by Cole McCade
“Look, Ma, no hands!”
She laughed, then, and rolled into an acrobatic twist. Willow watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as she caught the bar and spun herself around and around with her legs flexed straight out and together, her feet arched and pointed like a ballet dancer’s, her muscular, graceful arms flexing to control her spin. She was all colors in a pinwheel, flashing by in a whorl of red hair and pale Irish skin and the pink flowered skirt and that dirty thing on fire. Willow didn’t want to see that, but Mama had said Watch! and Willow was a good girl who listened to what her parents said.
Mama spun herself into slowing, stopping, then looped herself around in snakelike, agile movements to hook her legs and hang upside down, swinging like a monkey with her arms dangling down to the ground. Her breasts fell out of her tank top, spilling upside down to brush against her chin, and Willow wondered if all grown-up women had those dots as large and red as strawberries poking out from the tips. The skirt fell down around Mama’s waist and left her naked and pale and bare with scarlet poppies blooming between her thighs, and she sighed, her pale, sea-green eyes glittering like the cut edges of broken glass.
“The world looks different from upside down,” Mama said, and smiled a strange smile. “It looked different from up there, too.”
Willow didn’t know what to say. The words didn’t make sense and she didn’t like seeing Mama like this, so she looked away, hugging Erin-the-Doll close to her chest in a way she would never hug Erin-the-Girl. Right now Erin-the-Doll was more comforting than Erin-the-Girl could ever be, because whenever she took Erin-the-Doll’s clothes off to change her outfit, the doll didn’t have big strawberry buttons and she had nothing between her sexless thighs, and Willow liked her that way when something about her mother seemed dangerous, sometimes. Dangerous and careless, and a little desperate and frightening.
“Do you want to learn how to do tricks like this, Willow?” Mama called. “I can teach you. You’re small, so balance wouldn’t be hard. It’s best to start training young.”
Willow said nothing, and buried her face in Erin-the-Doll’s hair.
“I was six when I started, you know,” Mama continued. “So you’d have a head start on me. Maybe one day you could run away and join the circus, too. Willow the Amazing Flying Girl! Just like your mother, sweetie. God, you look so much like me at your age. You’ll be beautiful when you grow up. The spitting image.”
She thought of the posters at her Uncle Wally’s, the pictures of her mother flying with her legs pointed like arrows, and wished she were at Wally’s right now, hiding in the ice caves. Ice dragons were afraid of fire dragons, because fire dragons could melt them all into a puddle.
But in the ice caves, she’d be safe from the flame that got brighter and brighter and redder and redder every time she looked.
“Willow? Darling, are you listening to me at all?”
She gulped and whispered, “Yes, Ma’am.”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, young la—”
The sound of an engine cut them off. For the rest of her life Willow would remember that it was the angriest sounding engine she’d ever heard, like it had swallowed something bad and was roaring at it to get out. That was the roar of a dragon, not an ice dragon or a fire dragon but a poison dragon, and when she opened her eyes the car that oozed up the road was the green of sour venom—and it was low and long with a wide grinning front and the shiniest silver tires she’d seen in her life, a crocodile making ripples in the river of asphalt.
Her mother flung herself down from the swingset with a girlish squeal of delight, sticking the landing and bouncing up on her bare feet. She liked to be barefoot, Willow had learned early on. Liked to be barefoot and run with her feet dirty from the pavement, and her soles were black as soot as she sprinted for the front gate, waving with one hand and tipping her breasts back into her shirt with the other. The car stopped at the curb, and the door opened. The oiliest man Willow had ever seen stepped out. He was so tall and the car was so low it was like watching a Daddy Long Legs creep, his knees bent nearly to his chest as he unfolded himself from the driver’s seat with the silver tips of his pointy boots shining in the sun.
He wore leather like he was going to the rodeo, and his jeans had tassels and patches, and his arms were covered in pictures, and his moustache curled and gleamed like Uncle Wally’s but looked greasy and unwashed. Mama spilled out the gate, and he caught her in those painted arms as she tumbled against him. Willow could only read a few of the words on his arms, but she could sound out some, and she thought the curling, pretty loop-de-loop letters inside their nest of lovely red roses and blue birds said Fuck Yo Mama.
Mr. Fuck Yo Mama corralled Mama’s waist in ropy hands with too much skin, and grinned. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey yourself,” Mama said, and flatted herself against him, making her breasts push up against her tank top in white swells like unbaked biscuits. That’s what they were, white doughy powdery unbaked biscuits. But she remembered once late night Daddy had stayed up to watch a movie, and the lady in the movie—the lady with the bulging eyes and rubbery face and warbling voice—had called them dirty pillows, dirty pillows, dirty pillows.
Mama and Mr. Fuck Yo Mama looked at each other like they had secrets they could say with their eyes, and didn’t say a word. Willow wasn’t even there, like they’d forgotten all about her because she didn’t exist in the tiny sliver of space between one body and the other.
