux wood walls. The glass on the tanks was smudged and dirty. I walked through the office, looking for some sign of movement. One of the big tanks had a rattlesnake in it, or at least that’s what the plaque on the tank said, because the snake didn’t have a rattle. As I looked at more and more of the animals the more uneasy I felt. The dentist came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped. His hands were strong and weighed heavily on me. He was a tall man with white-blond hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore high-waisted jeans and a plaid shirt with a bolo tie. His face was wide and shiny and he smiled with his mouth open and his teeth slightly gapped. He told me that he had caught all the animals himself and that he had the largest collection of monitor lizards in the state. He asked me if I had seen the caiman. I had not. His breath smelled sour. He led me by my shoulder to his prized possession, the one animal not from New Mexico, at the far end of the room, in the biggest tank. I didn’t want to look. He’s beautiful isn’t he, he asked me. I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I looked into the black and beady eyes and could not look away. The caiman was motionless, and for a moment I thought it might actually be stuffed, but there was something alive in its eyes, some malice. The pit of my stomach was cold. We might have been standing there for ten seconds, or ten minutes, and I think I would have kept standing there if the dentist hadn’t turned and told me to follow him into the back room where the dentist chair was. The dentist chair was old and turquoise, ripped on the arms. He sat me down and tucked a bib into my shirt. I was staring at the ceiling, which was stained brown from water that had leaked through the roof. The shelves that lined the walls were filled with animal skulls. They were yellow and they all had big teeth. Under each skull, there was a handwritten label. There was a javelina from Texas and a wild boar from Colorado. There must have been at least a couple dozen of them. I was grateful when he turned on the bright dental light, which blinded me. He injected a lot of Novocaine into my gums. The shot hurt, but soon I could not feel his strong and gloved hands as they moved my jaw. He used a tiny drill and all I could sense was the vibration that it sent through my skull. But I heard the whine of the motor and smelled burning tooth and felt the dust the drill generated at the back of my mouth. I think I would have gone without the Novocaine if I didn’t have to smell that smell. It scared me. He was a good dentist. He worked quickly, and he didn’t ask me any questions. He told me that when he first opened the office children used to come in and look at the animals, but it had been a while since anyone who was not a patient had been in and even the patients no longer took an interest. He lived in a town south of Madero and commuted to Venero a couple of days a week. He told me that he didn’t work in the winters and that he had to pay someone to come in and clean the tanks and feed the animals. He lost a few animals every winter. He didn’t work in Venero in the winters because he was afraid of driving through the mountains on icy and snowy roads back to where he lived. He said, If your car breaks down on those roads in winter, there’s nothing left to do but the dying. He finished his work, switched off the light, and sat me up in the chair. He had a blue surgical mask on. He told me that I was all set and that they would mail me the bill. I thanked him, but could not pro- nounce any of the words because of the Novocaine. When I walked through the main room, I kept my eyes forward and unfocused. On the drive home I kept looking in the mirror. I thought that was what I was going to look like when I was old, when all the vitality had left my body and my skin was loose. I kept poking my cheek with my finger to see if I could feel anything. I couldn’t. I thought about what he said, about dying at night in the mountains, about freezing to death, about numbness. Katherine and I drove when we moved out there in the winter. We only got part of the way on the first day and so we stayed in a hotel in some run-down little town. When we got up in the morning to keep going the windshield was frosted over. We didn’t have an ice scraper—we didn’t know it got that cold in the southwest—so I had to drive with my head to the side, looking out of the little patch of windshield that the weak defroster melted clear. Whenever the highway turned towards the sun the frost on the windshield lit up into a brilliant glow and I could not see a thing and Katherine would begin to fidget nervously. But I kept driving. I got home and walked straight to the bedroom. I lay on top of the covers and fell asleep. I did not have any dreams. When I woke up, the walls were tinted orange from the setting sun. I had drooled all over the pillow. When I walked in to the kitchen Katherine asked me if I was having a stroke because of how the right side of my face sagged. Then she laughed. It wasn’t until dinner that I was certain that I had to go back. Katherine and I sat across from each other at the table with our heads down, looking at our plates. Usually, I tried to ask about her day and talk to her. Dinner was the only time that we could talk, when she was just drunk enough to speak and not drunk enough to be mean. But I didn’t say a word that night. I was thinking about the animals. I thought of the cold wire cages. Even though it scared me, I felt sorry for the caiman. I was chewing, but I was not paying enough attention and my cheek slipped between my teeth and I bit down on it. I did not feel it, but I tasted the blood. I don’t know why I felt that way. Once, when I was a boy, my father and I went on a hunting trip in the Rockies. We flew to Colorado. It was my special trip; my brother didn’t get to come, and it was my first time on a plane. My father had paid for a guide and a crew to take all of our gear. All I had to carry was my rifle. It was a .22. I don’t remember much of the trip anymore-–the camping, the food or any of that-–but I do remember shooting a deer. My .22 wasn’t really supposed to be able to kill anything, but the deer had popped up just in front of us, close enough that the little bullet could do damage. I remember being scared, scared that I would miss when my father whispered for me to shoot and that I would disappoint him. But I shot and hit the deer in the side. It didn’t die right away. It fell to the ground and lay breathing great gulps of air, its pupils so big that its eyes were black and they drew my own eyes with irresistible grav- ity. My father told me to shoot it again, behind the eye, and I did. My father patted me on the back, but I didn’t feel anything, not pride or empathy. I just wanted to go home. I washed the dishes slowly, and when I was done, my hands were wrinkled and peeling. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Katherine to go to bed. She was already done with her drinking for the night, and so it was only a matter of time. As I waited, the Novocaine wore off slowly and my jaw began to ache. It was a dull and pounding pain. Finally Katherine went into the bedroom and closed the door and I was alone. I waited until I thought Katherine was asleep before I snuck into our room. I fumbled through my dresser in the dark and put on a black pair of pants, a black sweatshirt, and running shoes. I guess I made too much noise, or maybe I was acting suspicious all night, because Katherine turned her light on and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I had some business to take care of. I tried to make it sound important. She laughed through her nose. What business do you have, she asked. I told her what I was going to do. I was always honest with Katherine. I was sure that she was going to try and stop me—that she was going threaten to call the cops or turn me in. But she didn’t. She asked if she could come. We got into the car. Katherine wanted to drive, but she was drunk. It was crisp out and the moon was almost full. I drove the same route that I had driven earlier. We didn’t talk on the whole drive, but it didn’t bother me. Katherine rested her head against the window and I wasn’t even sure if she was awake. Under the light of the moon the surroundings were a colorless gradation of gray. Katherine and I used to sit on the fire escape outside of the window of our apartment when we first moved in together. It felt more real, somehow. When we were down on the street surrounded by buildings I felt like I was on a stage and each action was mimed. But on the fire escape we could see the curvature of the earth. We would smoke cigarettes and watch the ashes fall slowly, like leaves. Katherine was afraid of heights and I used to climb on the outside of the railing to scare her. Then she would grab me and hold me close and kiss me. I pulled into the parking lot and turned off the headlights. We got out of the car and Katherine went and tried the front door, which was locked. I had a tire iron in the trunk and I got it out. I had never broken a window before and my first tap on the glass was too soft. Katherine asked if she could try. She put her whole body into the swing and she smashed the window. We both stood still as we waited for an alarm to sound, but the night was silent, other than the soft clicks of the car engine as it cooled. Katherine went and got a flashlight from the glove compartment. I reached through the hole in the window and unlocked the door. When I opened it, the bell chimed and echoed through the dark room. Katherine swept the flashlight around. The soft yellow beam reflected off the tanks. I told her to turn it off so our eyes could adjust. There was enough moonlight to see, if we waited. We stood still in the silence and I heard Katherine’s rapid breathing. When at last our eyes had adjusted, we stepped carefully over the broken glass and made right for the cages. I picked up a tank and walked out the front door. In the silver light it was difficult to see the plaques, which were often cast in shadows and so I didn’t know which animal I was carrying, but it didn’t matter. It was surprisingly heavy. I took the lid off and tipped the tank on its side. I left it like that and went back inside for more. We ferried the animals out one by one, letting them go into the night. It was hard work, the cages were heavy, but my adrenaline was pumping and with each animal we released I grew more invigorated. It seems silly now, but while we were in that office, in the pale moonlight, I thought I fell in love with Katherine all over again. We passed each other as we moved in and out of the door and I caught a whiff of her hair and we brushed shoulders, gently but consciously. With the lighting and the emotion it seemed as though that moment had been spliced in from some reel of film from long-gone days. We had moved almost all the cages, laying them on their