Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  “Of course not.” He smoothed the dirt where the bricks had been with the heel of his boot, divots all lined up next to each other, missing headstones in a graveyard. “Maybe gonna check out a couple penguins today. That something you’d be interested in?”

  His eyes slid to mine and I was the one who looked away, ashamed to admit that I did want them very badly. “Maybe. Depends on the condition.”

  “Oh, probably pretty fresh.” He grinned. So much of his happiness, I was learning, came from getting things for our family. He wanted to help provide for us. It was very sweet, in a morbid kinda way.

  This was the new normal. Me and my nephew talking animal murder so we could keep the store afloat. I did like the idea of getting some penguins in, though. My inner child remembered all those SeaWorld field trips and couldn’t wait to look at the bodies. Make my own dioramas. I bet I could do better than the theme park. Just needed some Styrofoam for snowbanks.

  He slapped the tailgate as I took off down the road. It was October and the kitschy decor Halloween shops were back in business, one having taken up residence in the old T. J. Maxx where my mother had bought all the Easter dresses she hadn’t sewn herself.

  All the lights were out when I pulled into my parents’ driveway. It was dark, Florida dark, which meant lots of bugs. Twilight was coming on quick, and I didn’t want to leave the specimen boxes out in the truck, where God only knew what would start gnawing at them.

  Knocking at the front door didn’t elicit a response and neither did ringing the doorbell, which still played the tune my mother had set for Dad’s last birthday. I knocked louder and called her name, hoping she’d at least turn on the light, but there was nothing. As I walked the perimeter of the house, I passed the scraggly flower boxes next to the front windows, burrs clinging to the cuffs of my jeans as I made my way to the backyard.

  Grass had grown past my calves, weedy to my knees in some spots. White-lined moths fluttered as I waded through. It was past the point Bastien would be able to get to it with the push mower. It needed something industrial. Maybe a lawn service. What would it be like when my mother could no longer take care of herself? Would she live with me or Milo? Who’d handle the house and take care of her basic needs?

  I tried the sliding glass door, but it was locked. Pressing my face to the glass, I peered inside but was unable to see anything other than the flashing blue 12:00 from the DVD/VCR combo. The heat from my breath fogged up around my mouth and made a Santa beard. I swiped my initials in the damp.

  There was one last place to try: my bedroom window. The weeds were the highest there, wicking wet and full of mosquitoes. I felt along the ledge, looking for the place I kept the bamboo shard I’d used to sneak out with Brynn in high school. AC slipped through the tiny crack in the window and sliced at the warm skin of my cheek. I got it open a half inch, then a half inch more, finally yanking it wide enough to fit my whole head inside.

  The room was musty. Nobody had used it since Milo and Brynn lived there with the kids. There was always an uncomfortable dampness to my old bedroom. Rot permeated the rugs. When I went over for dinners, I avoided the room as if its deterioration might infect me with the worst parts of me I’d left behind.

  I slid the window all the way open, stumbled back through the wet mess of piled leaves, then jogged awkwardly up to the house and jumped onto the sill. My body wedged halfway inside, the ledge digging hard into my stomach. I used my arms to jettison myself through the opening. Falling into the room, I tried to brace myself against an old bookshelf, which promptly broke under my weight. I slid forward on a tidal wave of cheaply assembled MDF and books I hadn’t read since elementary school.

  I kicked a few of the books beneath the skirt of the bed, then opened the door to the hall.

  “Mom?” My voice echoed and bounced back at me off the terrazzo. “You okay?”

  It took a while to find her. She’d holed up in the master bathroom, sitting alone in the shower. When I snapped on the light, she flinched and ducked her head.

  I crouched next to her and groaned at the strain it put on my back. “Is this what we’re doing now? Hanging out on dirty bathroom floors?”

  Strong body odor wafted from her armpits, powdery mother aroma, magnified by the smell of old underwear and used socks. Her favorite nightgown barely clung to one shoulder, nearly revealing her breasts.