Then Mama caught his face, drew him down, and kissed him.
She kissed him the way she kissed Daddy: long and slow and deep, the way that made Willow giggle and say ewwwww because Mama and Daddy kisses were full of cooties—but even though every time she looked down and covered her eyes, she was still all giddy inside because Mama and Daddy kisses were just right.
This kiss wasn’t just right. This kiss made her feel bad inside, sour, like looking at it let someone touch her in a bad way she didn’t like. When she looked down, she didn’t giggle. She didn’t do anything at all. She stared at Erin-the-Doll’s face, and tried not to listen to the wet slick sounds and that little mmm Mama made that sounded like she was rolling spoiled syrup on her tongue.
She hunched into her shoulders and waited for the sounds to stop. But she didn’t like the sounds that came after, either, like they had too much breath between them and they were too hot and full for their skins. Their voices, when they spoke, were things no one else was meant to hear. They were inside voices for conversations in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom when tiptoeing ears shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but Daddy wasn’t here and another man was standing on their lawn with Mama in his arms.
“Come out with me,” Mr. Fuck Yo Mama murmured. “Let’s make it a night. Go shoot some pool and smoke up.”
That wet slick sound again. “I’m supposed to be watching my daughter.”
“The munchkin? Bring her with. It’ll be fun.” His voice raised, then. Outside voice instead of inside voice, reaching for her like a grasping hand. “Hey. Hey, kid. You ever played pool before?”
She didn’t know what pool was, unless it was the wide shallow blue plastic pool Daddy put out in the summer and filled from the hose in the yard. She didn’t think that was what Mr. Fuck Yo Mama meant, but whatever pool was, she didn’t want to go. Not with him, not when Mama had turned into a fire dragon who made sticky noises, and not in that poison dragon car. She pinched her lips together and picked at Erin-the-Doll’s hair, and didn’t say a word.
“Kid. Hey, kid. I’m talking to you.”
“Don’t snap at her, you big stupid.” Mama talked like a pouty little girl, but it was still all sticky-fake.
“Sorry.”
Faint sound of skin on concrete. Then small toes poked into her vision, like little periwinkle shells on necklaces, with pink toenails and the edges of sidewalk dirt creeping up from the undersides like it was growing under the edges.
“Willow? Honey?”
Willow didn’t look u
p, and bit down hard on her tongue. Hard enough for her eyes to sting; hard enough for a sniffle to catch in her nose, but she wouldn’t talk even if she was being bad and breaking the rules. As long as she didn’t see it, didn’t see her Mama with her dirty thing showing every time her skirt shifted, her mouth wet and overripe from the leathery man’s kisses, it wasn’t real. Don’t look. That was the game.
Warmth encroached as her mother leaned closer, bent, craned until her hair fell into Willow’s face and her dirty pillows swayed in front of her nose. The neck of Mama’s shirt hung down, making a tunnel of cloth and skin. “Honey, do you want to come with us?”
No. No. She flinched back from that scarlet fall and the hem of the skirt right in her face and waiting to play peek-a-boo and open that red dragon mouth, and covered her ears with both hands. Her eyes slammed shut. Erin-the-Doll fell to the ground, bouncing over her feet, one molded plastic toe scratching over her skin. Mama said something, but Willow only shook her head sharply, squeezing her eyelids together and grinding her palms into her ears until her mother’s voice was nothing but a chattering like the noises the possums made in the back yard at night.
Mama was laughing, Willow could tell that. It was a laugh she didn’t like, thick and cloying and gurgling, and she never laughed that way around Daddy. That kind of laughter could touch someone, but Willow didn’t want the kind of touch made by a sound like that. Not at all.
That wordless noise turned sharper. Displeased. Mama was annoyed. Then louder, and Willow curled forward and pressed her forehead to her knees and thought I wish, I wish, I wish and wished more than anything for something to come and take Mama away. Wished Uncle Wally could come and make it happen, because Uncle Wally was magic and looked like he should be wearing a tuxedo and tall top hat and pulling rabbits out of thin air and making people disappear.
Make her disappear, Uncle. Make her go goodbye.
Uncle Wally didn’t appear. But Mama’s voice rose shriller, then pulled away. Her heat vanished. Mr. Fuck Yo Mama said something, something like a tuba’s womp-womp-womp, then Mama’s voice again.
Then the squeal-clang-crash of the gate opening and closing with a sound like shaking a box of nails, muffled kk-chuck of car doors…and then the poison dragon roared, so loud it hurt her ears even through the safe shield of her palms, louder and louder and then quieter and quieter.
And then gone.
She peeked one eye open. Erin-the-Doll stared back up at her from the walkway, but those periwinkle toes were gone. Mama had left, taking her syrup-voice and her dirty thing with her, and in the back of Willow’s mind pricked a memory that sometimes when Mama was gone, she was gone, and away so long it felt like forever.
