She Kong

This story was written in English originally, then self-translated into Dutch as “Sji Kong” and published under that title in the Belgian literary review Deus Ex Machina (November 2022). I have allowed the story to keep changing in the process of translation, which fed back into the original English text. In this sense, it is an experiment in multilingual writing. “She Kong” and “Sji Kong” were made possible by residencies at, and financial support from, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Het Huis van Herman Teirlinck. Thank you for your faith in me. Further thanks to Philip Landon, Delphine Somers, Thaddeus Gunn, Taymour Soomro, Vicky Vanhoutte, Dirk Elst, Vinicius Jatobá, Philip Graham, and Fiona McCrae, for reading and valuable feedback. Thank you for the translation pointer, Finne Anthonissen, and thank you for your care, kind editors at failbetter journal and Deus Ex Machina, as well as Astrid Haerens.

 

You Discovered Her in the Laundromat

You discovered her in the laundromat, but even without that she was a special kid. Wevelgem definitely counts as deep Flanders, meaning no one even uses laundromats. Neither did she. She just sat there, back of her head up against the softener box. Eight years old, insanely tall, an absurd hint of breasts and chain-smoking like an old lady with more problems than dignity.

That and she was Chinese.

From China, which was a country.

You’d only ever seen them on TV.

Of course something was terribly wrong with Ella.

Where’d you get that scar, Ella?

Nowhere.

Chinese, but she spoke your dialect, very local. Puzzling.

How about that one? 

Nowhere.

You could’ve gone on, there were more, but you were starting to see the direction of all answers present and future. Scars came to Ella like religion to the poor and dejected: Out of nowhere.

You were the one who discovered her. The kind of day you’re midway through and can’t remember how it began it seems so long ago. Sticky heat, and you and Tim and Sander heading for Delhaize the second time that day, kajillionth time that week. Tubble Gum, Hubba Bubba, Crazy Dips. Bright Calipo from the freezer. You don’t pick a spot in the shade, the vampire teeth melt away in your hands and you die hungry, that kind of day, but you were gonna get this right. You usually couldn’t get near Tim’s skateboard. Now he’d shown a moment’s weakness, there was a moral obligation to lean into it. So here’s to hoping grip tape is called that for a reason, you thought, feeling it with your Globes the way doctors feel swollen glands. You were trying to own it, hanging your arms, looking around disinterested, rolling on past doors, catching yourself in windows. Smooth, you thought. Totally pulling this off. You expended half your energy trying to keep your balance and the other half pretending you weren’t, and that it came to you all natural. There were many things you were not. You had to be the girl who skates. No girl in your neighborhood knew how. You were thirteen. You joined your hands and prayed to the heavens: Guys, if you’re there, I need this.

It must have worked, because Tim said for a beginner you weren’t half bad. Efforts quadrupled. The night before you discovered Ella, he even let you take his board home. It was hot as forever, the asphalt was an oven plate, but you kept going at it, one way, the other, over again, pulling at your underpants, wondering would applied science come up with a cure for swamp ass soon. As per usual Mario wasn’t getting home before nine, since so far no one at Lifetime Logistics had given the man one good look and thereupon done the logical thing, which would have been to reverse that promotion they got him right after Christmas. This event, though pending in the outside world, had taken place many times in the privacy of your headspace. It existed as a swish there, crisp and clear. The sound of justice cutting through the air. Swish: what was that? That was Mario’s promotion. Swept from under his nose. You imagined his face when this happened. You got tingly all over just thinking about it. You were not the best daughter, no.

But you’re not cruel. You knew it was no picnic for old Mario. You knew the deal he’d gotten was two-pronged and deeply lousy and had him simultaneously “swamped at work,” to use his phrase, and left to his own, admittedly poor, devices on the parenting front, to use yours. Of this situation you had a deep, intuitive understanding. 

So you were keeping an eye on him. 

Your impression by mid-July: Nearing the end of his rope, and fast.

But what to do? This was before the internet, you couldn’t google it. Mario was always calling you a smart kid, but that was typically preceded by you asking for help with some school thing, and followed by him disappearing into the spare room he called his “study” ever since Tina decamped. 

It’s true the insistence with which Tina refused to come back was discouraging for all involved. She kept calling and saying she would, but her return was invariably subject to this or that condition, none of which materialized. She’d been away nearly four months by the July afternoon Ella made her apparition.

This was your summer of learning. You learned there are things you don’t sign up for. You learned nothing’s easy when you’re swamped at work. You learned teenage daughters are a terrible thing to have.

 

The Cause of Polychrome Food Conservation

If you’d done a word count on Mother Tina’s phone calls of the time, “work” would’ve come out near the top. If she was, indeed, as was becoming increasingly undeniable, spending all these months in the South of France, where the weather’s gorgeous year-round and the air, according to Tim, “fragrant,” it was for the sake of work. Or so she emphasized. The irony being that for years Mario’d begged her to get a job, any job, if only to get her out of bed, where, it’s true, she spent too-large sections of her day bent double, either sideways on the mattress with her back to the door, or upright with the croissant of her body curled around one of the books Mario brought her from the library on request. He’d carry them up the stairs shaking his head from side to side. He’d try about jobs instead, but she’d do some head-shaking of her own, and open up the book, and start learning about things like the difference between depression and clinical depression. She wanted to stand on her own two feet, she said. She wanted her own car. She wanted, she said, to be free. To pick up and go and take you on trips like Thelma & Louise, which you’d seen together on tv1 one Saturday evening. And he’d listened, Mario. And done it. Got her a red Peugeot convertible. 

She drove it twice and flew to Marseille.

So, jobs. Definitely.

But there were more things she refused. 

Swimming pool, hobby club: No, and no.

Psychiatrist: Big no.

‘t Was, indeed, Tina’s Time of Refusal. Until, inevitably, ‘t wasn’t, which happened at the Delhaize late one afternoon. Significant event that needed detailing. She came to your actual room for no other purpose shortly before she flew away on the southbound wind. It was a Wednesday, middle of the afternoon, and you were snip-snipping away at your toenails in peace when there was this big sound. Around three it must have been. Any such hour any day of the week Mario was actively getting swamped at Lifetime Logistics. Even so, there was the sound again. You must’ve stared at your middle toe a small lightyear before you managed to identify it as the famous Knock At the Door. It was one of those Dreamland America things you knew from TV, a popular expression of family life across channels. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Full House: They were always rapping on each others’ doors. Dawson’s Creek. The amount of in-house conversing – it was mad. Every time you thought “What could they possibly still want to talk about?” the answer was: “Everything.” 