  Sir Charles sat beside the toilet. He’d seen better days. One of my father’s stuffing jobs, completed in a big hurry after the dog had passed away from an obstructed bowel. His face was squinched and snarling, though I knew my father had been trying for sweet. It was too hard to make pets look friendly and alert; better to make them sleep, curled up in a little faux bed. But my mother had wanted the dog preserved that way and my father had done it for her, to make her happy. Even though he had a hard time saying the words, he tried his best to do things that showed he cared. I tried to keep that memory fresh in my mind whenever it felt easier to hate him.

  “I’ve been working on some things for you.” I brushed a hand across her head. The hair was growing back: a stark, shimmery silver that lit her scalp like tinsel. I wondered if she was cold. Tipping her face toward mine, I took in the makeup caked around her eyes. There was dirt or possibly smoke creased in the wrinkles of her neck.

  “Let’s get you a shower,” I said. “Then we can talk.”

  It was hard getting her up off the floor. I sat her on the closed toilet seat and started the water, icy spray hitting my arms and spritzing my face before slowly heating up. I left the curtain half-open, trying to steam the room.

  When I pulled her nightgown over her head, she leaned into me, body very soft and small. Her breasts pressed against my torso. The skin on her back was withered, so thin I felt I could break through her flesh with my fingertips. How strange, to think of the woman who raised me as defenseless as a baby.

  Under the spray, she wilted further, until her chin nearly touched her chest. I soaped up a washcloth I found under the sink, one of the flowered relics from my childhood, faded into a muted gray from repeated washings. I scrubbed her head delicately, using care around her nose, sore and red around the nostrils. I washed under her arms, but between her legs I left for her, turning away for privacy.

  She cried silently, tears and snot mixing with the water that sprayed out in wild directions from the lime buildup on the showerhead. I took the washcloth back from her and let her stand there, spray running down her face and chest, soap bubbles collecting in the bristly hair between her legs.

  What was there to say? No lie would be believable. “It’s all awful, I know,” I said, squeezing the back of her neck. “It won’t be like this forever.” She turned and sagged into me, her body slick and still soapy.

  “You can’t know that.” She nuzzled into my collarbone. Her head felt heavy, solid as a bowling ball. “I put everything I had into that work. It was the only thing that made me feel good.”

  Sorry was the only word that seemed right, but I couldn’t get myself to say it. Sorry never fixed anything. It was just a word, no action behind it to make life any easier. My father’s letter had been peppered with apologies: sorry I failed, sorry I’m doing this, sorry I couldn’t be the right kind of man. What was the right kind of man? Was it a person who upheld his responsibilities? If he were truly sorry, wouldn’t he have seen how he was about to destroy his family, and stopped?

  Remnants of mascara dotted the corners of my mother’s eyes like slimy dead gnats. “Your father abandoned me.” Her mouth moved against my shirt, the fabric muffling her voice. “He was controlling and repressive, but he was my husband and I loved him. We built a life together and now he’s gone. I’ve got nothing of my own.”

  Her breath was sharp and bitter. I let her sourness wash over me, took it in and didn’t flinch. Took the foulness as my due, as she’d once taken it from my father. She was small and hurting and I loved her. I pulled out a clean white towel from the closet and bundled her in it. Sir Charles sa
t on the floor beside the toilet looking scraggly and damp, ringed with water from the drips falling from the shower curtain. I picked him up and handed him to my mother, who stuffed him under her arm like a teddy bear.

  We went to the living room. For the first time in a while, the television was off. The animals sat propped on the shelves, dim and quiet, as if everything but us was asleep. I turned on the lamp my father kept beside his recliner, the one with the glowing green shade he’d called the tortoise.

  Put on the tortoise, he’d say, shuffling newspaper pages, searching ads for old taxidermy pieces he could remount and flip. Can’t see shit in this house.

  Sitting her down on the edge of the chair, I wrapped the towel around her shoulders and used the edge to dry her face. Sir Charles sat beneath the tortoise’s green glow, staring at the two of us with wide, glittering eyes. Water pooled beneath him on the wood, soaking into the paper coasters my father always liked to take from restaurants.

  I held her hands as I squatted in front of her. They were smaller than mine and much, much softer. “What else do you want to talk about?”

