We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  Change Your Life Today

  there is a game soma likes to play.

  When Soma closes her eyes, the classroom stops. When she opens her eyes, everything has slipped a little forward. She closes her eyes and opens them, testing the slippage. A game she’s taught herself: she counts the number of things that change in the interval. Elbows in afternoon migrations across portions of desks, black lines on the clock, a person passing in the hallway. Increments, tiny markings only she pays attention to. Sundial of darkening elbow. Rain floods the fields outside the row of scratched windows and the crows and seagulls arrive by the hundreds, whole shimmering islands of polished feathers, an ocean of joyous cries. The sound crashes against the ash-grey stucco walls of the school. The water level rises to the edges of the windows and the birds beat it back down. A man in an orange uniform mows the grass on his machine. He rides steadily into the water until the birds surround him and lift him toward the sky. Soma watches him leave this world. Some kid told her that the school was built on a swamp, and if there’s ever an earthquake, the school will sink—just sink right into the ground and be covered by water. Water table, the kid told Soma. We’re right on the water table here. Soma pictured a dinner table set with polished silver and plates, floating off on the Pacific. He said this like a threat. It always rains a lot here—steadily, for three or four months of the year—but this year it’s bad, with flood warnings on the radio.

  Soma closes her eyes, opens them. Her ears are growing in power day by day. Her ears are developing into dog ears, she thinks. Getting better at noticing the pauses, parsing the lifts. Every strand in the carpet scrapes her eardrum, a field of swaying grass.

  In this way, she makes the hours in class go by, easily.

  By lunchtime, the birds are always gone.

  There is just the rain. Rain so complete it’s not water, but resonance. A shallow lake dangles from the city’s shores. Wheels and curbs. If the city were nudged slightly, it would hydroplane, skid away into the blue-white electric foam sky, but the rain would continue and new people would evolve, would naturally develop the ability to breathe underwater. These days Soma is watching her mother more closely than ever, since her mother went to her friends’ place for a little more than three weeks, then came back, quiet. Her mother leaves, always comes back stronger. Using her dog powers, Soma can track invisible things. She can predict people’s movement so precisely that sometimes, she is psychic. There’s really no difference when you actually think about it.

  In art period the teacher tells the class to copy down a map of the city and tapes a black-and-white grid to the wall. Soma tries for a while, then gives up when her streets come out all wrong, veer together like a fist of sticks. So instead she draws a big lake. It isn’t a perfect circle, so she scribbles it out and traces a circle with the bottom of a pencil cup. Rain falls onto the surface of the lake, covering the buildings. Apartment buildings tower through the surface. A bunch of Starbuckses float on the water around the towers. Soma’s mother hates Starbucks—too crowded, the coffee’s sour and a rip-off. Soma draws herself on the roof of a tower. Scribbles herself out. Don’t be silly. Grow up, her mother always tells her. The faster you grow up, the better. Soma will grow as quickly as possible. No!—no turrets. The underwater city has to be as realistic as possible. A bunch of tall apartment buildings. She draws people, a dozen, twenty people, all with breathing masks. What if someone loses their mask? Soma draws some bodies that have floated to the surface. They bump against the edges of the floating Starbucks islands. Nobody can just float around forever. Won’t they get tired and sink, their sore bodies dragging them under, down and down and down? The classroom’s windows bruise easily. Water palms the glass in many blues. The soccer field floods peacefully, reedy with western afternoon light.

  This isn’t the first time this has happened—her mother hasn’t come out of her room for a bunch of days in a row. It looks dark in there. Sometimes a shadow crosses the line under the door. When her mother came back from the weeks at her friend’s (what friend?), her father told Soma and her brother, “Mom is pretty tired, try not to step on her toes.” After dinner, when her father is almost always still at work, Soma keeps the TV on until it runs infomercials for hours, letting a woman’s voice reciting price lists tell her a story, put her to sleep. All over the underwater city, people are watching these glowing squares inside their apartments. Sometimes her mother comes out for tea, sometimes she doesn’t come out until after Soma is in bed, sometimes she walks past the infomercials and says nothing. Soma knows never to knock, to glide her feet close to the floor. Her younger brother wavers around her like a shadow with translucent lungs, twin glass vases he carries carefully balanced on his palms, rests on the couch or reads in his room, on the evenings when he isn’t at his friend Lucan’s. When Lucan’s mother drops her brother off, she never makes eye contact with Soma. Once, about a year ago, or maybe a few months ago, she said to Soma, “What’s wrong with your mother?” Soma stared back at her, surprised that anybody had noticed anything out of the ordinary. She and her brother are the only ones who really know how things are.

  Then, one night, while the TV is droning on, the infomercial for the light machine comes on.

  A woman’s face fills the screen, shadows covering a cheek and eye.

  Are you feeling…

  Depressed?

  Hopeless?

  Like there’s no end in sight?

  The woman’s face rotates. There is bright blue light and she is swathed in it. The light source is revealed: a box, facing the woman with an irrepressible blue beam. The woman’s hair flickers white and yellow. Her face goes limp, wrinkles brushed off. The voice begins again.