Took you the rest of that lightyear to rediscover location and inner workings of the vocal cords. 

Uhh… Yeah?

You said it in English, like on TV. Yeah. Casual.

She came in and you poked at the dirt underneath that nail. The middle toe’s the one you really want clean. It’s the fuck-you toe.

She came in and you didn’t stop poking all the time she came in and sat on your bed and told you about the Delhaize late one afternoon where the entirety of her luck changed. How unexpected and not wholly unpleasant her surprise when she found herself sharing an aisle with Nick suddenly – you knew Nick. You remembered Nick. From the Easter reception at Lifetime? 

There’d been a steady stream of receptions and walking dinners and informal get-togethers ever since Mario’s much-talked-of promotion. All involved diverging opinions on what everyone should wear. None involved any chairs. They got Tina out of bed, though, so you weren’t much inclined to protest.

Nick? 

You remember Nick! 

Sure you do! 

You talked to him?

At the Easter reception?

About your judo? Like, the system with the belts? And how you pass from one level to the other? And that girl with almost no hair, with the blue belt, I forget her name?

She was awe-inspiring in the scary way, Tina. Silent for months, then she’s scalding hot word lava.

The CEO of Good ‘n’ Tight, Nick?

Your father works with him?

He gave the opening speech that time in Lichtervelde?

This person speaking was your mother. She was speaking and did not stop. She was in your room.

You looked at her. 

Snip went the nail on your fuck-you toe.

He – a hint of desperation – he dropped the sausage?

Oh, you said. Nick.

She was right: You did remember Nick.

Nick was fat.

Nick was very fat.

Dropped not one but a whole platter of sausage.

Well, it would appear they got talking in Dry Goods that memorable afternoon, Nick and Tina. It would appear they found it hard to stop. Gave Tina an entirely new zest for life apparently, sausage-dropping Nick, as well as a mid-level job at Good ‘n’ Tight, which makes those plastic ends you tie bags of food with. You knew the ones she meant. They’d been a revolution in kitchens across Flanders. A matter of weeks. They came in sangria reds and golf-course greens and bruised plum. You tied your hair with them sometimes.

You know the ones! Tina said. You tie your hair with them!

There was one below the mirror, matter of fact. A melancholy midnight blue. 

I what, you asked, and pulled an elastic band from your hair and before you could think what direction to slingshoot it in, if any, she smiled, Tina. Smiled and got up. Anyway, she said, anyway. And started to gather your nail clippings. And didn’t stop until she’d reached the very last one, which had flown all the way past the head of the bed, and when she’d gotten that one too, and held all your nails now in the little nest of her hand, she took a moment to close her eyes. She closed her eyes and swayed her head. Then she walked out of the room like that was all she ever did.

It remained unclear in the months that followed how exactly Tina was furthering the cause of Polychrome Food Conservation in the South of France. A little bird had whispered in your ear that the CEO of Bag Tying owned a yacht. Also, a jet-ski.  Vines, a couple acres.

This information you never passed on to Mario.

Because he was right.

You were a smart kid.

 

You Knew Her Name and Nothing More

Was it also, in a wholly different way, not just perfect, though? With Mario in his swamp and Tina on her jet-ski, were you not free to pursue magnificence in the realm of skateboarding? With no one telling you to get inside or get to the table or get to bed, could you not get yourself exactly where you wanted? So here’s to freedom! and holding Tim’s board high over your head you made for the cul-de-sac that humid evening at the tail end of June, and there, at its southernmost tip, where the houses give way to cornfields, you lowered it to the asphalt and engaged in some high-focus motivational self-coaching. 

You didn’t need to know any pop shuvits or plasma spins or backside heelflips. You didn’t need to be the best. You just had to be the girl who skates. For now that was enough. For starters. Good, so let’s focus up here. That thing with the turning. Let’s do that again. And again. No one cares if you’re dizzy or hurting. You suck it up. You do it again. No one cares.

And, lo and behold, did this method not prove effective. 

And, as a result of this method, were you not wheeling it on the big street as early as the next day.

You rolled in behind Tim and Sander calm and quiet. You were going for aloof. And smooth and soft and oozing down the pavement wind in your hair, even if maybe there wasn’t much wind. You were going for the unmistakable sense that, yes, it’s quite normal, having the body point one way and the face another, and, yes, quite normal, too, to rest one’s entire bruisable body on a moving plank rather than the ground. 

I’m doing it, you kept thinking, and, watching that gravity-defying girl zip past in window after window, That’s me! The whole thing was like Kwinten’s house, which had a ping-pong room: Very awesome.

And now here came the laundromat, where you saw yourself pass one blue letter after the next till suddenly, zip.

And that was her.

That was Ella. 

Caught right in the middle of an ‘O.’

You stepped hard on the back of the board. 

It flipped right into your hand. 

Pro.

Hold up, guys!

Now here was a different kind of mortal. Different from what you’d seen at school or anywhere else. The Chinese thing, sure. The eyes. That was one. But there was something else. Some age thing. She was clearly younger than you and Tim and Sander. She was also the oldest kid you’d seen. What a strange creature, you thought, and went inside and gathered her up. When you came back out, you knew her name and nothing more. You said: Guys, this is Ella. 

And it was cool with them.

 

Enter Ella

Just not very long. Her being Chinese was a complicating factor. Rather, that she was and wasn’t. She looked Chinese but didn’t dress it, and she spoke your kind of Flemish. It posed a mystery that at the time you failed to crack. People don’t do questions where you’re from. They do jokes. And Ella did silence, especially about herself. She only ever explained about her name, and that was only because Tim wouldn’t let it go. He had a niece called Ella who was nothing like Ella, so Tim said, No way that’s your name. Over and over. No way. Until finally Ella sighed a deep sigh of impatience, and rolled her eyes, and rolled the cigarette round in her mouth, and with her thumb squished a flying ant on Sander’s parents’ supermarket receipts by the microwave, and explained that Chinese people choose a name when they get here, duh. And you learned that by “here” she meant not so much Wevelgem as, apparently, Europe. 

Which, wow. 

You were aware Europe was a thing of course. You were first in Geography three consecutive years. You just didn’t know to what extent it was a thing. To the extent you could come from outside of it, say.

When she told you her Chinese name, it sounded like she kong, which surely you misunderstood, because she kong is a vegetable. A winter vegetable, very bitter. In your dialect anyway. It’s really called Belgian endive, but you would never have said that. To you, and to Tim, and to Sander, and to everyone else your side of the dialect border, it was she kong, and she kong was what vegetables were. What your lives were. Who’d know there’s less bitter out there? Who’d know about sweetness?