  “You didn’t know your father.”

  “No,” I replied, squeezing rhythmically, so I could focus on that sensation and not the one of my stomach falling through my body, down onto the floor between my feet. My body, piecemeal. “No, I didn’t know him, I guess.”

  “And you don’t know me, either.”

  Our faces were very close. I could see the tiny black pores that lined her nose. Her nostrils were crusted around the edges and beginning to flake. Hair grew near the corners of her mouth, bristly and dark. When she sighed, I could see that one of her front teeth had a white stain near the top. How strange, to single out pieces of the body I’d never seen before on a woman I’d known all my life.

  “Do you know me?” I asked, cataloging the small defects in my mother’s skin. The tags of flesh near her right eye, which was somehow lower than her left. A dark blotch lined her collarbone, what might have been a bruise or a birthmark. There was a mole on her cheek that looked nearly purple in the green light.

  “Not now.” She squeezed my hands again, rubbed her thumb against the center of my palm. “I knew you when you were little.”

  “Nobody can ever know another person.”

  There were times I’d thought I knew people. Brynn, who I’d loved more than anything. The other half of me. My father, a man I’d adored, someone I’d considered to be the strongest person on the planet. We spent so much time looking for pieces of ourselves in other people that we never realized they were busy searching for the same things in us.

  She gently stroked my eyebrow. It was thick and overgrown, an inheritance from my father. “I’d like to know more about you, if you’d let me. I know it’s hard for you to open up. To share things.”

  Her towel drooped and hung near one dark nipple. I tugged it back up for her and secured it beneath her armpit.

  “Nobody knows me. I don’t even know me, Mom.”

  “I don’t know me, either. Nobody knew me but your father, and he’s gone.” The whites of her eyes were so red I worried I’d gotten soap in them. “I don’t know if I can start over again.”

  “Nobody knew me but Brynn. Sometimes I wonder if she actually did, or if I told myself that so I’d feel less lonely.”

  My mother smiled. Her teeth were dark from years of coffee, chipped, pitted in the corners. Eyeteeth flat and no longer carnivorous. “Your brother knows you.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  She shrugged and wiped at her nose, which was dripping again. “It’s all intimacy. Just different kinds.”

  I knew who Milo used to be. But now I couldn’t name his favorite movie. When was the last time he’d told me about a date he’d gone on, or if he preferred dogs or cats? Where did he like to eat lunch? Love was a thing that needed constant care. Our intimacy was an uprooted plant, shriveled and withered.

  My legs had cramped while I hunched down in front of her. I sat down on the rug and picked at it; it was full of crumbs and needed vacuuming. Everything needed cleaning. I wanted to go around with a trash bag and start tossing things. All the dusty, unused stuff we didn’t need anymore.

  “Intimacy means giving up parts of yourself to someone, even when that means they can hurt you very badly. But sometimes we let them because pain can feel good too.” She pressed her palm against my cheek.

  I yawned until my jaw cracked. “I don’t wanna try all the time. I’m just tired.”

  “That’s okay.” She petted my neck and smoothed back my hair. “It’s hard to talk about the ugly parts. How we can be that terrible and still worthy of love.”

  “I don’t want to feel anything.” I leaned into her and she cradled my head against her chest. It was awkward and uncomfortable. I willed myself to go numb, to fill with white noise.

  “It’s scary to need people.”

  Burying my face into the crook of her neck, I felt my teeth denting the wrinkled flesh. I found it hard to speak without choking. “I do like feeling pain, feeling hurt about Brynn,” I confessed, hating myself for saying it. “I like it because it’s mine and it’s the only thing I have left of her. If I stop feeling bad, then she’s really gone.”

  My mother’s fingers dug into my braid. I let myself cry then too. Both of us clinging to each other, the towel falling around her waist. Sir Charles stared down at us, little paws soaking ruin into the woodwork.

  GOPHERUS AGASSIZII—DESERT TORTOISE

  We found the condoms in the lot behind Brynn’s trailer. A whole box of them, unopened, like they’d just fallen out of someone’s shopping bag. I’d seen condoms on TV before but never in person. Brynn told me her mother used them, but she wasn’t sure where she kept them. She thought maybe the guys her mother dated were expected to bring them over. I didn’t know if my parents used them, but it wasn’t something I’d ask.