sides in rows in the gravel parking lot. I carried one particularly large tank out and took the lid off. As I tilted the tank onto its side, I felt a stinging pain in my right hand. I flung my arm backwards instinctively and the tank fell and shattered. A snake slithered swiftly out of the tank and into the night. The rattlesnake. I put my hand between my thighs and Katherine came running outside to find me on my knees. She asked me what had happened and I explained, the best that I could. Her eyes were wide and she swayed slightly in place as I held my hand up and she looked at the two puncture wounds. I started to suck on the bite, but Katherine pulled my hand away from my mouth. She thought I might poison myself that way. I didn’t know if she was right and so I stopped. Neither of us knew what to do, neither of us knew much about snakes. She wanted to call an ambulance but I told her we couldn’t call 911 from the dentist’s phone because then they would know it was us who had let the animals go. I like to think the snake tried to warn me but couldn’t because it didn’t have a rattle. I like to imagine it shaking its tail vigorously and in vain. After the incident, I looked up everything there was to know about rattlesnakes. I have become an expert. People don’t really die from rattlesnake bites, at least not unless they are in the middle of a desert. The venom takes hours to be lethal. But in that parking lot I didn’t know if I was dying or how much time I had left, which was worse in some ways than knowing for sure. Then at least there is nothing left to do but the dying. My favorite fact about rattlesnakes is that they give birth to live young. The nearest hospital that I knew of was in Madero. I told Katherine that we had to leave. She wanted to drive, but I couldn’t let her because she was drunk. I started the car and the headlights illuminated the whole scene in yellow: the faux stucco, the shattered glass tank, the dark and gaping door to the office. The only animal left inside was the caiman. I put the car in gear and eased onto the road. I leaned over and put my right hand as low on the floor as possible. I knew that slowed the spread of the poison. I was leaning over towards Katherine and had to crane my neck to look out of the window. She reached over and caressed my cheek and I almost jerked away because her fingers were so cold. She stroked my cheek in a way that she hadn’t done in a long time. Beneath her fingers my jaw was aching. With each beat of my heart I thought I could feel the venom advancing up my arm. I thought about what the dentist had said about his car in winter. How much nicer it would be, I thought, to freeze like that, to fall asleep, than if we got stuck now. Katherine would have to watch me and I would have to watch her watch me. There would be no dignity in that. With each hill I held my breath and as we crested it I let it out slowly. Katherine began to cry. I wasn’t sure if she was crying for me because she thought I was dying or for some other reason, and I didn’t ask. She told me that she was sorry, but she didn’t say what for and I felt as though her words were not for me. She asked if I remembered how we had met and for the first time since I was a boy I lied. I couldn’t recall a thing. She said that we were stupid, that this was stupid, to let those animals go. They are probably going to die in the wild, she said. And I knew she was right. She told me that she wished she had been bit too. She said that we both deserved it. The pain was spreading up my arm and my tooth hurt and my neck was sore. My heart felt as hollow and empty as a swallow’s nest and I wanted to get as far away from Katherine as soon as possible, but I was afraid to lift my hand. We got to the hospital and went into the E.R. I was embarrassed when I saw how unconcerned the doctor on call was. We sat on the plastic chairs in the waiting room, Katherine with her head lilting, and me with my chin almost on my chest. I thought about my brother, about how he had gone too quickly, about how he had died in a phone call. I felt as though I had an hourglass emptying sand into my limbs until they were heavy and hard to move. I felt tired. A nurse called my name and I got up and walked towards the double swinging doors. Katherine called out. She asked me if things would get better and I looked into her fearful and bloodshot eyes. Yes, I said and I turned and walked through the doors. Some people think that, when cornered, a rattlesnake will bite itself with suicidal intent. This is not true. When cornered rattlesnakes strike out at anything that moves, including their tails. When they feel yielding flesh beneath their fangs, they will release venom. Rattlesnakes are immune to their own poison and they rarely die from this.
Fiction • Summer 2019
Years from now, she will remember the ash that followed her. The cities charred and smoldered behind her, plumes of smoke like storm clouds in the rearview. The air was dense and syrupy with car exhaust and ash, vermillion sunsets like something out of science fiction, electric and strange. Wildfire tinged each grapevine in the Sonoma vineyards, boiling the grape juice on site and disrupting the ferment. In every cabernet bottled that year, the faint edge of smoke cut through like rot.
Reports of the wildfires occupied news headlines for weeks after. Atlas, Cascade, Sulphur. They named the fires like animals, a new one to report each morning. *Investigations ongoing*, the news anchor said gravely, the satellite images in stop-motion swirls, gray pixels dancing behind him in delayed flurries. *Strong winds. Human carelessness*.
Carelessness, she thought. That’s all it was. Accident. But some fires started on purpose. Forests knew self-cleansing better than anyone. It was programmed into their DNA—like the way a mother knew the sound of her infant’s cry with her body. The way children thrilled to water like a second home.
The day she left, highways clogged with minivans and Explorers, traffic bottlenecked and stood still for miles of the Interstate. She took local roads, navigating unpaved gravel streets that rattled the Datsun. All those empty houses of evacuated towns, like the set of a film. The kitchens in Sonoma and the living rooms in Mendocino reduced to rubble. All those places left behind.
The Datsun stalled around Fairfield. Miles and miles of cars, helmed by drivers with white surgical masks, breathing their own wet breath. Stopped behind a Chevrolet, she thought of a Ford she passed back near Petaluma, a boy in the passenger seat. He stared at her not unkindly, and she was startled by the wide spotlight of his gaze. As if he’d been watching her long before she noticed. As if he’d always seen her, and everything else, all of it, from the beginning to the end.
The Datsun idled in the driveway, the afterthought of dusk lingering pink toward the west. For a moment, she’d contemplated reversing, driving away, but there was no money for a hotel, barely enough money for gas. The empty light clicked on as she’d exited onto Del Monte, pulling the Datsun sharply into the hairpin curve of the exit ramp, as if she had no choice, as if the car were driving of its own accord.
He’d left the front door unlocked, as if he knew she would come. Strange, how they still knew each other’s habits. Inside she did not glance at the walls, where empty frames reflected the light back. Instead, she followed the trail of lights down the hallway, into the studio.
He didn’t turn around, but he knew she was there. She could tell by the way his shoulders stiffened. She surveyed the work. There were twelve of them: almost identical, lined up along the wall, postcard-sized canvases. Covered in charcoal, smeared with orange and yellow. Some were like bonfires, color ravaging darkness; others were subdued, on the verge of extinguishment. They aren’t getting worse in order, she said.
It’s wrong to view them as a progression, he said. Disaster is rarely so straightforward.
She watched his hands move across the canvas, charcoal working deftly across the page. His hands—artist’s hands, she thought, hands that made things.
I’ll give you gas money, but you can’t stay here, he said.
Because you don’t have room for me?
For you. For anyone.
I’m different from anyone, she said.
I think the house burned down, she said.
You think.
I know, she said, and she did. It was something she could feel.
Like you know anything anymore, he said. Like you don’t spend every weeknight drinking yourself stupid.
We both have ways of forgetting, she said. Some of us indulge. Some of us hide the pictures.
I wasn’t planning to stay, she lied, and she turned back to the door. How can you stand it, she asked him. How can you make art when the world is up in flames like this?
It was all his hands knew how to do anymore, he told her. And she could say nothing. After all, what had her hands ever done?
She missed him too, she’d wanted to say. She thought about it as the Datsun trundled into the highway ramp. She missed the look of bewilderment when he’d lost his first tooth, the puddle of blood and bone cupped in his outstretched hand. She missed the smear of vanilla on his nose after he ate ice cream, how his hands had always been a little bit sticky. She missed his fears, arbitrary and assorted: the dentist, the bike without training wheels, slides with covered roofs. The way he’d stayed away from the pool, even when the other children loved to swim. Another one of his routine aversions, she’d thought, and had beckoned him to the water. Don’t be scared, she’d said. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
How he’d decided to be brave when she wasn’t looking. How wan he looked after, the pale spotlight of his face, still round with baby fat.
In the hurry to pack up that morning, nobody had noticed the woman with the gallon of kerosene who stood on her front porch. A lit match like an act of creation, the crackle of her unmaking. By the time the house was entirely engulfed in flames, she was forty miles east and the firefighters wondered about the house that had caught flame on its own—an anomaly, some called it, a gas fire, lucky no one was hurt. Lucky the resident wasn’t home at the time. Did anyone still around know who she was?
She knew she would not come back. She would stop for gas when she was far enough away. Tahoe, she thought, or further, even, Reno. Or maybe she would keep driving until she disappeared like a speck on the horizon, and keep driving after that, too. She could never be far away enough, until she arrived somewhere new, somewhere the smoke could never follow her.
Poetry • Winter 2017 - Cell
Tell me are you dark?
Is it dark in the box?
Show me. Do you
always have pride
in your work?
You have taught
me well. Life
is a flying pig and
you are a closet.
I live in the sky today
and refuse to look
down on my guy.
Why did you hate
your father? Why
did you turn me
into him? I live inside
shapes for days, electric
cables and clouds
give me what I need.