Another troubling item was Ella being basically an amoeba. At eight she’d gained none of the transformative life experience you and Tim and Sander had. She knew none of the good music. She wore all the wrong clothes. She said stupid things. 

Also wrong: Where she lived.

Everyone knew where Ella lived wasn’t really part of the neighborhood. Yours was a nice neighborhood. Sander even had a pool, though they were always cleaning the filter. Where Ella lived was way by the big street that had the Delhaize and the laundromat and the small Delhaize and Bowling Kentucky and windswept lots that sold caravans and children’s slides and mailboxes shaped like other things – the one street that had anything, basically. It was busy and noisy and Ella lived just off it, in a mess of narrow back-to-back streets where the houses were all skidded together like junk. From one side you could see into some of the yards, which deep in your heart prompted the question: Where was all the grass? And: Was it technically a yard if no grass? Or if you couldn’t actually see the grass because of the many discarded household appliances that hung their electric wires like sad tails? Or if you couldn’t stick around long enough to find the grass because of some very angry-sounding dog kennels? 

It was the part of the neighborhood your folks made you loop around if they had any sense. 

That’s not what you did, though. You cruised right in, almost every day. You went to get Ella. Even when Tim and Sander had started calling her She Kong In Ham (after the dish) and King Kong (after the monkey) and Donkey Kong (after the Nintendo monkey), even when you were the only one still calling Ella Ella – that’s what you’d do. You’d cruise down her diminutive street, ring at her diminutive house, tell her, Let’s go, sit the two of you down by Sander’s pool, and pretend not to hear their ignoramus jokes, all because very sometimes, when she had her moment, Ella would use one of her big hands to cup your chin and with the sweetest bubblegum breath she’d blow the bangs from your brows.

There’s this song. The one that got them famous, K’s Choice. The one about breathing in, and breathing out, and how it makes you feel so creative, and so much more, you’re high above but on the floor. You’d be listening to that and not know what the fuck. They’d go, If you don’t have it, you’re on the other side, and you figured, okay, that’s why then. That’s where I am.

Enter Ella. 

This plank of a girl.

A whole head taller than you, half as thin, smoked twice as fast. 

Rigid, unyielding Ella. 

It’s only her eyes would flit. 

Eyes and nails. Crazy long nails, with dirt underneath. She’d paint them assorted colors but then chewed off the paint and swallowed it, so she never had all ten done at the same time. You breathed in, you breathed out, you’d crossed right over to the other side. The song played on your discman an estimated ninety-nine percent of disposable time. You’d hum under your breath. You’d turn a corner and turn another corner. The streets would grow narrow, you would get nervous. You were on your way to Ella.

 

What You Categorically Didn’t Do

First to appear were usually Ella’s nails. They’d come creeping round the door, then, pop, she’d stick her head out, look past you, and go, Oh hey, like maybe she was expecting someone else. Oh hey, a little disappointed, though she had literally zero other friends, Hold on a sec, and before you could get a peek into that sliver of hope, she’d closed the door and all was sealed again and you’d understood the usual nothing and Ella wouldn’t come out for another two, three minutes during which time you– 

You sat on the curb. 

You waited. 

July, August, you sat waiting for Ella.

Was that dumb? How do other people spend it, their summer of learning? You sat on a curb and stared at the mutest of houses. Stared and waited and the blinds stayed flat. Got you skilled at guessing silhouettes, though, and the day things went pear-shaped you were absolutely sure it was him. It was the same dude, only in the front room this time, meaning close range, meaning you make sure you hang onto that bell way to the side where hopefully he can’t see you.

He wasn’t any clue at all, if you had to be honest, but there was nothing else to guess at. No other way to understand about Ella. To learn. This one dude she apparently lived with, that was all. 

And now he came wavering closer as you rang again keeping well to the left. Closer as you rang and thought, Oh come the fuck on Ella. Closer, blurred and wobbly, silhouette swelling, as you rang and he came almost all the way – oh will you open this miserable – almost all the way up to the window, and you were about to press the bell again, press it hard, when you saw: Impossible. 

It just wasn’t possible. 

He couldn’t be her dad.

You’d kept your hopes up until then. A dad was all Ella’d ever mentioned family-wise. You liked to think that was who she lived with. The way kids do. But you saw him stoop down now, slowly. 

Slow as gets he stooped, and took him twice forever to get back up, he had to hold on to something, a buffet or something, and no. There could be no doubt. Dude was wicked old.

Which raised – well, questions.

Luckily you kept a little box just for those way in the back of your head. That’s the box you opened and closed that day in August when the air was hot and like syrup and you thought you smelled ozone, you opened the little box and closed it again, and already Ella’d spilled out of the house eyes jumpy, hair messy, ready to roll, and all was well, and the box seemed fine, and she’d pushed you aside and was leading the way to Sander’s, and from up behind you could eyeball her a while, and take a look at that micro-thing her shoulders did when she inhaled, and how they were all bone, the shoulders, and like hooks, like pretty hooks, and moved a certain way, and you watched some of the smoke curl away from the back of her head, lazy and to the right and up, up it curled and you watched it until finally the box in your head felt very small. 

Very and sort of dangerously small because a thought had formed. 

You tried to fight your way around it, but you were the slightest of waves and the thought was big as a lighthouse and the thought was this: That already Ella’s cigarette was almost gone.

So. 

Then.

She’d been smoking inside.

She’d been smoking inside with Mystery Dude right there.

At the end of Normandiëstraat you veered into the veinwork of pathways. The ground turned gray under your feet. Leaves gathered around you. This was the safe spot for getting out your cigarettes. Ella lit one for you the way she always did, and when she did, you noticed a new thing near her wrist, yellow-green. It’d go purple-black later and you were thinking, okay.

Maybe you wouldn’t bet so much on the box in your head being very sturdy.

Maybe you’d take a little moment, and smoke a little bit, and calm a little down, and maybe, okay, that didn’t help as much as you hoped. Maybe that actually didn’t help at all, okay, so maybe there you go, maybe there you had it then, apparently there you went and came right out and said something. 

You said: Who’s grandpa, by the way?

And proceeded to check out the tops of some dark trees. 

And the weeds in the ditch. 

And the back gate to Mrs. V’s garden, heavy and bolted. 

It wasn’t an amazing joke, so you didn’t expect her to fall over laughing exactly, but you also didn’t expect her to turn white the way she did, and have the look she had for as long as she had it, which was when you started to panic a little bit, and to say, inside your brain, to your brain: Generate something. 

Like an idea.

Now would be good.

