Literary Vandalism

I'm going to re-start this.

The farmer left his ranch. It was early morning and the light flickered in and out of sleep, rising and falling like breath. When he reached his truck, he got in, slammed the door, and started driving into town. The air was crisp and wet. He knew how it would be in town -- stilled -- and he let it wash over him: the feeling of being the only person conscious anywhere. The shoes were empty and the lights were off, there were no cars in the parking lots, and the only things on the sidewalk were plastic bags and cigarettes. He opened the bed of his truck and emptied bag after bag of feathers into the street. The light wind curled them at the side of the road in drifts of gray and black. Eventually all the feathers would get caught in the trees or disappear into cracks under doors or hands of curious children. It was a harvest of sorts.

Its th kind a defeat claws you in th belly like you done it somethin somehow personal and now itll show you back do you good. Right when I pushed out th cream-good wood a th office door I felt it and thought, I didnt get it. So I stopped at th market since I never tole Ma but that I was out for milk -- not about my interview. My skirt goes only halfway down th meat parts a my legs and I feel th long patches rubbin like old raised scars, I got one a those on my foot where I cut it vaultin th chain fence at school couple years ago. I dont do things like that now, Im too grown up for kid stuff like fence jumpin and school. I got to be. Darn these patches they itch, and here I walk down th street all wrapped tight n tied in the squeeze of the ruffled shirt I starched this mornin and th skirt like a mummy. I count out th quarters in my palm quick for th money man at th counter, my head addin th tax n spittin out th total fore the cash register can. I wasnt good for English none but I useter get hundreds in math and when I past Mr. Collin our math teacher in th school parkin lot th other day pickin up my brother he askt me "When you comin back to school Missy?" and I laughed but dont tell him what I know: that I aint have time for fun things like geometry n algerba now. He wouldnt of been able to fathom it since for men theres always time for fun for math for sex to laugh and swim in swimmin holes. I aint been swimmin all August since all my girlfriens they go in the mornins and I dont feel well so many mornins. Countin the quarters I wonder how many quarters it takes to buy a jar of baby food, carrots maybe, and I wisht I looked at th price. If the office dont call Ill go in to th Wal-Mart tomorrow. I got to get a job.

Trofton, Louisiana was a town too small not to have a centrepiece – the one breathtaking beauty that made all the townsfolk feel a part of things on a larger scale than church luncheons, quilting clubs, and Tuesday night softball games. She – of course it was a she – was their royalty, rich-plumed and shining blue of blood. In the Fourth of July parades, her place was just behind the mayor and his family. Anyone old enough to know his own address also knew hers. There was not a man in town who could watch her pass without feeling the stir of desire in his stomach, deeply rooted. In the throes of a thirsty summer, it was said that the purr of her engine brought the rain.

She was going on sixteen now, reaching the heat of adolescence, and the old man felt it. Day by day the incongruity of his buckled fingers roughly groping her steering wheel grew. Boys’ eyes turned everywhere to her – on the street, parked in front of the five-and-dime, in front of her own house. Worse was that the old man knew they had greater claim to these hungry glances than he. She had outgrown him. As he eased her down Main Street at an aching 24mph he struggled to keep his eyes from falling on her speedometer, which went up to ninety.

He bought a bike chain and at night she stood still in front of the house, breathing the dark, her taillights small pointed red breasts and her back wheel tethered to a telephone pole. Angry and restless, the high school boys used to wander past at midnight, carrying baseball bats. They had violent dreams but, seeing her helpless, did nothing. Inside the house stood the old man, watching trembling from behind a curtain.

The wine fills their cheeks, they are sleepy from turkey and yams, the deep soft of armchairs and couches dull the murmurs of their conversation. The last two guests, aunt and uncle, cross their legs, let their hands linger on their knees, uncross them. Host and hostess, mother and father, keep their eyes fixed on wine glasses or fireplace – never wandering to the tall clock, the door.

There are sudden shouts like a flurry of small wings. The little cousins, outside, have discovered snow for another year. Their feet pound out a code of senseless joy. They are a world apart. They run races up and down the yard and their legs spin and whir, fed by impossible fuels.

Here we are. Mother father (foot and head), uncle aunt (man and wife). Here we sit, and I have harbored in my bed Dante’s unquenchable fire, howled the spells of Prospero to the music of a ruptured sea, whistled the ninth in the dark of the homeward path after a night spent shining-eyed among kings and queens, and none of it seems to point to this red Christmas eleventh hour where we sit in silent weight. Aunt’s ears ring with ruddy cheeks, uncle’s with sore throats and runny noses. Father can feel his desk muttering from the next room, its hot breath ruffling the stacks of letters and tax forms. Mother’s eyes spin with a sinkful of dishes, an oven strewn with turkey bastings. They too have walked Bloom’s Dublin, swam Hecuba’s Aegean, but their crowns sleep now in the dust of the closet, keeping company with dead mice and brown shoe polish. Even to walk is to them too sudden. They will sit as far as silence will stretch.