I’m for the man
who drives the hammer.
The ones left out
in cold, at work,
spirited, unchurched.
Fiction • Spring 2009
The cutlery disappeared on Monday. I was getting my breakfast ready the same way I always do it. Bowl, Raisin Bran, whole milk, spoon. But when the spoon part came, there weren’t any. No forks or knives either. Not in the drawers and not even in the dishwasher, and there’s *always *stuff in the dishwasher.
I could hear Dad swearing at Talk Radio in his bedroom, which is what he does right before he barges into the kitchen and shouts about how he can’t find something. He doesn’t actually expect me to help him look, but if I’ve got to ask him something, I have to pretend to help. Otherwise he won’t listen.
Anyway this time it was his glasses.
I figured he’d want to know about the empty drawers, so after I’d made enough noise pretending to look, all dragging the kitchen chairs and lifting up pieces of the newspaper, I said, “Dad, the cutlery’s gone.”
I didn’t think he’d heard me, but then he said, “Where’d you learn to call it that?”
“You, I think.”
He smiled. “Really?” But it wasn’t a question and he went back to digging around under the newspapers.
“Dad?”
He found his glasses. “Aha! They were hiding.”
I said it louder. “Dad!”
He spun around. “What? Oh.” He scratched his head. “I don’t know, Kip, use your hands. Like an Indian! That’s what they do there, I think.” He took a deep breath. “Yes, that’s right.” He grabbed his keys.
“But the *milk*, Dad.” How was I supposed to eat milk like an Indian?
“Don’t waste the milk!” He yelled from the door. “And don’t miss the bus!”
That night Dad brought home pizza, so of course no one said anything about the cutlery. And the next morning there were six boxes of the plastic stuff up on the counter by the microwave. The next day, Dad grounded me, which sucked so bad I pretty much forgot about the cutlery for the whole afternoon. But now I just don’t care at all, because yesterday I found out I’m not the only one in big time trouble this month. Drew and Ellie are grounded too. And I’ve got to find out what they did.
If we were little it’d be easy, because back then we were always together. Sometimes I think it’s Miss Allen’s fault we got split up, but sometimes I think it’s Dad’s. I mean, Miss Allen didn’t have to tell, but Dad didn’t have to get so scared and make it so we had to let him sign us all up for different activities. Drew got soccer, and he still does it. Ellie got gymnastics, but she quit last year, which is why she’s sort of fat now. But I wasn’t good at anything because I always sat down at the ballet recitals or got too hyper at the acting camps. When I was Catcher in summer softball I made crow noises to scare the batter, which Dad said was embarrassing for him. Once at horseback riding lessons, I fell off and almost got run over by a cantering pony. So, finally Dad gave up and let me stay home.
Drew and Ellie and me had lots more dangerous games than Snowbank Ninjas, but that’s the only one we ever almost died at, I guess, which makes it worse than all the others combined.
***
The worst part was how Dad made such a thing of it, all coming to my bedroom with his arms behind his back and telling me to meet him in the kitchen in five minutes. Usually when he grounds me, he just does it wherever he finds me. So, of course I thought maybe he’d bought me those expensive Nikes I’d been asking for. I even slipped off my sneakers so that when I walked in, I could put on the new ones right away. But when I slid across the tiles in my socks and actually saw him, I knew I was in trouble. See, he had a chair all pulled out for me and was standing there, staring at his feet, which means he’s so mad he can’t even look at you. Not to mention that then he took a butt-load of time sitting down—all crossing his legs and taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes and sighing, before *finally* he went ahead and said what all grown-ups say when they’re about to bust you: “Kippy, is there anything you want to tell me?”
I’m always getting grounded but it’s never that bad because I usually don’t have any friends. But this time I was literally dying—*dying*—because Kate Petersen is having a slumber party next weekend and she invited ten girls including me. Plus, there’s this girl Susan George from my bus route, and we’re not friends or anything, but I was sort of planning to hang out at her house this whole summer. She’s fine, I guess, but she smells like ham. (No one really likes her but can’t say so because she’s got LD—that’s a Learning Disability.)
Anyway, Maxwell Mann from TV said it’s going to be the hottest June in ten years, which wouldn’t be so bad except Dad never turns on the air conditioning. (He always says there’s a “breeze.”) But see, I wasn’t so worried about Dad’s No-Air rule because the Georges just got a pool put in and I figured I could go down there when it got too hot. I knew, *knew*, Susan’d let me, because she’s got no friends. Plus, chlorine probably kills the ham smell she’s got.
So, yeah, my one chance to be friends with Kate Petersen, and also, basically, to have a pool, and I’m grounded for a month. This sucks balls.
At least Drew and Ellie won’t know. Our Dad has had this thing since we were kids about tattling where he pretends to be deaf unless someone’s bleeding. Otherwise he covers his ears and says, “Tattlers help themselves” in this sing-song voice. He only broke his own rule once. It was a really long time ago, right after Nana died and we drove up to Atlantic City for the funeral. We still have the van we took. It’s got seven seats, but that time it felt tiny. Ellie gets carsick, and so she got to sit up front with Dad, and even though Drew and I literally begged—*begged—*to sit in the Captain’s chairs, which are in the middle, that’s where Dad put the suitcases for some reason.
So Drew and I were sitting in the way back because of Ellie and the stupid bags, and what happened was Drew asked if I wanted to play this game where he got to punch me if I touched him. I told him it sounded pretty boring, but he said he’d give me 15 dollars if I won, so, like an idiot I shook on it. Then Drew scooted closer and closer to me until I was pressed up against the window and couldn’t go any more over. Of course he scooted a little bit more and our legs were touching, which he said counted and punched me really hard in the arm. He did that for the whole car trip, so of course I started to cry after a while. Just tears, though. None of us made sob noises when we were kids because Dad’d either tell us to stop playing some fun game, or he’d say “don’t tattle”, and if any of us heard him say that, we’d beat up whoever’d tried to get his attention.
So anyway, I waited until Drew fell asleep against his window and then I reached over and slammed him really hard in the balls. And of course then he started crying just tears and stomping his feet and slapping the seat in front of him. I laughed so hard even though I was technically also crying, but then Drew pulled it together and said, “That counted as touching, Anus,” and the game started all over again.
By the time we got to the hotel, I had a big time bruise, and the next morning when we were getting ready for the funeral it looked even worse. My dress didn’t have any sleeves and of course Dad wanted to know what’d happened. So, I told him, which is technically tattling, but instead of playing deaf, Dad made the really angry face where he puts his top and bottom teeth right on top of each other, and chased Drew all around the hotel. I didn’t see it because I locked myself in the bathroom, but Ellie went into the hallway to watch, and she said that when Dad caught Drew, he held him down and slapped him once really hard on the forehead. Ellie also said that Dad farted and made Drew smell it, which at first I didn’t believe because, for starters, I was pretty sure that Drew and Ellie and me were the only three people in the world to know about Fart Fights, but also Dad was a grown-up, and at the time I didn’t think that adults could fart. I mean, I was only five or six, so I still thought that grown-ups were born big and boring. I didn’t get that they were just us with time added on.
Anyway, like I said, I didn’t believe Ellie. But then she swore on Mom, which meant a lot back then, and I wasn’t so sure. I tattled every day for, like, weeks after that to try and see if Dad’d do it again, but the minute we got home from the funeral, he went back to being deaf.
***
I didn’t even know that you could check where people’d gone on the internet. Or, I guess I did know, but I didn’t know Dad knew. Turns out he’s like, this total computer genius, which sucks balls because I was at sites like lustylibrary.com and sensualstories.net. And not only does my own Dad know, but now I’m grounded because of it, and the parental controls for my sign-in name are insane. I can’t go anywhere except boring news sites and nickelodeon.com.
It’s not like I was reading the stories to learn how to *do it*. Sometimes I think about what it’d be like to freeze time and take a boy’s clothes off, but I’m not a slut or something. I just think erotic literature is way better than what they tell us at school. Plus it’s really creative. Way more creative than *My Side of the Mountain*, which we had to read this year in homeroom.
The school thinks no one finds out about it until sixth grade, so every Wednesday we have to listen to Ms. K talk about Judy—this plastic mannequin whose chest is sliced open so you can see the reproductive stuff. Ms. K is always talking about “penises” and “vaginas.” Everybody hates it. Online they never call them that, even though those are the parts they’re always talking about. My favorite words for boy’s parts are Purple Python, Gusher (which is technically for a girl’s thing, but sometimes they use it for boy’s), Artistic Cauliflower (that’s from a Finnish site, and I only like it as a joke) and Dick (which is a normal word). But my favorite is Schlong.