And unable to generate anything better in the space of time allotted, what your brain did was instruct your arm to put a big unwieldy hand on Ella’s shoulder, and your mouth to say something the likes of: Hey.

Hey.

Which was a bad idea.

You didn’t pat Ella. 

You also didn’t pity Ella.

What you categorically didn’t do was pat Ella out of pity.

You could have told anyone in your situation that. 

In your defense, she did look authentically helpless. Which was a first. And if desperation is a defense, then in your defense: You were reliably desperate. Weeks had passed and Ella was still as locked and remote as Mrs. V’s garden.

Your hand hadn’t even landed when she spazz-jerked it off. Then instead of letting go, she started to squeeze it. Next, to squeeze it tighter, driving the nails in. Next, you really thought she’d stop because of how obvious the actual physical pain you were in. You thought even Ella would stop then. But the nails dug deeper, and as they did, suddenly you understood. That Ella was only that grip now, and wouldn’t be back till it was spent. And instead of your mind it was your body doing the understanding. It held this knowledge like it held the liver, so when you were screaming, you weren’t trying to make her stop. You knew there was no stopping. It just came out.

 

Your Colorful Little Princess Always

When she backed away it was lights out for a second. 

You held your hand.

You shut your eyes.

You caught your breath.

So little blood there was it felt like an afterthought. You had it wiped in no time, and as soon as you had, and looked up, there was Ella. Looking scared. Swirling like dark water. She was back. And already you’re thinking, Poor baby, and feel stupid for screaming. Already you’re looking away from the bit of blood on that Kleenex because you don’t want to embarrass her. Already you want to tell her it’s okay, and she didn’t do anything bad, and she’s your colorful little princess always.

You don’t, obviously.

You wipe your nose and stuff the Kleenex in your pocket. 

You flatten your hair, which has gone insane.

You’re a smart kid who’s just learned a lesson.

 

How Big and Broad the Landscapes

You don’t remember the rest of the walk. You remember that when you did make it to Sander’s, Ella went to sit with him and Tim at the other end of the pool, which was breaking your unwritten law. 

You were alone by the garden shed.

It was pretty quiet around that pool. But such was the nature of hanging out. Only way to do it was low activity levels. Swatting at ants was okay. Checking the back of your hands. Listening to the crackle of a bag of peanuts. They were cleaning the water, so no swimming. You sat by the pool and watched each other watching each other.

You thought you’d give it a try.

You tried with only half a finger first. 

Waited a moment.

It didn’t seem impossible, so you rolled up your shorts, checking also what Ella was up to, but she was only staring across the water. Which glittered. Ella too, her face and arms. There were all these lines in a kind of craze. You started in and two dead ants rippled away wings spreading. 

It was that time of the year. Flying ants. The yearly phenomenon that every year comes as a massive surprise. Summertime-the-weather-is-fine and Flanders sits on its mowed grass by its trimmed hedges thinking of maybe a barbecue tonight and did I water the azaleas when, wham, it takes them by storm: Nature.  Director’s cut.

You started to feel it when the leg was about two thirds in. You took a sharp breath and slid it way down. It felt good, so you got going with the other leg. Slowly first, then dropped it quick. Felt your face get flushed. Felt the pain. You had this song in your head. Tomorrow I was nothing. It was the opening track on Cocoon Crash. “Believe,” it’s called. Yesterday I’ll be. K’s Choice was good for when you got serious, the way you had in Wevelgem these past few months. Tim, Sander, all of you. Some abstraction of sad had settled, like evening fog. Tomorrow I was nothing. You told yourself to breathe. Seemed like maybe it wasn’t so easy, keeping both in at the same time. Seemed like maybe it was kind of hard actually. But that was okay. It was allowed to hurt. Tina had said once you deserved whatever came your way. This was before she stopped saying most things. On the day you turned nine, when for some reason she was mad sweet and had given you an Off The Wall trucker hat in all the right colors, and when she said this, about the deserving, she pulled you to the side, away from the others, and close to her, and she was right when she said it, and right again years later when she got on a plane to France without any kind of exit policy.

One of the dead ants had floated back and head-butted your leg over and over, you began to chew the inside of your face.

Did you see them on MTV? you asked Tim, in what you hoped was a nuance of normal.

He was roasting an ant over a candle. The toothpick caught fire and Sander stomped it out and called him an idiot and Ella was eating all of Sander’s peanuts really fast. The bag crackled and crackled.

Yeah, Tim said, Yeah, they totally killed it.

It was pretty incredible, this K’s Choice business. They were just like everyone else. Normal people, Flemish. Except they were on MTV, with The Prodigy, and Pras Michel, and, like, Will Smith. You’d taped it and watched it. Then you’d rewound and watched more closely. They looked amazing. Everyone did there. They all spoke English and looked amazing and no telling if this was a real place or no. Didn’t look like it. Looked like some Shangri-la, some TV-and-cineplex dreamland made up of great hair and fiercely communicative families. A magic kingdom of Jeffs and Bills and sophomores and cheerleaders, in pick-up trucks they sat blinking neon: LIQUOR STORE. 

You’d be thirty-one by the time you visited the real place, the actual America, and even then it would keep some of that glow of the late-night screen. Something about those colors, something about the light, how big and broad the landscapes.

You rewound the tape and watched them again, Sarah and Gert of K’s choice, in that place of magic. You said it to yourself, out loud. Said it several times, just to test it. 

America, America.

America.

When they sang that tomorrow they were nothing and yesterday they’d be, you didn’t quite get it, but it sounded true. Sounded like you. No me, no world, no mind, no face. That was how you felt. Tim and Sander too, you guessed, though you didn’t ask and couldn’t know for sure and definitely didn’t know why. Felt like life was this crude and heavy thing. Like an army blanket. It looks like it can protect you. It can’t.

 

And in the Hot Air Something Cracked

The water was really doing its work now and your stomach hurt.

Dude!

Suddenly he’d seen.

What did I tell you! The chemical’s in!

Your face was pretty red by the feel of it.

Inside the pool all the water was a scramble for light, beautiful like heartbreak. A dead ant lapped uselessly against the steps.

You’re worse than my sister! Sander said, and in English: Get the fuck out already! 

Yeah. Fuck. America, America. Get the fuck out.

Which you didn’t until Tim bounced over and hauled your legs out of the water and– 

He pushed you flat on the grass then, Tim.

Harder than you would expect.

And then he was on top of you, sort of hovering over, like a danger, a cliff, and far off was the sun, far and tiny, a squint in the blue, and Tim laughed, and you laughed too, laughed and felt brave and also lost and like nothing was normal, and one of Tim’s hands was on your shoulder and another was near the top of your head, and you tried to wrestle free without really trying, just enough so his breath came close.