  Soma watches the screen intently—her body has gone stiff, her dog ears a bit numb. It’s been raining, just raining, for weeks now. Her mother has hardly left the house. Yes—now she knows. Relief, a humming in the back of her head. That song they chanted in softball—rain, rain, go away, come back again another day.

  The voice recites:

  For when the weather lets you down.

  Seasonal affective disorder has a cure.

  Change your life today.

  The woman sits under a cloud, separated out by the light machine, inside a zone of radiance. She is weightless, articulated by light. Every hair, every line in her face, every polished aspect of her eyes. Soma closes her eyes, opens them. Her mother sits in the space made by light. Her mother turns and turns, never glancing at the camera.

  Soma’s mother was supposed to be taking a break from work, but it’s been months now. Nobody, not even Soma’s father who works all the time, most nights and weekends, brings this up anymore. There’s no point. Her mother will just get angry, want to know why they’re picking on her. Why does everyone always gang up on me?

  Twenty minutes later, the light-machine infomercial plays again and Soma copies the information down. It appears on the blue screen in flashing yellow print. 1-800-GET-

  LITE. Free delivery. Change your life today.

  Voices circle from the bottom of the stairwell. Soma moves in the group of girls down the stairs. Fingers compete for the phone receiver, hopping on its silver tongue. Shea, a girl in her class who wears overalls every day without being teased, holds up a slip of paper and recites it again and again for the fingers punching the buttons, a looped incantation of a 1-800 number. The group vibrates with giggles. From the periphery, Soma can’t tell who they’re calling—she watches their masks break into shock, seriousness, drawn mouths of something like pleasure, after ice cream or in strained sleep. Girls are a tide and Soma has no idea why she’s here, at the bleach-and-sweat-smelling bottom of this stairwell in a back corner of the elementary school. The group of girls moved around her and somehow she followed them here, out of the lunchroom, and they’re marshmallowed together in this underground corner. Every girl in her grade and the grade above is here. The older girls ho
ld the receiver and pass it around. Mostly laughter and gasps, followed by a squeal. When the receiver is thrust toward Soma, she takes a step back. The receiver: black curved body with two faces, whining perforation, coiled wire hanging, and the sound coming from the top half. Aren’t you going to listen? What’s wrong? The receiver is cold on Soma’s cheek. The sounds coming through are words, noises, not noises but words, extended strange breaths, a pile of sharp and soft sounds. When she opens her eyes, she sees the crowd of eyes mirroring her, appraising. She has no idea why she’s listening to this woman moaning and sighing on the other end of the line, making sounds nothing to do with words. A growl, a sourceless want. She stares at Shea’s face for clues to how to react. Where is this woman? In her home somewhere? In an office? Is she being held captive? She sounds pleased, and slow, and probably tired. Soma puts the receiver back to her ear and then it is grabbed away. A girl laughs at her.

  My turn my turn my turn. Arms circle Soma from behind and she is turned, pushed out of the way, and for a moment she moves above the group and she is weightless, lifted, and then on the ground again, close to the stairs. The phone receiver levitates between hands. More girls arrive, a crowd of younger girls. They are pushed back up against the steps, protesting. Get out, you’ll get us in trouble. Soma watches them go. A small girl with pale hair, dark eyes, looks back over her shoulder with longing and rage.

  On the map of the underwater city, Soma draws cigarettes with boots and arms marching in a long line across the floor of the ocean. People mutter to each other, cigarettes cigarettes cigarettes. She draws big, wide smiles on some of them, furious triangle eyebrows on others. Her father comes into her room, says he will be gone for a week on business. He leaves.

  In the place it has taken up in her mind, the light machine sits in the bottom corner inside its fence of orbital rays. Soma calls the 1-800 number she copied down from the infomercial to buy the light machine—the only thing that will help her mother, she knows. Ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, a voice recites. An unimaginable amount of money.

  She hangs up. Her mother will always be like this.

  The group of girls that comes to listen to the phone is always different, and so it’s easy for Soma to take up permanent, floating residence. Always changing, the group has no memory. There is a tiny clutch of regulars, and always Shea, whose father’s credit card is used for the calls. This isn’t a problem because Shea’s father is rich and never visits and rich people never look at their bills, Shea tells them breezily. They don’t gather every day because that would be too obvious—a couple times a week the word gets around and it’s always after school that they go, not lunchtime because there’s more of a chance that a teacher might hear and come exploring the source of voices. Mostly they’re quiet, passing the receiver around the huddle. The voice on the other end of the line does all the talking. All they have to do is say yes.

  “Do you like this?” the woman asks Soma, and she says yes, like she knows what she’s agreeing to. She has this feeling often, like she’s agreeing to a deal she never intended to make.

  It’s always a woman’s voice on the phone and at first Soma wonders why. Is there an option to choose between a male or female voice? Did Shea choose “female”? Shea is always the one who punches in the numbers and nobody asks her any questions.

