Don't Kiss Me: Stories(18)

Over the break we saw Dee’s little brother at the movies by hisself. We forgot all about him, but there he was with his money in a wad, staring up at the listings like he couldn’t read. We went on in and spent all our money on arcade games. Then later that night, in your bed that smelled like socks and sweat and secretions and powder Tide, if you weren’t careful you’d start thinking how when you came out the boy was gone, and how maybe you should feel regretful about not inviting him to man the firetorch gun, really the best gun to have if you were playing Immortal Fear and you made it past the first two rounds, which everyone did.

But he had gone.

That winter someone found the girl’s yellow purse on the side of the road. The strap was gone. One of us heard their dad saying how you could use a strap to strangle someone, or at least tie up her hands. Her perfume bottle was smashed. That girl ain’t coming back, we told each other, shifting our nuts like we’d seen our dads do whenever they said something serious.

But really, we already knew that. You just had to say some things out loud.

During the spring semester Miss Shane’s boy got in a fistfight with the custodian. No one knew why but we figured it was stressful, having a bitch mom who had cancer. Then on Palm Sunday a dog found a skull and carried it to his master’s doorstep. There was excitement for a time, but it turned out to be the skull of an infant, probably buried by some of them country folk who can’t afford no funeral.

A rumor got spread that a girl tasted like a 9-volt battery down there. It got hot, hotter than the last summer, and a old lady died in her house cause she was too weak to open some windows.

We’d see Dee’s momma working as the greeter at the Walmart. If she recognized you she’d say, Seen Dee? Dee Switcher? and most of the time we just shook our head, stared at our shoes till we got to the magazines aisle. Guns and girls, we needed more info on both.

Some of us got for-real girlfriends. Some of us snuck into their rooms at night and made love, you had to call it making love or your girl got mad, to these girls while you listened to their dads sawing logs just to the other side of the wall, you biting your girl’s pillow hard so you wouldn’t make no noise, you ignoring how sometimes your girl just laid there, her fingertips on your back limp and uninterested, you despite the dud your girl turned out to be feeling like your bottom half was exploding up into your top.

Dee one time punched a girl in the mouth, she’d been crying hard just before, her face ruined, black smears down her cheeks and her upper lip all glistened with snot. By that time we knew girls sometimes got ugly. Dee got sent home, came back the next day with her makeup all set again. Lips all wet. Eyes so blue you got to feeling indecent. See, we had seen Dee, we’d seen her a lot, but back then we had our eyes on all the girls, and over time it got to be hard to see how losing one was such a tragedy.





HEART


The man griddling pancakes don’t look me in the eyes when he fills my plate. His eyes drift upward toward my hairline, skitter down to my neck, I feel for the man, I ain’t easy to look at.

I feel for the man, that’s one hallway, but down another hallway I watch myself beat the man with my tray until his head’s a broken gurgling pie.

My momma always said I got a head shaped like a heart. Not like them cartoon hearts bitch girls draw about other boys in their notebooks. Like the real thing. A pumping chambered ugly of a muscle not meant for no light of day. Guess that means instead of brains I’m all blood. Guess that’s why I ain’t ever been scared of blood. It’s warm like I’m warm. It pools thick and gorgeous and don’t step in it less you want to make a painting of what you done for any passing bitch to start hollering about.

Rest of me’s just flesh. Mounds and folds of flesh, rubbing against itself, slick like a tongue through a mouth. When I feel rotten I pretend all that sweat is blood, my insides pouring out, the sky above me narrowing to a speck till there ain’t no sky and there ain’t no me.

But then I always wake up, my head and heart pounding, clobbering me all to shit.

I ask the pancakes man does he know if there’s pie, he points his spatula away from himself, I turn in that direction but he is pointing at the soda machine. I feel that spider I get in my belly again, that prickly thing. I close my eyes, push the corner of my tray into my belly till it hurts and past till it hurts, till the pain feels normal and that spider’s a goner.

It ain’t the man’s fault, the spider, I got to keep reminding myself it ain’t people’s fault.

A lady in scrubs rings me up. Tonight it’s pancakes, a waffle, curls of bacon, a dish of macaroni and Velveeta, a good-size fluff of scrambled eggs, a wrapped sandwich for later, a salad I ain’t going to eat. A wedge of cake, red with white frosting. The lady’s flesh is the color of honey, flecked with tiny dark freckles. I wonder is something wrong with her, that honey color and everything, then I realize I like it, I like that color, I like this lady in her shirt of colored cats. I say, You like *cats, huh? But the lady says, No, like I just asked her did she like eating babies, holds out her hand for the money.

Another thing about me is, I got a real hard time showing my true emotions. So inside me there is a roaring, I am the roaring, it shreds the lady before me, it hangs her by her cat shirt, her tongue pink as a lozenge, but outside me I thank the lady, ask her could she just keep the change.

I sit way in the back of the lunching room. There’s only a few other people here, a crying lady crumpled over her tea, two thugs in white uniforms, holding them plastic spork things in their skinny fists, a man watching a little girl fingering dimples into her mashed potatoes.