I don’t like most of the online words for girl’s privates, probably because I’m not a lesbian (I don’t even like sports that much, and one time, Dad made me cut my hair short, and it looked terrible). But yeah, stuff like “Cookie” and “Cooter” and “Beaver” are gross. The British sites call it a Cunny, which is like Cunt, which I don’t like. Once, in this story called “Victoria Goes to Camp”, they called it a “Poozle”, which was funny but not in a good way. Anyway, when I’ve got to call it *something*, like, if I knock it on the kitchen table when I’m sliding around in my socks, or a baseball hits it, and I’ve got to tell Dad or Mrs. Pelech, who’s the school nurse—or if I’ve got to answer one of Ms. K’s stupid questions—I just always call it Crotch. But I don’t think about girl’s parts, really. Unless it’s during scoliosis checks and Kate Petersen’s got her bathing suit on. But that’s just because she’s got actual boobs already and I want to know if she’s also got a lot of pubic hair.
My favorite author right now is jscackman709, who’s a writer for banginbookpage.org. That’s a non-registered site, which means you don’t have to click a button that says you’re eighteen, and so there can’t be any words like “cock”. That’s why jscackman calls them “cacks” in his stories, which is funny at first, but you get used to it. He mostly writes about incest, which means Dad saw I was reading stuff called “Playtime With Mother,” “I Love You in that Different Kind of Way,” and “Seductress of Hope.” They’re not *that* obvious I guess, but there was also stuff like, “Cousin Catherine’s Cunny,” and “I Recently Had Intercourse With My Sister, and Liked It.” So he definitely knows. I’m so embarrassed I could barf.
I mean, it’s not like I don’t know incest is gross, but you can just pretend the people in the stories are boyfriend-girlfriend instead of cousins. It’s really easy to do, but it’s the kind of thing you can’t explain that you do. Especially not to your Dad.
***
Maxwell Mann wasn’t kidding when he said the thing about June. It’s only the first week and already I’ve got to walk around in my Speedo (with tank-tops you can see my nipples, which’re sort of pointy. Drew once called them weasel snouts and I kicked him in the balls. That was the last time I did that, though, because instead of hitting me back or chasing me he called me a bitch).
That’s what the Speedo is for: to flatten out my “budding breasts”, which is what Ms. K calls them. I don’t get to wear a bra yet. Dad says I don’t need one, and Ellie doesn’t let me into her room. Well, technically I’ve been in there a bunch of times. And gone through all her underwear and stuff. Her boobs aren’t big or anything, but like I said, she’s kind of fat right now, so of course none of her bras fit.
Anyway, today was my first day grounded, and so after Dad left for work I went into his room and looked for secret letters and drugs and stuff in his drawers. Danny Kemp from my bus said he found pornographic pictures with his father’s socks. But Dad only had some golf tees and sci-fi paperbacks. There were the birthday cards from Mom, but I’d already read those a bunch of times.
I thought I was the only one home this morning (I even sang in the bathroom and stuff, which is embarrassing now to think about), but when I left Dad’s room there was Ellie in her pajamas, playing with the thermostat in the hallway. This always happens, where I think Ellie’s gone somewhere and then all of a sudden she’ll come out of her room.
“Oh, hey,” I said, “I didn’t know you were here.”
Anyway, of course she ignored me. Ellie’s gotten really stuck up since she turned fourteen. She doesn’t talk to me or Dad, like, at all anymore. She’s still nice to Drew, though. I mean, yesterday I saw her mowing the lawn, which is technically Drew’s job. Plus her and him walk to school together, and since high school starts earlier than middle school, I hear them talking and sometimes even laughing on their way up the driveway.
I don’t think it’s fair that they get to be closer in age. I told Dad once that I was mad about it, but he thought I was joking and called me Cutie Pumpkin. I don’t even know what that means.
“You’re not supposed to put the air on,” I told Ellie. Sometimes I get so mad at her, and then I say something that makes me want to cry right after I say it. “Dad *said*.” Yeah, like that.
I tried again. “I mean, besides, you could just change into short sleeves.”
She punched a button and the whole house started to buzz.
“Well, I bet Dad won’t care, actually, ‘cause it’s really hot.” I smiled. “Like, the hottest summer since forever.”
Ellie looked at me and rolled her eyes, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“Want to put the sprinkler under the trampoline later?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, me neither, actually,” I said. “Hey, I’m grounded.”
Ellie yawned. “Yep.”
“Who told?”
“You’re *always* grounded, Kippy.”
“Yeah.” I like it when she says my name. “But this time it’s for a whole month.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Weird.” Something about the way she said it made it sound nice, like we were friends. “Me too.”
“’You too’ what?”
She rolled her eyes. Whenever Ellie’s nice you know she’s going to be mean right after. “I’m grounded, Idiot. For a month”
“For June?”
“Um, *yeah*.” She was being sarcastic. Like I didn’t know that June counted as a month.
“No, I meant ‘are you grounded for the same month as me?’” But of course she was already walking back into her room. “Ellie!” I tried to follow her a little without making her mad. “Ellie, Dad told me to tell you that someone stole the cutlery.” This wasn’t true, but I just wanted to keep talking for some reason. “So, in case you were wondering, there’s plastic stuff on the counter.”
She slammed her door. Not in the regular way, but hard, like I’d said something wrong.
***
Ellie didn’t used to be such a snot. When we were little, her and Drew and me played together all the time. We even had this game called the Butt-Butt Game where we’d get on the swings and take turns kicking Ellie in the butt. She won’t even let me hug her now unless it’s a holiday. But back then I could hug her and kick her as hard as I wanted. She and I used to share a room, too, and we’d have nighttime talks about my secret crush on my third grade teacher, Mr. Lauwasser. I wanted to get stabbed on top of the hill at school so that he’d run up and rescue me. I told Ellie about it once.
“It’s stupid if he doesn’t get you *before* you get stabbed,” she said.
“No.” I pinched my stomach hard to practice what it’d feel like. “That part’s important.”
“How come?”
“He’d have to carry me.” That was my big fantasy—getting carried by a boy.
“But what if he wasn’t out at recess when it happened, and one of the other teachers carried you instead?” It was a really good question, but I pretended that it wasn’t.
“It wouldn’t happen like that.” I told her.
She smiled. “You’re weird, Kippy.”
“I know,” I said. I’ve always loved it when she says my name.
Anyway, then Dad decided that Drew needed “boy space” and put a bathroom in the basement so Drew could live down there. And then Ellie wanted her own room too, so, I had to move into Drew’s old room. It was okay for a while. Ellie and me still did bathroom stuff together, and at night she’d knock on the wall, which is something she and I used to do with Drew—that Shave and a Haircut thing—and I’d knock back the Two Bits. I don’t know when everything started to get bad, but there was one time where Ellie came into the bathroom after I took a shower and said I was using her towel.
“You don’t *have* a towel,” I said. The only towels in the bathroom were our beach towels. They had stuff on them like sunsets or Mexican patterns or the dancing Raisinettes. We’d had them since we were kids.
“Yeah I do.” She was really angry. “That one’s mine and *that* one’s yours.” I realized I was using a big all-white towel I’d never even seen before.
“Fine I’ll use that one, geeze.”
“Whatever. Keep it.” She started putting all her make-up and stuff into drawers, like I might try to steal it or something. “You’re always using my stuff.” This wasn’t true at all. I only use Ellie’s stuff when she’s not home.
“Sorry.” I tried to think of how to fix it. “You can have the Rainbow Brite towel.” Ellie used to love the Rainbow Brite towel.
“You’ve used that one too.” She started plucking her eyebrows. “It’s gross to share towels.” *You know what’s gross? *I wanted to say, *That bleeding pimple on your neck. That’s *gross. “Ew, are you gonna pee or something?” She asked.
“No. I’m just”—I was actually just standing there. But if I didn’t say something quick I was going to cry. “I’m waiting to use the sink.”
“Because if you need to pee, I’ll leave.”
“I don’t!” I wanted to rip off the towel and throw it at her. But then I’d be naked.
“You’re looking at the toilet like you want to pee in it.” This would have been funny if she hadn’t talked about the next thing: “Remember how you used to always pee your pants? And once Dad caught you trying to bury your overalls in the yard?”
Yeah, I think that’s when things got bad.
***
After Ellie went back into her room I tried to figure out how to turn the air conditioning back off. I couldn’t find the Off button, though, so, I just pressed the up arrow until the numbers said 88—which is what it was outside—and went to make myself some macaroni. It was too hot upstairs to eat it, so I went down into the basement.
Drew was down there playing Mortal Kombat, which I’m no good at. I wish he’d been playing Super Mario Brothers 3, but he never plays that anymore. He says it’s too easy.
“Hey, why aren’t you at Mike’s?” I was so excited to see him.
“Why would I be at Mike’s?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I put the bowl of macaroni on the steps and went to sit next to him on the futon. “’Cause you usually are.”
“Nope, not at Mike’s. Want to play?”