You were laughing still when you pushed him off and sat up and shoved his knee out of your way and looked at Ella and, pleasantly, it’s not because your legs are out of the water that it stops biting.

Not immediately.

She looked away, Ella.

Sander’s little sister showed up and Sander said, Scram, and Ella said, Yeah, scram, and she scrammed. Tim snorted and probably saw the all-clear to be cool in front of Sander. Man, kids are fucking dorks, he said, which made Sander go, Dude! And play-throw his head back making big eyes at Ella, like: Not in front of the children.

Sander said, He doesn’t mean you, Donkey Kong Junior. Obviously you got it going on.

Tim snorted again, which was like his main activity. A quarter peanut came out his nose.

You said, Don’t be a dick.

Sander said, I was praising her in case you didn’t notice. 

You were about to drop your leg into the pool again when Tim slapped it, which gave a tingle not unlike the chemical, and you must have been smiling because he smiled back.

Sander said, I’m glad you brought up the dick department, though, because when it comes to that we might have a bit of a problem on our hands here, I mean if this little foursome’s gonna–

Ella said, I’ll blow you if you want.

You gave her a look, like, Christ Ella. 

Sander said, Does your daddy know you’re out?

Tim snorted again.

Ella said, Oh etcetera! and made her couldn’t-care-if-I-tried face.

You said, Oh my god you really are bovines all of you, and got up and did a sort of, like, yawn, with a long stretch of the arms upward, which had one thing close to true about it, which was you did feel very tired all of a sudden. Tired like the bottom of a pit you felt. Tired like long dead. So, This has been pleasant, dudes, you said, but I gotta go. Even though you didn’t have to go. You never had to go anywhere. You just didn’t know how to stay just then.

Ella said, Like I would actually blow you, you probably have, like, the grossest dick in the world, etcetera! Does anybody have any gum?

Why did she have to talk like this? Blowing and dicks? It sounded very bad in our dialect. Also, what was with the word “etcetera”? She used it all the time now, mostly wrong.

You asked, Do you know what etcetera means?

Because for some reason Ella was under the false impression she could hide stuff from you.

I know what it means, she said, and you thought, liar. 

Lying liar, you thought. 

Because once you’d shown her something on the back of the cereal box and she couldn’t make out the words. She tried to hide it, but there was no way she could read. Even less way she knew a high-ranking word like etcetera.

She asked about the gum again, if people had any, but her voice sounded thin and liquid, like the voice of a kid. 

You watched her scratch one hand with the other and watched pool light crawl over her cheeks and crawl into the whites of her eyes and around the time it reached the second eye you grasped something so exceedingly simple that it should have been clear all along. 

She is a kid. 

She sounds like a kid because she is a kid.

She was bent double scratching her ankle now, sweet Ella, just scratching up and down that leg of hers unthinking, your sweet Ella with the cat claws. And you thought maybe you’d teach her how to read and write. You thought maybe you’d teach her, and, come winter, you’d buy an armchair that fits you both and put it close to a heating unit of some kind and the two of you could grow old together brushing each other’s hair.

It’s orange? Ella said when Tim gave her some gum and orange was undeniably the color it had. What the freak?

Which was Ella-speak for “fuck.” For someone who couldn’t read she was curiously fixated on words. “Fuck” was how the rest of you planted your Flag of Cool on the Mountain of Awesome. Not Ella. Ella had to say “freak.” She’d just decided one day and hadn’t gotten it wrong since. 

Even now you struggle to get this. How Ella had to be different about everything. How she wasn’t really interested in being like you, wasn’t really interested in many things. Half the time you weren’t sure she was interested in breathing. She blew her gum into a big ball of orange and had it explode in her face, BOOM, any of you have a cigarette?

Man alive could Ella blow a bubble. 

Times this girl was splitting you right down the middle.

No way, Sander said, Get your own.

I gotta go, you said again, but why didn’t you?

Ella said, You know you can make gum out of wheat?

Tim said, No way.

Ella said, You chew it long enough, it turns to gum.

By, what? The magic force of your spit? Sander said.

Because Ella didn’t know much of anything. You all felt safe in the knowledge she didn’t know this either. It was a Wednesday, August 12^th. It was almost six. Tim shot you his skateboard. Everyone gathered up their sneakers and got walking, past the nothing streets where Ella lived all the way to the big street, and on the big street past the laundromat and Bowling Kentucky and the small Delhaize, and finally past a whorehouse named DESIRE where the buildings stop dead on a wheat field.

There were a million flying ants. You squinted, up over the awns and into the blue. The sun was unreasonably high for the time of day. The whorehouse kept its eyelids closed. One of the flying ants touched down at Forearm International and it was like slow motion when you killed it in one dull stroke. It sailed to the floor in its own time, and while it did, and the wheat swelled into the blue, and you were about to prove Ella wrong, were about to prove her very wrong as usual, another ant landed, and you shrugged it off slowly, and, shrugging it off, you felt a shift, something under your feet shifted, and something was Tim’s board, and it ran clear into the street where a black SUV met with a bad sense of timing, and in the hot air something cracked, and something was Tim’s board, and the flying ants flew, and some of them landed, and in the windows above the D and E of DESIRE the curtains hung as before, but everything else had changed.

 

1 Pack of Cheez 

It looked whole-ish at first.

Then you picked it up and held half a board in each hand. Okay.

Okay, okay.

Tim, fuck, you said.

It wasn’t okay. 

You didn’t do it on purpose, but you saw his face and knew: Something bad had happened. 

Before this terrible accident Tim would show up at your place, like, a lot. Whenever he could be sure Mario was out basically, which was whenever-period. He showed up less since Ella was around but showed up still. You’d kissed four times in the process, twice even with tongue, round and round it went like a wet pig going circles panicky, it was a bit boring, but one time it got more interesting, when after three Watermelon Breezers Sander was upstairs passing a motion and Tim put a hand under your t-shirt and asked was that okay, touching your non-existent breasts was probably what he meant, and you said sure, and his dick came up in his pants, seemed like.

You guessed you could’ve asked Mario to pay back Tim’s board. Which, you guessed, he would have done no problem because have it be known Mario had that kind of money easy now. 

And that might’ve solved things, yes. 

Tim would’ve gotten a new board, maybe even a better one. 

He would’ve felt up your chest area again. 

Things would’ve stayed easy to understand. 