  Let’s blow ’em up, like balloons. She shook the box, held it overhead and shook it again, slapped it against her ass like a tambourine. Fucking condoms!

  It was too hot to be outside. It was early August and we were smothering. I was breaking out bad on my back and wore a gray flannel to try to cover it, roasting myself alive. I’d ditched Milo at the 7-Eleven when he wouldn’t share his Slurpee with me. He’d find us eventually, but for now it was just the two of us, which was better. Brynn was hanging on him a lot, touching him too often. Throwing her arm around his neck, poking at his underwear when the band popped up out of his shorts. It made him blush and then she’d laugh at the color in his cheeks, leaning in to giggle in his ear.

  Brynn held the condoms out to me. Let’s do this. It’ll be fun.

  Someone will see, I said, crossing my arms. We’ll look stupid.

  We should find your brother. He’d like this.

  It put me in a really bad mood to think about the two of them together. I wasn’t happy with anything; too broken out, my hair greasy from hormones. Brynn looked comfortable, snug in her cutoff jean shorts and white cami top. I could see her nipples through the thin fabric, and I told her so, but she just shrugged and wiggled her chest at me. I knew if Milo saw her he’d freak out and get that look on his face that always meant he was thinking about sex. It bothered me for a lot of reasons I couldn’t reconcile. Brynn was mine, but Milo was mine too. I hated the idea of the two of them having each other without me.

  No, let’s just do it. You and me.

  Yay! She skipped around in the grass, kicking up dirt with her flip-flops.

  We drank hose water, pulled around from the front of the trailer to the back, where we could hide from prying eyes. Brynn’s mother wasn’t home, but she hardly ever was. She’d met a new guy and he was already living in the trailer. Brynn said he didn’t have a job and he just sat around watching TV in his boxer shorts. It sounded gross to me, but Brynn said all the men her mother let move in were like that. The kind of guys who made her want to lock the bathroom door when she showered.

&nb
sp; Fill them up with water. She held up one of the condoms, bloated and slick with lubricant. That was what Brynn had told me the shiny stuff was: L-U-B-E spelled out at me like I was an imbecile.

  Like the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! of jizz. Brynn shook it and it jiggled, so full it looked ready to burst.

  That’s nasty. I can’t even look at it.

  Get used to it. How else are you gonna have a baby? Gonna need some baby batter, dummy. She tossed it lightly, hand to hand, so slick she nearly dropped it. The hose had wet her cami, and now I could really see through it, tiny nipples hard as pencil erasers.

  I don’t want a baby.

  Brynn snorted. Of course you do. Everybody wants a baby.

  Well, I don’t.

  Most kids grossed me out. How babies were made especially disgusted me. I never wanted to think about having to do something like that with a boy, letting him lie on top of me and shoot weird gunk inside my body. It sounded like a horror movie. Made me sick even thinking about it.

  I could smell the funk from my own crotch and underarms, got whiffs of the greasy mess of my hair, like old french fries. I didn’t want to be in the field tossing condoms around. I wanted to swim in the community pool, spit chlorinated water from the gap between my front teeth. In the pool, I could feel light and weightless and like everybody else.

  Taking a deep gulp of hose water, I held it in my mouth and wished it didn’t taste so much like melting rubber. It was the tail end of summer and nothing felt good. Already my mother had put out the fall harvest leaves, the wreath on the table ringing the large white pillar candles we were never allowed to light.

  Four, five, six condom water balloons stuffed into an old plastic Easter basket that Brynn had unearthed from beneath the trailer. Their place was a dump, so full of trash all the time. They never threw anything away, and it always smelled like pulpy, rotten wood. Usually I didn’t mind. It was so different from my house and it reminded me of Brynn, how she loved things so much she couldn’t bear to throw them out. But I was thinking of Milo, how he would find us soon, and then Brynn would ignore me to giggle at him, and it made me want to bite something. It was too hot. I just wanted to be alone.