I did, but I suck big time unless I get to be Sub Zero, who’s actually called Noob Saibot now, and even then I still suck. Anyway, Drew’s always Sub Zero. “No thanks,” I said. I went to go get my macaroni.
Drew yawned. “Don’t get any on the carpet,” he said. “Dad makes me vacuum it myself.”
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.” I ate a little bit. “Oh, hey, Drew, want to hear a joke?”
“Sure.”
“So, once there was a little boy who really wanted to shower with his parents, but they wouldn’t let him.”
“You’ve told me this one.”
“Nuh-*uh*, I haven’t.”
“Yeah, it’s the snake-in-grass one. It’s sick. You’ve got a sick mind, Anus.”
“Oh.” I pushed my initials into the carpet with my toe, K.H.K. Kippy Hamilton Kelly. Hamilton was Dad’s dad’s name. Of course I hate it. “Well, did you know Ellie’s grounded?”
“Yeah.” I was so jealous. I bet he and Ellie talked all about it on their way to school. “She’s being a bitch,” he said, which made me feel a little better.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s probably got her period or something.”
Drew raised his eyebrows. “Jealous?”
“No!” I didn’t tell him that I’d already had mine.
The game said, *“Finish Him!”* And Drew did this really cool spin kick and killed Shang Tsung, the evil Oriental guy, which is really hard because Shang Tsung can morph and do the flaming skull eruption.
“Dad grounded me too,” Drew said.
I was so excited that I choked a little on my macaroni. “Why?”
“Because he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, but *why*?”
“None of your business.” He was smiling.
“I’m grounded too,” I said. “I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
“You’re always grounded.”
“Yeah, but this time it’s for a month.” He didn’t say anything. “Come on, Drew! Tell me.” I was whining. I couldn’t help it.
“Nope,” he said. “But I’ll let you be Sub Zero if you play with me.”
I should have just done it and let him beat me, but instead I asked if he wanted to play Mario instead. By the time I changed my mind back Drew didn’t want to play anymore. I was about to say *How about the trampoline?* But then Drew got up and put his hand in front of the wall. “Hey, who turned the heat on?”
I felt like a total idiot. “Oh, shoot.”
“Anus!” He reached over and pushed me really soft.
“I’m sorry!” I said, but I was smiling. He was being so nice.
“Well, go turn it off.”
I froze. I wish so hard I’d paid attention when Dad showed us how to use the thermostat. Then Drew wouldn’t have had to go upstairs, and maybe then he’d have gone outside with me, or at least let me sit downstairs and watch him play some more. But I had to tell the truth, because otherwise Dad would get angry and then everything’d be worse. So, I ruined it and said, “I don’t know how.”
It sucks how sometimes you know exactly what you said to ruin something, but there’s still no way to fix it and just be okay. So you have to wait for things to be fun again, which is always up to the other person and sometimes it takes a really long time. Sometimes it takes a whole day.
***
Dad left for a business trip this morning. So Mrs. Galanis is coming over at noon and six every night this week to make us lunch and dinner. Dad pays her to do that whenever he goes away.
“She might come at other times too,” Dad said. “But I’m not going to divulge those hours to you.” He kissed us all on the face—even Ellie, who pulls away every time and hurts his feelings. “Just remember that you’re all grounded. And don’t do anything stupid.”
Dad went into Ellie’s room last night after he tucked me in. I listened through the wall and so I heard him tell her to go with him this weekend to Atlanta. At first he was all serious and angry about it. He told Ellie she *had* to come. But then Ellie said, “No!” a bunch of times and Dad quieted down a little. Serves him right for being nicer to her even though I’m the one who helps him find his stuff every morning.
“Dad!” Ellie yelled. “I’m *not* coming. You can’t *make* me come.”
“But El, it’ll be so fun,” Dad said. He was trying to make it like it was her decision. He does this all the time. Usually that’s when I cave because I start to feel bad for him. “The two of us hanging out in Atlanta. That’s a big city, baby!”
“Yeah right.” Ellie did her mean laugh. “You’ll be gone all day. At least at home I won’t be by myself. God! You’re such a hypocrite!”
“But there will be a pool,” Dad said quietly. I wanted to *kill* Ellie. She gets all the good stuff and she’s *still* a snot.
“I don’t care!” Ellie said, and then she did this thing where she talks all slow and loud. “I’m. Not. Going!” Yeah, like that. It was quiet for a while, which mean they were staring at each other. That’s when they do when they fight. Dad holds his mouth tight and Ellie puts her hands on her hips and raises her eyebrows. Then all of a sudden Dad said something so soft I could barely hear it, and it was quiet again.
“Dad, I won’t,” Ellie said. “I promise.” She sounded completely different. Like maybe she was holding his shoulder or petting his hair. “I promise.”
When we were little, Dad used to pay Mrs. Galanis to spend the night with us, too. Back then I had really bad nightmares, which meant when Mrs. Galanis was around, I couldn’t go sleep in Dad’s room if I got scared. Ellie and I still shared a room back then and everything, but she doesn’t make any noise when she sleeps, which was sometimes scary to wake up to, like she was dead or something. So, whenever Dad went away and I had a nightmare, I’d go to Drew’s room and he’d get his sleeping bag off the top shelf of his closet and roll it out for me.
I actually liked sleeping in Drew’s room way better than sleeping in Dad’s. But it was one of those things I could only do if Dad was on a business trip, because otherwise Drew’d say, “Isn’t Dad home?” Well, he never actually said that, I was just afraid he would. What Drew would really say was: “What was it about?” And after I told him he’d go, “That’s way less scary than the one about Mom,” which always made me feel better.
The one about Mom was Drew’s favorite. “The Nightmare of All Nightmares,” he said. It was this dream where I found Mom’s dead body in the yard and I kissed her on the face a bunch of times to try and wake her up. I always had dreams about Mom and she was always a zombie or a ghost or a vampire or something. But in The Nightmare of All Nightmares, she was frozen. So, my lips stuck to her like when that kid licks the pole in “A Christmas Story”, except when I finally got the guts up to pull my own lips off, I couldn’t. That’s when I realized I’d have to be there, kissing her forever.
I remember I heard that if you think about something right before you go to sleep, that’s what you’re going to dream about. And so I always thought about Drew and Ellie as hard as I could. I figured if I could dream about them, then at least I wouldn’t be by myself when things got scary. It didn’t work really. I mean, sometimes Drew and Ellie’d be in the dream part, but when the actual nightmare happened, it was just me and all the different monster versions of Mom. But see, I wanted them there so bad that I thought maybe if I pretended they’d been there, then it’d be real or something. So I made up a nightmare where Drew, Ellie and me were running away from a murderer and told it to Drew one night when I went in to sleep on his floor. He didn’t really say anything about it, so I tried it the next night, and then a few more times. “It was that one about us again,” I’d whisper seriously, acting all scared. Drew’d just nod, though, and go back to sleep like it wasn’t a big deal. Then one time, after I’d told it, like, four times, Drew got kind of angry and said, “That’s not even a nightmare, Kip,” and after that, I went back to telling him the real ones.
***
Mrs. Galanis made tacos tonight and told us to eat “quick quick!” because she had to get to her cousin’s house before seven. So, Drew, Ellie and I got to eat standing up by the counter while she did dishes. Ellie’s a vegetarian now, so she was eating a cheese tortilla from the microwave.
“*Somebody* got dressed up,” Drew said. He was talking about Ellie because she had a lot of makeup on. I giggled because I thought Ellie might be embarrassed. She doesn’t know my nervous laugh, though, so of course she got snotty.
“*You’re* the one wearing a Speedo,” she told me.
“So?” I tried to pull it down a little so it covered my butt more. Ellie’s really good at saying stuff that makes you feel naked.
“You’ve got shit on your face,” Ellie whispered and looked away. It was true, but she could’ve just called it salsa. She didn’t have to be so mean.
Drew bit into his taco and some beef fell out the other end. “Shit.”
Mrs. Galanis turned around and started going crazy, all grabbing stuff to mop up the little bit of beef Drew spilled. She’s nervous all the time and shakes. Plus she always wears silk shirts, which doesn’t make any sense since they show every shake she does.
“No, no, it’s fine, Mrs. G,” Drew said. “I got it.” He mopped up the beef with his sock, which just made Mrs. Galanis crazier. She got down on her knees and started pulling Drew’s sock off so he had to hop around and *still* try to balance the paper plate in the other hand.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys know what happened to all the cutlery?”
“Who calls it *cutlery*?” Drew asked. He was still jumping.
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t remember. Just like I don’t know who told me to call it an Indelible Marker instead of a Sharpie. “Dad?”
“I’m pretty sure Dad calls it *silverware*, Anus, like everyone else.”
“Who gives a shit where it is?” Ellie said all of a sudden. “It’s not like we need it *right this second.* We’re eating tacos, for God’s sake.”