  Now there’s a flood warning advisory out, and at school they are instructed in the basics—where to go to stock up on canned goods, to buy candles and lanterns and waterproof matches. Soma writes down everything the teacher says. She puts it in her pocket for safekeeping. There’s a loudspeaker announcement—if a state of emergency is announced, they will receive calls to stay home from school. Soma prays, no, because then she’ll have to stay home with her mother and her mother is getting quieter every day. Her dog ears are very strong now.

  The field outside the classroom is completely flooded. Like at the beaches in the summer, crowds of people arrive and launch off into the water. Laura watches them. In sleek scuba-diving suits, the bodies are fast as fishes. They swarm the waters, hundreds of them, bodies under the blank, massive sky, a constant cloud cover that absorbs the days and the spaces between them. Soma grew up here, in this city on the coast, so sometimes she feels like a seal, or some other kind of animal who knows how to breathe underwater. From her desk, she watches the people swim for hours.

  At home, she gives the list to her brother. He reads it, crumples it into a ball, throws it at her.

  “This is stupid.”

  “What?” she shouts at him. “We need that.”

  He tells her, scorn in his wavering voice, “Lucan’s mom told me if there’s a flood I can stay with them.”

  “No you can’t,” Soma shrieks. “You’re staying with me.”

  Her mother’s door slams open and there she is, marks on her face from her pillow and sheets, hair sideways. “What’s the yelling about?”

  Soma’s brother shrugs, drifts away, the way he always does—disappears into thin air.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Soma mumbles.

  Her mother scoops the list off the floor. She reads it over, a confused grimace. She laughs. “What’s this for? The flood? The flood that’s going to wash us all away?” She laughs. “If this city was going to go, it would go in an earthquake, not a flood.”

  Soma grabs for her list. Her mother moves it out of range of her small hand.

  “So what?” Soma yells. “That’s mine.” Soma’s brother is at the door. This is the thing to never do with their mother—try to take something away from her.

  “If there were a flood, you would go with your father and leave me alone here,” their mother says.

  Soma turns and follows her brother out of the room. He’s running. So she runs too. His bedroom is too small for the three of them. Her brother is so small, wriggling under his quilt in the far corner of his lower bunk bed, trying to climb the wall into the top bunk bed, pressed between the wooden beam and the wall. Soma can’t see him, just the movement and hard breathing of him, the quilt he’s trying to hold up around his body. He’s pressed against the wall, trying to fit through the narrow space. There’s her mother, lunging, big hands filling Soma’s vision. She’s grabbing at him, trying to drag the quilt off his body. Soma jumps in between. She is huge—taller than her mother and ferocious.

  “If you try to do that to him again, I’ll kill you,” she screams. “I’ll kill you.”

  Her mother is gone. Door hinge, snap. Her brother shaking under his quilt, a bell in an empty building, but no sound comes out of him. Soma pulls the quilt off him, touches his squirming back. She looks down at her hand. She’s still holding the list.

  She’s so good at her game now. She closes her eyes and opens them. Records the changes. She can predict almost everything. Which kid will shift impatiently in his seat, the arc of a yawn, a sloped arm travelling across a face. A few ants come out of a gap in the ceiling tiles and she traces their traffic down the wall, until they disappear. She closes her eyes, opens them. The room slips just a little forward. Not many people would notice the difference, but she does. When she opens her eyes, Shea is often watching. Her brother has been at Lucan’s all week, so maybe he told Lucan’s mom what happened with the list. But probably not—he’s such a baby. Her mother has mostly stayed in her room, and she ordered a pizza three nights in a row, brought home Wendy’s takeout in a huge paper bag, so things are better now.

  Soma closes her eyes, opens them. Being with people is just an experiment in watching.

  Every night in bed, Soma takes the map of the underwater city out of her pocket, unfolds it, smooths the crease that bisects the water world. The centre of the two folds places her mother in faint target crosshairs. Soma doodles a water-borne grocery store, full of stacked tomatoes in perfect, tight pyramids. She draws a tunnel from her mother to the grocery store. She fills the tunnel with tomatoes. She draws a couch in thei
r house. She draws herself, chubby with shoulder-length hair and giraffe eyelashes, wearing her raincoat and a mask for breathing like a soldier in a movie. Under the city there are huge tunnels.

  Two horses with long webbed tails sail past Soma’s bedroom window, lights strapped to their great heads, starlight dispersed by their manes spirals in long spokes in their wake. They head for the surface.

  Today, at the bottom of the stairwell, there is only Shea waiting.

  “Hi,” Soma says, toes touching down on concrete. Shea takes the receiver off the hook, holds it limp-wristed, casually.

  “Is it only you?” Shea says.

  Soma shrugs. “I guess. We gonna call?” Shea shrugs. Soma mimes Shea’s blank stare.

  “I mean, I guess. Sure.” Shea slips the credit card out of the zipped side pocket on her backpack and punches in the numbers while she listens to the instructions, a seemingly endless series of digits. Shea holds the phone receiver to her ear, then shrugs at Soma. “We might as well listen together,” she says.

  Soma moves forward, and Shea presses the volume button. Laughter bubbles out of both of them as a moan spills from the receiver, the woman throws herself onto the floor.