Blurred flakes vanish on red hands and purple tongues. The little cousins, too, will run on, inward and inward, the victorless race, the track that spirals into tiny nothingness.

The last time I saw my uncle, it was through my left-hand rain-peppered rearview mirror. He was standing on the dip by the side of the road watching my Chevy pull away and he was getting wet. I don't ever remember it raining in the middle of the desert but it did that day.
Some people would say later that he had brought the storm to Dogshit Valley, but I don't believe it. We just went to meet it before it ran us down.
When I left him there, it was just to kill him. He was famiy after all, so I didn't think he should suffer. The water filled his dried-up heart and clogged his lungs. Not till Wednesday did the buzzards come back to pick him clean.

When he met her, he hadn't really cared who she was. She had a temper like those crazy street cats, all hiss, spit, and claws if you got too close to their patchy calico tails. Man, did she ever have a tail. She hid it under his jeans and a green jacket that had gone too far too many times, and when he complimented her on her hair, she cut and highlighted it just for spite. He learned his lesson, though, and didn't tell her it still looked good.

As he figured out how to make her work, he started finding out the other things, too. She'd been in two car accidents, both times as a passenger; she liked bad movies, rain, bubble gum flavored medicine, noodles, and the smell of cedar and pine; she didn't like their friends leaving cigarette butts in the apartment, belts, being taken care of, fish sticks, or the small dogs that people in the city liked to keep as pets; and she had a family somewhere.

He was standing over the sink, shaving, and she was sitting on the edge of the tub in their tiny, cracked-tile bathroom putting a Band-Aid on one of her fingers when she invited him to come home with her.

"You and I are going on a trip," she said. "I need to get away." Red, white, and blue, the flimsy wrapper drifted into the trashcan.

"When's this?"

"This weekend. That way my family can meet you. Then we'll come back."

Skinner had learned early on not to argue with her when he had a razor near his face.

“Look at him, again,” called the neighbor girl to her sister, fumbling with her needle. She laughed a little, in wonder, at the patter, bump, and scrape that had made her glance up from her work, already knowing what she would see. Her sister bent over her bowl, hands flying sharp and hard and precise. She was husking corn. The sound was like ripping wet rubber.

“We’ll send Marja to tell his mother,” she said. She did not smile.

The neighbor girl nodded merrily. “Such a funny thing to take with you when you’re running away. And to go in broad daylight.”

“He plays it so beautifully for so small a boy,” said the sister. There was something shrunken in her voice.

The neighbor girl fingered the white cloth she was stitching. “What do you think you’ll feel like, having children?”

The sister said, “I wonder if my husband is as handsome on the inside as he is without.”

The neighbor girl nodded, as if that were an answer. The patter, bump, and scrape continued. “His mother should lock the door,” she said, and sewed another tiny stitch in her sister’s wedding gown.

Onstage she looks like some great white long-necked bird in flight, right out of those picture books we’re all too old for this year, or one of those whipped-cream horses Haley rides when she’s not at ballet with us. Here, though, arrested and still, she looks strangely human – too human, because we are used to seeing her as an animal, a flower.

We know the other older girls don’t like her because she is the pet. We aren’t sure what that means, but we try not to like her, either. We never tell one another of the secret longing we feel to be just like her, as we watch her transform onstage.

Curved over her shoes, tying her laces, her back becomes a tiny sharp staircase of bones. The tension in her skin seems so real that a pinprick would pop her. We count her xylophone vertebrae and titter. Her name is Kelly. The older girls call her “Skelly.” We sense this is supposed to be clever and use it too, and laugh as if we’ve discovered something. Later she will dance, and we’ll want to climb onto her back and fly away with her.

Jim asked me to the sophomore formal. My dress was a size 10, iced like a cake. We stood by the punch bowl and he played with the ladle, stirring and swirling the punch in a figure eight, blushing pink at me.

I used to be on the swim team. I was never very good but Ma thought I needed exercise. I felt like a sleek otter in the water, vibrantly alive and naked despite my suit.

My stomach was tight with my second daughter when Jim called me beautiful for was sounded like the first time, although of course it wasn’t. He took our children to the park, the zoo. Where’s Mommy? they asked. Working, Jim told them.

I used to love Thanksgiving. Now it just makes me feel more trapped.

My daughter – the second – took me shopping for this suit. Slim and pretty, she hugged me and said I was beautiful. All I could remember was that my grandchildren don’t sit on my lap. They back away, hands fisted in their pockets, and in their eyes I can see that they don’t want to drown.