“Geeze, I was only *asking*. I just thought you’d like to *know* that someone *stole* all of it. Right out of our own *house*.” I licked some beef juice off my taco. “And anyway, cutlery’s just what it’s *called*, okay? And for your information, *Elenor*, *that’s* called* *a *quesadilla*.” I always think of stuff like that too late.
“You think you’re so fucking *smart*,” Ellie said. “Talking like that. *Cutlery*. Like a fucking 90 year old woman.”
“Mouth!” Mrs. Galanis yelled up from the floor. We all looked down at her. It took us a few minutes to figure out she was talking about Ellie saying a swear word.
Ellie rolled her eyes. “You don’t *need* a fork for this,” she said. She was staring at her plate and her cheeks were red like she was embarrassed about something. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Mrs. Galanis jumped up and started waving Drew’s sock around. “What!” She yelled. “You need a fork?” She shook one of the boxes on the counter. “There. Lots of forks.” She said and stomped off into the laundry room.
I looked at Ellie who was smiling at her quesadilla.
“I have fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes until I leave for my cousin’s!” Mrs. Galanis screamed. That’s then we all burst out laughing, the quiet kind that hurts because you’re holding back the noise.
***
Like I said, Snowbank Ninjas wasn’t bad at all if you think about the other kinds of games we played. For a while there was this one called Car Chase where Drew and Ellie’d hide behind the bushes at the end of the yard, and I’d have to run across the street whenever they said *GO*. The trick was to time it so that it was just when the car was about to whiz past, but not too late, so that I didn’t die. I usually closed my eyes. Anyway, we had to stop that one when they sent me out running in front of a police car.
Snowbank Ninjas was our winter game. See, our driveway goes downhill but the yard stays flat so that when you walk down the driveway, the yard part gets more and more above your head. When you walk to the very edge of the front yard it becomes the top of a stonewall that is above the street. We weren’t supposed to go that far when we were little because Dad said we’d fall into traffic (maybe like, two cars went by our house *an hour)*. So we always did Snowbank Ninjas at the part of the yard by the Weeping Willow so Dad couldn’t see.
Anyway, we’d take the kid shovels (those are the plastic ones. Dad never let us use his because he said we’d kill ourselves), and we’d take all the snow around the tree and build a snow wall on top of the actual one. Once it was tall enough to climb and slanty enough so we could slide on it, we’d get the spoons from the kitchen and start the game, which was to lie on our bellies and race up the snow wall without using our legs. The loser got held over the edge of the wall by their feet. The road’s curvy and icy, and we’re in the country so no one comes here unless they live here—which is only us, really, and some old people. So we never got caught until Miss Allen, who was going, like, a hundred miles an hour down our street. She said she was on her way to teach piano, which is a lie. I mean, yeah, Miss Allen’s a piano teacher, but like I said, only old people live by us, and old people don’t take piano lessons, kids do. Also, Drew, Ellie and me thought she was intoxicated because her face was so red (but that could have just been from the screaming).
Anyway, the trick was to use the spoon part of the spoon, but that part was always harder to stick into the snow, so like an idiot I usually gave up and tried to pull myself with the handle, which makes you slide back. So, Drew got up the snow bank first, and won, and then Ellie won second, and then they got to hold me down the snow wall. I wasn’t like, actually hanging because, like I said, the snow bank is slanted, so I was on my stomach against the snow the whole time. But the snow wall was as high as our house, which is one and a half stories, and like always, Drew and Ellie screamed and pretended a car was coming, which made it pretty scary.
Then it happened: Ellie, who’d just gotten new gloves without the grip fingers, accidentally let go of me; Drew was still holding my foot, so he almost fell down too, because, even though I was the youngest, I was wearing a snowsuit, which made me pretty heavy. Ellie couldn’t reach my foot, and Drew couldn’t get it because he was still trying to hold onto the other one, so Drew had to try and hang on while Ellie got on her stomach to pass me spoons.
“Stick the spoon part in, Kip!” Ellie yelled. “*Not* *the* *handle*!”
But then one of the spoons broke in half and the other one fell on the street and I started all crying with my face against the snow and my foot in Drew’s hand. Ellie, who was brave back then from getting kicked so much, took off her gloves and climbed down next to me. My head was down by her ankles, but I could see that she’d dug her fingers into the snow and they’d turned bright red.
“*Drew*, help!” Ellie screamed. I tried to hold my body stiff and still even though my face was freezing off, but I got so dizzy looking down at the pavement like that, that I started shrieking, which made them stop fighting and try to make me quit so Dad wouldn’t hear.
“Okay, okay, shut up, Kip.” Drew said. “El, give Kip a foot to hold onto. Kip, I’m gonna climb down to you and then me and Ellie’re gonna throw you over.”
“Don’t throw me!” I sobbed, but I reached up to hold onto Ellie. Drew climbed down, still holding my foot, and I actually swung around just fine, and for a few seconds, Ellie was holding on okay at the top. Drew’d even gotten a foot grip on the snow bank and was just about to push me up by my butt. But then he started slipping because he didn’t have his boots on. He tried to grab onto me to save himself, and I grabbed onto Ellie, and all of us went crashing into the street.
That part wasn’t *so* bad. I scraped my face a lot on the ice at the bottom, but I didn’t die like I thought I would. When we stood up and looked at each other we started cracking up, and then Drew and Ellie hugged me really hard between them, which would have been great if they hadn’t smushed my chapped face against their buttons.
Anyway, that’s when Miss Allen came speeding around the corner.
The thing about the way they plow the streets here is that the snow doesn’t go off the road, it just makes walls on both sides of the street that make it so there’s only room for one car. So, see, there was no where to go when we saw her, and no way to make her stop, and if Drew hadn’t been so smart that day, we definitely would’ve all died.
“Flat against the snow, Idiots!” Drew yelled, and we jumped against it like cicadas on a wall—our arms all stretched out above us, and our hands dug in, trying to hold ourselves skinny against the snow. I sucked in my stomach when I heard Miss Allen’s horn, and felt this big wind go up our coats when she whizzed past. She ran over the spoon I dropped, which was Mom’s, but Ellie and me got lucky—not like Drew, who had bruises for months from Miss Allen’s door handle slid across his butt.
You’d think she would’ve been glad she didn’t crush us, but she was totally upset, all red and screaming, “Where are your parents?”—like we would ever even tell her that after she practically tried to kill us. But then Dad ran out into the yard and was calling for us, and it wasn’t like we could hide him from her.
We ducked down behind the Weeping Willow to watch them. I couldn’t hear any of the actual words, only how Miss Allen was talking really quickly and angrily, with Dad all interrupting her to say short and serious things. Then all of a sudden we could hear exactly what he was saying, which is never a good thing.
“Where are my children!” Dad screamed.
Of course we thought we were in trouble, and so we ran to Dad to tell our side. When I saw him, I kind of wished I’d gotten a little hurt or something, so that he couldn’t be mad at us. He pushed Miss Allen out of the way and ran at us fast. He looked crazy, but instead of hitting us or yelling he just grabbed each of our shoulders, like he was counting us, and whispered, “inside, my darlings. Inside.”
Miss Allen kept talking, but was a little quieter about wanting Dad’s attention. She kept reaching out to touch him and then putting a piece of hair behind her ear instead. “All I’m saying,” she said, all chasing after us, whining like a little kid. “All I’m saying is they’re *your* kids, and”—she stopped talking when she saw that Dad was about to slam the door.
We followed him into the TV room, still thinking, I guess, that he might be angry. He sat down on the couch in the TV room and rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses—these could be angry things or tired things, we didn’t know. So we just sort of stood in front of him, all dripping on the carpet.
“Sorry Dad,” Ellie whispered. She was always the first to apologize for anything. Dad cracked his knuckles and started tapping his foot, which made the change in his pockets jingle. “Are you really mad?” She asked, but Dad still didn’t say anything.
I started sobbing. “Please don’t be mad at us!” I went and climbed on Dad’s lap and even though I was making his work clothes wet he didn’t say anything. He pulled the sleeve of his sweater over his hand and wiped snot off my face. His mouth was really tight when he reached out for Ellie. He looked scary, then, but she sat down and her and me let him hug us tight on his lap.
“Should we take our boots off?” Drew asked, even though he wasn’t wearing any. Dad just stuck his face into my hair and breathed.
Dad has this joke he does where he hobbles and says: ‘I’m an old man, kids, an old man without the mental strength to deal with your antics’, like a grandpa. It isn’t very funny—it never was—but I wanted so bad for him to say it right then.
“Dad,” Drew said, “I know you’re always saying that ‘next time’ you’re gonna call the PTA and get us into ‘age appropriate activities’, but I really don’t think this should count, because, see,” Drew put his hands in his pockets, “See, I think it was Miss Allen’s fault, Dad.”