But you were done asking Mario for stuff. You were serious about that like Mr. P. of History about the Holocaust. Never forget, is what he said, and you thought, Damn straight, and on a Tuesday night in Tina’s red Peugeot convertible with a flashlight under a blanket you’d shed heartfelt tears and sworn you didn’t need Mario’s time or his money. You’d effectively stolen your last pair of sneakers. They were white as baby teeth. Dumbwit never even noticed you had new ones. Middle of the hallway, middle of the kitchen, middle of the living room – everywhere you left the fuckers. Nothing.

It was just you and Ella then, after you broke Tim’s board. 

Which was sort of excellent. Everything in between Ella was more like filling gaps anyway. And she had a way of making things alright, Ella. One time she licked the ice cream off all your fingers and you didn’t even have to ask. One time she farted in a glass and held it up to your face and you couldn’t smell a thing. One time she decided it would be good to starve yourselves, which you did, five days straight, and what you sinfully did eat you took down in a super-designated notebook, like:

Wednesday

a peanut plus 1 pack of cheez

(200 gramz)

(That wasn’t good.)

(Two hundred gramz was a lot of cheez.)

It lasted until over by the industrial zone they opened the first ever McDonald’s and Ella decreed enough already. So into old Mario’s wallet you dipped and forward you fled, along the big street with the two lanes each way and the car-filled horizon and the coughing of trucks and the interminability. Took you close to an hour because Ella didn’t have most basic things like a bike, but then you were about to round a climb and she pulled on your sleeve, Ella. And chinned up ahead. And you fell silent. And slowed. Because in the sky something began to appear. You kept walking, only slower, and side by side now you watched it happen. Watched the dark gleam of car roofs give birth to two bright flecks. Watched those flecks give birth to two bright beams, and watched those beams find each other, there in the middle, and when they did, and the two of you were walking along still, fingers almost touching at times, almost but never actually touching, you watched it form and lift: The biggest brightest M. Slow and yellow as the sun it lifted. Clear from the bulk of the world. 

You were grinning ear to ear when you made it to its base, so wide, and next to it was a sign ‘DRIVE-THRU,’ bold and black, like Wevelgem was the movies, and what you did was choose one pocket of air to be your car window. And you leaned out low. And you chose another pocket of air to be your horn, and you honked. And as if joy was nothing else than that clean, free sound, you kept honking, honking, and the sound rose and rose, right up to that sunny M.

On the way back your stomach made a sort of contraction and you threw up a little and Ella said you were disgusting, which was a true thing she said a lot. But the acids had settled down again by the time you got back to your neighborhood, and right before you were at the corner she asked could she see your hand, and you said, Okay, and what she read in it was a dark, dark future, No offense, she said. None taken, you said, because during the reading she was touching several of your lines like your heart line and your fate line and your life line, in several different places, applying a bit of pressure each time, and you ran home happy holding your hand a good part of the way.

It’s true sometimes she wrung your forearm like a mop.

Your stomach was a favorite target.

She liked furious knee-butting, and, when knee-butting furiously, liked to go for the thigh. The soft flesh there.

Sometimes she reminded you of this devil child you saw on TV late one night when you were maybe six and the sitter was asleep. It was so scary you almost shat. The way this child stalked through the rooms and flashed frenzied stares and, come to think of it, long nails actually.

 

Some Thoughts Land Like Spaceships

Then towards the end of August you started to suspect some things.

For one, t-shirts were disappearing from your wardrobe. Maybe Mario threw them out, you’ll never know, but whoever it was took great care, disappearing only things you weren’t wearing anymore. You never saw Ella wear any of it, never saw her wear anything other than that perennial t-shirt the color of mushroom and those too-large pants, truth be told. Only now you started to think maybe she wasn’t wearing those to be all different and Ella. Maybe she was wearing what she had. Hah. Some thoughts land like spaceships.

You’d never once seen Ella with a backpack and suddenly you thought, well, maybe she doesn’t have one. Maybe it’s not just that with pants that size who brings a backpack? It’s true everything she could ever need fit into Ella’s pants. She’d walk the neighborhood jingling like Christmas, pulling little presents out of her pockets. A meter of gum rolled into a pink snail. Glitter rouge. Edible stickers. Magic candy that went pop in your mouth. See, Ella was cruel but then not cruel at all, because, Here, she said, and gave you a tiny white pearl shiny as your uncle Remi’s head. She said it came from some-type sea creature, etcetera, but you weren’t sure because it had a hole down the middle that was perfectly straight like maybe you could pull a string through there and make a necklace. Like maybe that’s what it was from. 

You didn’t ask. You liked it from the sea. August sweltered and you walked and smoked, walked and smoked, and while you did it was a nice feeling in your pocket, this pearl. It pushed into your thigh every step you took, and the world did seem like a more breezy place. There was this clean maritime happiness. So nice it felt you almost took Ella’s hand one time. Like in “Believe.” Touch the fingers of my hand, and tell me if it’s me. Which doesn’t mean you did, of course. No sirree. You kept next to her. Holding on and on to love, what else is real. Kept close and learned that that was wonderful, too. Learned that every moment you didn’t touch was a moment you could, and all the distance you didn’t close was not just that anymore, not just distance, but had, like, a heartbeat of its own. You didn’t have to do a thing and the world would be an amazing place always.

 

What Happened Next Is Hard to Explain

Walking together like that one afternoon you wound up at the dead-end street where in former times you’d tried to be something special by way of Tim’s board. But you had Ella now, and walked the length of the street and when there was no street left, you kept walking, into the cornfield, and from there you looked up and then back and, Go on, you said, because she’d stopped all of a sudden, Ella.

Holding on and on and on and on and on. 

She’d stopped where the street ended and from the safety of the asphalt stood peering into the dark tunnel of corn you were in. Drawing on her cigarette.

It’s true it looked a little dense there in terms of foliage. The corn was tall. It was wide-armed. Dead straight it stood, on either side of you, and in the middle, up high, the leaves touched like hands waiting for a trust fall.

It’s true you couldn’t see an end to it.

Go on, you said, but Ella stood there.

What? you asked.

Nothing.

What is it?

NOTHING. Will you freaking chill.

Jeez, fine, you chill.

Like in Full House: Jeez.

You whacked a bunch of leaves aside, dove headfirst into the corn, and right away there it all was. Everything you thought you’d forgotten. The mighty rustle. The crunch of dry earth. A smell like Kasia needs to clean the fridge, gets way up in the nose. Very green leaves curled from the stalks and they wrapped close round the cobs and all of it felt the strange kind of familiar. Like being surprised you know something.

You kept going. 

The cobwebs, the dim.

Going and, at intervals, stopping. 

Ostensibly to have a looksee around, get oriented in the big heap of corn.