“Yeah, Daddy,” I said. I pulled on his ear to get his attention. He wouldn’t look at any of us. “Miss Allen had intoxication.”
“Intoxicat*-ed*,” Ellie whispered.
Dad squeezed us tight.
“She had intoxicated,” I said impatientely and tried to push him out of my hair. His breath on my ear was making me feel funny.
He pulled all the way away from both me and Ellie, which made me feel guilty, and put his hands in his lap. “I couldn’t have done anything to stop it,” he whispered, and his face got wrinkly—not like an old man, but like one of those fancy dogs whose face is folded like a stack of bath towels.
“Dad,” Ellie said. “Dad, don’t be sad, please.”
Dad put his face in his hands again and started shaking.
“Dad?”
I tried to pull his hands away but he just dug his face harder into his palms.
“Daddy?”
That’s when the noises started. Sob noises. Big wet, sob noises coming out of our own Dad.
“He’s crying,” Ellie whispered.
Drew took a step back and kicked his shoes off. “Hey Dad it’s okay, I’ll clean up, you don’t have to do anything.” He got down on his knees and started pulling on Ellie’s boots.
“We won’t play there anymore,” Ellie said. “We promise.”
“Yeah Dad, we promise,” I said.
Drew’d lined up all the boots by the fireplace. Mine were on the end, and one was propped funny by some matches and as soon as Drew stood it up, it would fall and knock over Ellie’s. Drew just kept lining them up again, which made me want to cry for some reason.
“You could even call the PTA if you want,” Ellie said. “There’s a whole list of school activities in my Thursday Folder.”
I thought about going up to my room and grabbing my Trapper Keeper, because I had *my* Thursday Folder too, but just then Dad took his hands off his face. His glasses were fogged but there were tears coming down behind them, and his face was all wet and streaky and stained red. He looked ugly, like a baby that’s about to scream.
“Clean his glasses,” Drew whispered. I didn’t want to, but I reached up for them anyway. Dad pushed my hand away really slow. His mouth was a line again, but it was shaking. He motioned at Drew to stop it with the boots. “It’s fine,” he said. His voice was low and wet.
“Dad, really, I’ll do soccer, I will.”
“Gymnastics,” Ellie blurted out. Her and Drew looked at me. I sat down on my hands. I didn’t want to promise those things. But I was scared Dad might stick his face into my hair again. “Susan George’s brother goes to space camp,” I said.
“That’s only two weeks out of the year, Anus,” Drew said.
“Well, Ellie’s doing gymnastics even though she has Motion Sickness.”
“At least I can do a real cartwheel,” Ellie said.
“Probably not without barfing on yourself!”
Then Dad stood up and smoothed out his tie. His pants were wet on the front from my snowsuit. It looked like he’d had an accident. “I’m going to my room,” he said, and left us.
It was quiet after he left. Bad quiet. I tried to make it better by sticking my tongue out at Ellie, but she just ignored me and started getting off her snow stuff, which Drew put on the bricks next to her boots, which’d fallen for the last time a few minutes before that. My fingers were too small to do zippers, so after he’d undressed, Drew came over and zipped me out. “Try not to get the carpet wet,” he said, even though it was already totally soaked. We stood there in our underwear staring at each other a few minutes and then decided to wait in our rooms. We decided Dad’d forgotten to send us there.
It took almost 30 minutes for anything to happen. But then Dad got on the phone, first with the builders, talking about putting a shower and toilet in our basement, and then with some moms from the school directory, asking about “appropriate activities for eight, eleven and twelve year-olds.” Moms from school were always telling Dad what to do with us, but he never asked them for help until right then.
“It’s my fault.” I whispered. Ellie shook her all-wet face and said, “I should have worn the good gloves.” We didn’t say anything about Dad crying in the TV room.
After a while, Dad started making Fish Stix in the kitchen, but he didn’t call out “Dinner” and so Ellie and me just sat on her bed for a while, not talking or anything. It wasn’t like we were saying goodbye right then, even though that’s what it seems like now. I just don’t think we were ready to leave yet.
“We’ll leave when the clock says six,” Ellie said, and I nodded. After a while, we knocked on the wall to see what Drew was doing.
Shave, and, a, hair, cut? We asked.
*Two. Bits.*
***
After Mrs. Galanis threw away all the taco mix and mopped the beef and washed Drew’s sock, I changed into sweatpants and Dad’s sloppy-joe-eating-contest t-shirt (which I’m not technically supposed to wear because it’s his favorite one from college) and went to watch TV. There was supposed to be a Fresh Prince marathon, but I must have read it wrong, because there was just baseball. So I decided to drink some milk on the roof and then maybe see if Drew wanted to play Mortal Kombat.
You can get on the roof if you go through Ellie’s window, which used to be both of our window. Dad and us used to go out there with a blanket to watch fireworks every fourth of July. It’s not scary because pretty much the whole house is ranch-style, which means the roof is flat. But of course Ellie’s in her room all the time, so if I want to go on the roof I have to climb the tree outside the TV room, which is hard to do if you’ve got a glass in your hand. After a while you get used to it, though. The trick is to have long toes and go barefoot so that you can hold on with your feet.
Anyway, it took like, two seconds to get up there. That’s when I heard someone coughing.
“Drew?” I whispered. I heard him say some swear words.
“Go away!” He yelled. I couldn’t see him, but he was totally sitting on the slanted part of the roof by Dad’s room, I could tell. So, I started walking there. I took a sip of my milk so it’d be harder to spill. “It’s my house too,” I yelled.
Drew was wearing his soccer sweatshirt, sitting all hunched over right where I guessed he’d be.
“You smell like butt-crack,” I said, even though it was more like a skunk. He had a lighter in his hand. “Are you smoking?”
He sighed like he was fed up. “Yes, Kippy. I was smoking.”
“Sor-*ry* if I care about you or something,” I said. “Cigarettes give you cancer. Like. Like—”
“Like Mom.”
Actually I was going to say, *Like Smokey The Bear*, but then I realized that was wrong. “Yeah.”
“It’s not that kind of smoking.” He pulled his hood up over his head.
“Oh.” I thought of the D.A.R.E guy Ms. K brought in. “You mean, like, Drugs?”
“Yes, like drugs.”
“Ew.” I picked some tar off the roof. “Can I try it?”
He looked at me like he was really grossed out. “No!”
“Well, what is it, like, Crack or something? Are you smoking *Crack*?”
Drew giggled. “No, Anus.”
“Yeah right.” I said it like I’d been joking and went to sit next to him. “So, is that what you’re grounded for?”
“Can I have some of your milk?” He poked the side of my glass with his lighter.
“If I can play with your lighter,” I said. We passed them to each other.
Drew took a sip so big I would have yelled if he hadn’t been about to tell me something cool.
“Okay so yeah.” He put the glass between his feet and pulled his sweatshirt off. “Dad found my weed and grounded me.” He looked at me. “Weed is marijuana.”
“I know!” I couldn’t light the lighter and thought maybe it was broken.
“You better not say anything, Kippy,” Drew said. He took my thumb rolled it down the wheel thing so hard I thought my skin would come off. It lit. “I’d get in major trouble. Dad said he’d send me to boarding school if I did it again.”
If Drew left I’d literally die—just *die.* I tried to sound casual. “I’m not an idiot,” I said. * *I ran my fingers through the flame like Drew does with the dining room candles. “What did Dad do when he found it?” I was trying not to sound like I hadn’t burned myself, which I had.
“The bastard made me flush it down the toilet.” Drew took another sip and just about finished my milk.
“How’d you get more, then?” I lit my lighter some more, trying to make him jealous.
“He didn’t find it all.” Drew had a milk mustache. He pulled a plastic baggie out of his pocket. It smelled really bad. “Don’t worry, Anus. You’re not allowed to have any.”
“Why?” I was pretending to be upset.
“Because I said so.” Drew stuck his nose into the bag. “Go crack Ellie’s window a little,” he said. “We’ll lure her out.”
I shuffled over down the roof to Ellie’s room and waved at her through the window. She rolled her eyes and went back to painting her nails. I pushed the window up and waved at her again through the screen.
“Shut the fucking window!” She said. But I just giggled and sat down around the corner where she couldn’t see me. I knew she wouldn’t get up and shut it herself. When I came back Drew had a cigarette in his mouth.
“Hey—”
“It’s a joint,” Drew said.
“Yeah I know,” I lied. “I was just saying ‘hey’.”
“Oh, well, *hey*, then.” He sat down. The joint went up and down when he talked. “Want to light it for me?”
I tried to be cool about it but it still took a few tries.
“Thanks,” Drew handed me back my milk. I finished it and put the glass on the chimney with all the other ones. “So, what’re *you* grounded for, Kippy?”
I ignored him. “Hey, how’s Ellie going to know to come out?”
“Ellie is familiar with the smell,” he said. “Come on, Kip, fess up. I told you.”