Really you were seeing if Ella was following.

She was, approximately. You could tell she wasn’t used to this. Several times when you turned she was checking her shoes and kicking off lumps of earth. She put each leaf to the side separately before squeezing past wrinkling her mouth. She kept falling behind and had to run to catch up. She looked helpless and out of place and for the first time that summer you felt nostalgic about when it was just you and Tim and Sander.

You sped it up a little.

You stopped looking back so much.

Hold up! 

But you thought, No way. You were a jungle cat. Fast, fast. Left and right you shot, like this was where you had breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like it was your jungle, this, fast, fast, past the cornstalks, left, right, like you’re chasing creatures smaller and more innocent with jungle-cat agility and – fast, fast – no complication. No such human complication as pity.

Hold up!

You didn’t.

Until her voice sounded very thin and far away, and she said, Please.

Which sounded sort of lovely.

Would you hold up please.

Sure you’d hold up please.

Dust was plastered to her forehead when she caught up. She wiped it. Looked up. Looked left and right and back over her shoulder. Her cigarette had burned way down to the filter and died. She held what was left of it in her fist like a stick of chalk. Like she was about to go find the nearest sidewalk and turn it all colors of the rainbow. You wanted to knock it into the dry earth. Or knock Ella into the dry earth. Or close her in your arms forcibly, it was hard to tell which. The Ella you knew was a creature so tall and strong and beautiful you’d frankly smack her across the frontal features. Who was this now? 

You started peeling the leaf off a cob. 

Up-down, up-down, up-d– your foot. 

It did this all by itself. 

You felt it jerk and peeled the cob and then a third, larger, thing began to happen. Something inside you took to swelling. Took its time but kept on swelling and in the end delivered a thought that was weirdly and sort of grotesquely stretchable. If this was possible, the thought began, if Ella could be this—ugly thing – this ugly little thing, well – and here the thought stretched – you were probably doomed – and stretched more – you were definitely doomed, all of you, each and every single one bar none, you knew this for a fact now,  you were sure, and what happened next is hard to explain.

You started to feel very calm.

At the same time you started to feel brainsick.

It was a powerful thing. Didn’t seem like it came from you. Seemed like it came over you, from the outside, and you let it. Like there was some deep, tucked-away part of yourself that found its way to the door and opened it wide and went, Come on in and let’s do this. Whatever the reason and whatever this thing— you invited it in. 

You let it take over.

You let it say: Let’s do that game.

What game?

She sounded suspicious.

You were in awe of this thing’s force. Gave it full license. It started to eye Ella and you let it take its sweet time, and the longer it went on, the more Ella started to look like she was squirming under some foot, it was all very interesting. 

What game? she said again, and you let it say: Wow, look at you.

You let it laugh in her face a little.

In her scared face. 

She was scared of something, Ella. 

You.

She was scared of you.

You let it think: What a sad little mouse. Let’s see if it does tricks.

You explained about the game where you each go in a different direction and walk in the corn a long time and then find each other by the sound of your cries. She was practically trembling by the point you were done explaining. She was so not down with it. 

I’m down, she said, and was like one of those cartoon mice over an abyss. Tiny feet running solo. Super-fast but getting nowhere.

 

She Was Not

You tore through the corn. The movement alone was gripping, the violence. There was all this horsepower, but someone else was driving. You pushed the leaves, stomped the earth, knocked the cobs. Then, from far off, you heard a cry. You stood still. Pricked your ears up. Didn’t answer.

In your head you started to count. One. Two. 

To count slowly. 

Three.

Thinking you’d answer her on five, say.

There was another cry.

Four. 

Four and a half. 

But there was time.

Six. 

Seven.

There was no rush. 

Eight. 

Nine.

One more.

On ten you both cried out.

Now you knew this game well. You’d played it infinity times with Tim and Sander when you were, like, drooling babies still. The game was you both had to move towards each other. 

You stayed put. All around was a world of corn. It looked impenetrable. It was okay, she could do it on her own, and it’s not like you weren’t helping. You were calling out steadily now, shouting into the void each time. You looked at the stalks as the cries drew closer. 

You listened. 

You shouted, looked, listened. 

Then there was a big stretch of nothing, then next cry you heard sounded scary close and you turned around. 

Nothing. 

You turned back. 

You looked at the stalks and stalks and stalks, thinking they’d produce her any second now, you looked all around, very intently, at those stalks that were starting to look like they might produce God knows what, something God-knows-what, something awful, and when there was another cry, it sounded so close you could hear a ripple in the voice.

Time did a thing then where it slowed way down. 

Like when you were seven and broke your arm. 

You were on the bike.

You saw the car come at you.

And there’s just nothing you can do.

That was more or less the feeling, and that was enough, that was it, you were off, you were running, fuck this shit, bye. You stopped answering her cries. You ran. She stopped calling. You still ran. Fast, fast, and for a while that was all. The stomp of a body, the big rustle of leaves, the stink of rot, like nature dying, and the important act of you getting away, away, you had to get away, to the street maybe, but you weren’t sure where that was, and then a hand came out of nowhere and dragged you in real deep like into some serious drama.

Of course it was Ella, who had a face like she’d just swallowed something bitter for her own good.

It washed over you, there’s no other way of saying that. Just did, and before you knew anything you were clutching long Ella in your arms, saying, Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry, and you’d known all along that she was taller than you, but now you knew she was exactly one head taller, because your face was just above her teeny-tiny breasts, and she said, What for, and you said, I don’t know, which was true.

It was also true that in a general way neither of you knew very much at the time, like you didn’t know exactly why you were crying either, but that never stopped anyone, there was some shaking even, and from the outside you must have looked a little crazy, especially with the whole thing taking up a good space of time and the two of you sort of suspended in that until finally the shaking was less and you calmed way down.

In fact, everything calmed way down. It was like the air itself did. Like something in it thinned way out until it became altogether difficult to hold a body upright in it, so you sort of slumped into the earth happily and sat in the dirt for a good two hours.

Just, you know. 

Talking. 

About stuff.

Ella had her thumbs wrapped tight in her other fingers, like little presents for you to open. Her head was tucked away between your legs, in that warm hollow there. You knew it, of course, you felt it, but every time you looked down and saw Ella’s head there it was a great big discovery anyway. The pearl in your pocket pushed into your thigh and you passed a finger over a bruise near her elbow. You switched places about an hour in, and then Ella was raking her colorful nails through your hair and you’d landed in some beautiful dream where all the world was made of tall corn and, looking up, it wasn’t much of a stretch to see the cobs over your heads spell E-L-L-A. 

Ella, spelled the cobs.

And there was more. 

Around the cobs were leaves, for instance. Above the leaves was a bright sun. In the leaves was a soft wind. And the soft wind moved the leaves sideways peaceably, and because of this peaceable movement, the sun spilled through in new little places all the time, and leaked the kind of fine, sparkling dust that, wherever it lands, catches significant things in clear bright spots, like in one place some crumbled earth near Ella’s foot, and in another the long elegant footbridge a spider had suspended between two stalks, and in another the cut on your hand where a few weeks earlier Ella had dug her nails in deep. It looked like a thing of magic, this cut. Stirred like an insect. You watched it in the light. The raw pinkness of the skin. The fissure. Gaping still. Gently.

With such quiet dedication it looked to be festering that for once all things big and small were where they had to be, everything was, so to speak, in place, it all belonged together, that cut was going to leave a scar and you were glad you hadn’t disinfected it better and felt just about ready to die in peace when Ella said she was moving away.

You gave her a look. 

She didn’t have the face of someone who just made a killer joke.

The way you remember this is the sun crept behind a cloud just then, as though in polite response to the situation. And doing that, it untied everything that before was tied good and strong and natural. You looked around and nothing quivered in unison anymore. Each thing was returned to itself. The earth to earth, the corn to corn. You and Ella to your separate ungrown bodies.

You had to do something, so you bounced to your feet. 

The appropriate reaction to a claim this bold was to doubt its veracity. 

You said, No, you’re not.

She said, I am.

You said, What.

She said, Nothing.

You said, When. 

She said, I dunno, day after tomorrow?

You said, You’re shitting me.

She was not.

 

As Far As Codes Went

The thing to understand is Ella came into your life as this chain-smoking angel. Completely radiant. Hard to believe. Shut you right up. As far as codes went, this one was undecipherable. Even if you’d figured out who that old dude was – it was like she was born without parents, Ella. Like she’d descended from the skies. You found her in the laundromat, for crying out loud. And now they were moving her away? You didn’t think so. You’d never mentioned it afterwards, no one had, not even Sander, but the day you found her all of Ella’s clothes were dirty and had this funk to them that was super-offensive. You were the one who’d been washing her clothes through the summer. Twice a week you’d stuff them in Mario’s machine while Ella sat hugging her knees.

And these people were moving her away?

You really didn’t think so.

You were so mad you took the laces out of her shoes.

It was easy. She was wearing fake Ben Simons. The laces on those are really short. 

You went into the corn and put them away and sat back down beside her.

Where are they?

Where are what?

Where the freak are my laces dude.

Your what?

She sighed. 

My laces.

I dunno.

She dug into your pocket.

Dude.

I dunno.

She dug into your other pocket.

Oh my god you’re such a spaz where are they.

I dunno.

The brilliance was you’d stuffed them in your underpants.

Hey, where you going?

Where you going without laces? 

Where you gonna go without your laces, Ella?

 

Exit Ella

Apparently some shoes you go wherever you want without laces. She walked right off, Ella.

Next day you were still saying you didn’t have them. You’re one of these dopes—you’re scared to open your eyes in the morning because who knows what happened to the room while the lights were out.

Ella stood at your front door and called you a freaking liar. You looked at her stone-faced and called her worse. No need to get verbatim. Suffice it to say you took your time, and whatever it was you could think up in the rotten insides of your head, you went ahead and said it. It didn’t matter anymore, you couldn’t see there was anything left to do, she was gone the next day, she was gone already, only for some reason she was pretending she wasn’t by standing at your door saying things. The way you saw it, she’d blown that good right when she’d decided to fuck off. She wanted to come in, which you ixnayed. At some point you bit her arm and she slapped you in the face, but it was hardly a slap because she’d already turned to leave and it lacked all force. 

Then, for one second, you half-tried. 

You grabbed her arm right where you bit it and for one second you half-tried to achieve the impossible somehow, which was to drag her into the past, to a place where she wasn’t leaving, like your kitchen, where she’d sat down to eat ice cream, or the cornfield, where she’d rested her head on your thighs.

But you let go. And she went away, Ella. Down your driveway with no laces. Saying she was happy to be leaving on account of you being such a fucking tard. 

Etcetera! she yelled when already you couldn’t see her anymore.

And that was that.

Exit Ella.

In the heat of the moment she’d forgotten to say ‘freaking’ instead of ‘fucking.’ 

Freaking tard. 

Weeks of work that was.

At night Tina’s car was on fire. You’re not saying she did it. You’re saying at night Tina’s car was on fire. It wasn’t a big fire anyway. Something went wrong and it fizzled out quickly. It struck a chord, though. Something about those flames licking away at the metal without hope. The only thing that really got burning was the soft top. It burned right off. It was the first time you saw the car like this, like in Thelma & Louise, with the top down, ready to hit the big, broad landscapes, but not really. You stood looking at it with Mario, feeling him next to you. Like, feeling him. His presence. Father, daughter, one beside the other in the night. It was weird. You were waiting for the fire truck to come and extinguish nothing much anymore, and thought of Ella and how she was really just a baby, and maybe she should cut down on her smoking and learn to read and write, and maybe also someone should get her a really nice and expensive present or a new pair of pants, and thinking these thoughts and looking at those dying flames, independent from any decision of yours, your eyes watered up a bit, and your dad probably saw, because he wrapped an arm around you and said, Oh, sweetie. 

And kissed the crown of your head.

And, what’s weirder, you let him.

Which, in all honesty, made for some high-caliber relief. Like putting down a super-heavy backpack. Or taking a dump when you’ve had cramps all morning.

Oxygen was what this fire needed, lots of it, or a can of diesel. Burn her up, leave the ashes. Who knows what things could look like in the morning, when everything’s new? But the orange went blue and you leaned into your dad and by the time it’d gone dead, you thought, All the better. The fire truck came shortly after. They got out and got back in. Disappeared in the dark soundless.

 

After She Was Gone

You had one week of summer left after she was gone. You told your dad you’d broken Tim’s board. He asked did you want one for yourself. You said, Nah, but you did want a refund for Tim. You called Tim and asked how much for the board, and your dad wired the money to his the same day. Next morning you went to his house and turned the charm way up, which sent that Babette girl he’d been hanging with quick out the door. He’d always thought you were excellent.

You did end up doing it with Tim then. You started end of summer and continued into the fall. First it was nothing. For others to know and you to guess what all the fuss was about. Then you found a different way and it became better. And then there was one time, you’re not exaggerating, when Tim’s dick felt almost as good as Ella’s crazy nails. Almost.