It made me mad thinking of the two of them smoking marijuana together. I tried to smile and think of a joke to make, but it felt like holding my breath so I said what I wanted to say instead: “Why don’t you guys like me?”
“Are you crying?” Drew bent over and tried to look at my face.
“No!” The worst kinds of sob noises are the ones that come out when you’re trying to keep them in. Anyway, that’s what started happening. I smacked Drew’s hand away from my arm and felt bad about it after, like, a millisecond. “It’s just that you and Ellie and me used to be such good friends and now just you and her are friends.”
He rolled his eyes.
“No! You’re wrong. We were *friends*, and now we’re not because Miss Allen almost ran us over and then everything got bad. It’s true!” I was really crying now. I pounded on the side of the dormer window, which Ellie probably couldn’t even hear because she had the music so loud. “And she hates me and I hate it!”
“Ellie’s just gonna shut her window and not come out if you don’t stop it.”
I choked on my own spit and coughed a little.
“She doesn’t hate you, Anus.” Drew banged me on the back. “She’s just mad.”
“See!” I screamed. “She talks to you and not me.”
“No, Kippy,” Drew was getting sort of mad. “She doesn’t talk to me. I just go to school with her.” He took his arm away. “And I’m not gonna tell you about it because she’d be pissed if she knew that I know, but it’s really bad, okay? Really fucking bad. And I’m pretty sure Dad found out about it and that’s why she’s grounded.”
I wiped my face off with Drew’s sweatshirt and tried to get it together. “Is she a slut or something?”
Drew yanked his sweatshirt back. “No! Sick.” He made a face. “Hell no.”
“If I tell you what I’m grounded for, will you tell me about Ellie?”
He shrugged.
“Will you?”
He shrugged, but he didn’t look angry anymore.
“Say it!”
“Fine,” Drew said. “I’ll tell you. But you can’t ever tell her you know. Ever. Promise?” I nodded. “Swear to God?”
“I bet you don’t make Ellie swear on *anything*,” I said. “I bet she just says she won’t tell and you tell her.”
“It’s the only way I know you’ll keep your mouth shut!”
“*Drew*!” I whined. “I’m *not* a *baby*!”
Drew started picking tar off the roof. I was ruining something.
“I’m grounded because Dad checked where I was going online.” I blurted it out before I could stop myself.
“What?” He didn’t get it. “Sick. Were you looking at porn or something?” I made a face like he was the sick one. “What, then?”
“I was reading.” I couldn’t stop or Drew’d never trust me again. “I was reading erotic literature.” He just stared. “Not porn. *Erotic literature.* It’s different.”
“Sex stories?”
I nodded, totally embarrassed. But Drew started cracking up. “Oh my God.” He choked he was laughing so hard. “You were *reading*, like a total dork, and Dad grounded you.” I nodded. “Kippy, that is the best fucking thing I have ever heard.”
I smiled. I wanted to hug him for being so nice. “Now you tell me,” I said. Drew stopped laughing and looked over at Ellie’s window. “Drew! You *said.*”
“Fine.” He put the marijuana joint between his fingers. “Quiet, though. And no laughing, ‘cause it’s not funny.” He reached his arm around me. “Remember Melissa?” His breath was hot and smelly. I nodded. Melissa was Ellie’s best friend since, like, 7th grade. They did gymnastics together. “Well,” he said. “Melissa told everyone Ellie’s a lesbian.” I pulled back and made a face like *No! *“Yeah, I know, right?” Drew pulled me back against his face. “She—”
“So, you told everyone it wasn’t true, right?”
“It was only the girls talking about it, and Ellie would’ve gone nuts if I knew.” (If people were calling me a lesbian, I’d want Drew to beat them up, but I didn’t say anything because I don’t get how high school works.) “Melissa said that Ellie tried to kiss her.”
“*Did* she?”
“I don’t know, who cares?”
“Right.”
“After that the gymnastics girls wouldn’t change in the locker room with Ellie, and Melissa told the coach it was because Ellie stared at them. So then the coach said Ellie had to change somewhere else.”
“And that’s why Dad grounded her?” This seemed really bad, even for Dad.
“No! I’m getting there, okay? Dad doesn’t even know any of that stuff.”
I thought somebody should tell him, but I didn’t say so. “So that’s why Ellie quit?’
“Exactly. And then people stopped talking to her at school. They wouldn’t even sit at her table during lunch, so all the other tables were packed and Ellie sat all alone at her own big table.”
“But why was Melissa so mean all of a sudden?”
“She’s a total twat, that’s why.”
“But why didn’t *you* sit with Ellie at lunch?”
“We have different lunch periods.”
“But why didn’t you switch?”
He shook me. “I’m only one man, okay? And you know Ellie, she’s impossible.” It was true and I nodded. Drew sighed. “So, Ellie started skipping.”
“She *skipped*?”
“Yeah, everything. Study hall, lunch, even class sometimes. *Everything*.”
“Like, a lot?”
“Yeah, ‘like, a lot.’”
I really wished I hadn’t promised not to tell, because this sort of stuff would make me really cool on the bus. “So, that’s why she’s grounded,” I said.
“No, Anus!” Drew let go to smack me on the back of the head. “Shut up, okay?” He pulled me back against him and said in this voice that was out of breath because it shook: “She was in the basement. Someone found her down there. Cutting herself with razor blades. And they told.”
I almost screamed. Almost. “How do you know?”
“Because the guidance counselor called me in to ask about it. ‘Is there anything going on at home that’d make your sister want to carve curses into her forearms.’” He shook his head and took his arm back to put the drugs back in his mouth.
“Here I’ll do it.” I reached over and set the end of the joint on fire. “And that’s why she’s grounded?”
“Yes, Anus. *That* is why Ellie’s grounded.”
I couldn’t believe it. I thought my sister was the coolest girl in school. She was mean and wore underwire bras and had a best friend—she was never even embarrassed when she had makeup on or when we caught her looking at herself in the mirror. It scared me, because I’d always thought that having a dead Mom meant kids aren’t ever technically allowed to hate you, and now all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure.
“But Drew?” I wrote my initials in the tar with the bottom of the lighter. “You think she’s still doing it?” I wrote Drew’s down too. And then Ellie’s. “What she’s grounded for?” I wrapped all three together with a big circle.
Drew threw a rock at the driveway. “No,” he said.
“But how do you know?”
“Hey don’t worry okay?” He looked so cool. “I made a deal with her that if she mows the lawn this summer, I’ll do her laundry for *life*.”
I didn’t get it. “So?”
“*So*, there’s no blood, Dipshit.”
“Oh.”
Drew shrugged like he was admitting something. “Plus, Dad threw out all the sharp stuff in the house.” He threw another rock at the driveway. “So, it’s not like she’d really have anything to do it with anyway.”
“*Dad* threw out the cutlery?”
Drew nudged me in a nice way. “Stop it, no one calls it that,” he said.
I thought about the Raisin Bran on Monday. “Why the spoons, though?”
“God damnit, Kippy, I don’t know!” Drew sighed. “Maybe he thought it’d be weird if he got rid of everything but the spoons.” He picked a mosquito bite off his foot. “And I can’t believe that’s the only thing you noticed. He was at it all night finding stuff. He threw away your entire fucking key collection.”
For some reason I didn’t care. “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t notice.” All I could think was how everyone else’d done stuff to help—all of a sudden I thought maybe I’d go to Melissa’s gymnastic things and put butter in the chalk bucket so she’d slip and die on the uneven bars. But then I wondered if wanting to kill the people who’d hurt Ellie was the wrong way to make things better. It’s what I’d want if I were her, but maybe Dad and Drew were right. Maybe trying to love somebody just meant wanting them not to die. Anyway, it was too much to figure out right then. There was really only one thing to say:
“What a big fat stupid *bit*—“
Drew knocked me in the chest with his elbow. “I think I hear something.” Ellie’s radio went off. “We got her,” Drew giggled, and shook me like I’d helped him win something.
I heard Ellie stomp around a little inside her room—just heavy, though, not pissed or anything—and then her screen went up, like, *bam*. She stuck the top part of herself out and twisted to look at us.
“Oh. My. God.” She said. Just like that, all slow.
“Hi Ellie,” Drew said.
“Hi Ellie,” I said. Drew and me started cracking up.
“Hi weirdos.” Ellie put a hand on the roof pull herself out. She wasn’t smiling, but she looked like she was about to. I started shaking like Mrs. Galanis—like I’d had two Pepsis instead of just milk. That’s how excited I was.
Fiction • Winter 2019 - Double
Ahead of me in line a man starts to cough and the hacking splutters out of control until there is blood on the floor and the guards lead the sick man away. Edward might have been able to tell them whether it was a tubercular cough or a cancerous one. Either way, I suspect the coughing man doesn’t have long. Have you eaten? Edward texts. Have the guards given you anything to drink?
2026