Her hands fell. There was no coughing poison dragon sound. No slick sliding and popping. Only the sound of a few crows chattering as they lined up along the electrical lines. They always lined up that way, and she always looked up to watch them, and wondered what made them decide it was time to leave all at once in a big black cloud of wings tumbling like flecks of charred ash rising from a flame.
Behind her, the front door squealed open. A heavy, beloved tread made the porch boards groan. The porch didn’t creak so much, not back then, not when she was four and sitting outside and watching the time go by like summer was a river without end, its surface shimmering with the heat. But even before the crutches had become a permanent attachment, even when he could still stand and walk and work and drive and be, Daddy’s legs had always been heavy, his feet had always been stones, and each step shook up through her bottom and brought him closer to her.
“Come on, sweetheart. Come on.” His hands slid under her arms. Those hands had a dry warmth like the heat that came off the oven when dinner was cooking, and she leaned into his touch as he lifted her and settled her on his hip.
She snuggled into him and stuck her thumb into her mouth. She wasn’t supposed to anymore, but sometimes with Daddy it was okay to do things she wasn’t supposed to do until it made her feel better. Daddy was tall and safe; Daddy was smooth and sexless like Erin-the-Doll, and Daddy’s clothes never came off and made her feel funny and wrong, and she liked the way he always smelled like clean, fresh laundry.
He patted her back and bounced her gently in the soothing rhythm she loved. “You okay, sweetheart?”
She shook her head. “Mama left,” she mumbled around her thumb.
“I know. But she’ll be back.” His voice was gentle, but his face was strange; she didn’t understand his expression, when he looked over her head like he was looking all the way to the other side of the world. “She always comes back. She came back to us this time.”
Willow looked up at him, but he was still staring away, and she wondered what he could see. Maybe Daddy had super powers, and could see super-super far to where Mama was. But after a few moments his gaze cleared and he saw her, looking down at her with a faint smile.
“Come on.” He turned toward the door. “We’ll watch that show you like. The one with the ugly bears.”
“They’re not ugly!” she protested, taking her thumb out of her mouth, and he laughed.
“Everyone’s ugly to someone, baby.”
Oh. She fell silent to digest that as he carried her inside and tucked her into a corner of the couch with a juice box and her favorite shaggy, cuddly pillow. Was she ugly, then? Did people like mean Erin, Erin-the-Girl, think Willow was ugly?
Am I ugly? she wondered. Am I ugly to Mama?
Is that why Mama goes away?
Because I’m too ugly to love?
CHAPTER FIVE
WILLOW WOKE SLOWLY: LIKE SWIMMING, but the surface moved farther and farther away with every stroke, until she’d been struggling forever toward a light that was nothing but fragments through a rippling, crushing sea, compressing the air from her lungs. Her head was a madhouse of pressure and pounding, clanging pain, and her mouth tasted musty and sour; when she tried to reach for her pillows to hug them tight and burrow deep for another few minutes of sleep, that crushing sea tangled her arms in seaweed and pulled them back no matter how she strained away.
She dragged her eyes open. The lids didn’t want to move, the edges hot with that particular puffy soreness as if she’d been crying for hours, a painful pinching ache at the corners. Her neck hurt, and her vision was nothing but splotches of color in grays and shadows and the white of pink-tinted flesh that her brain instinctively recognized as me, that’s me, that color belongs to me and only me.
Her knees. Those are my knees. The thought seemed to belong to someone else; a dream-thought, belonging to the self she became when she fell asleep and looked at the simplest things with such wonder, and sometimes simply naming them was an act of magic in the floating surrealism of her dream world. She caught impressions of a wide open space, a space filled with concrete echoes and bitingly cold air and a scent like anise and old cars. Her head rolled to one side, and it came to her why her neck hurt: she was sitting upright, but her head had been hanging forward long enough that her neck was stiff and sore and locked into place. Her thighs hurt, too, and her butt, resting against a hard and unforgiving seat. The floor was cool and faintly gritty under her bare feet, and something rested between her legs, something she didn’t like that pressed close to her flesh where it shouldn’t be.
“Slowly, now.” A deep voice rolled over her, inflected with the flavors of another place, lending it richness and lushness. “I would expect you’re quite disoriented.”
She jerked. Her heart lurched; her stomach followed, threatening to climb up her throat and lodging somewhere in the middle of her chest with a gurgling sound. Reality crashed over her, and riding that tidal wave was memory: the house, the shadows, the silence, hard hands grasping her tight and muffling her screams, that chemical smell filling her nostrils. Her phone falling from her hand. The 911 operator calling for her, a lifeline already too far away to reach.
Breathe. Breathe in, breathe out. She tried, but all that came were hyperventilating, panicked w
heezes that weren’t giving her enough air and only scratched at her sore, dry throat. Her head was too light and too full at the same time, and her vision reeled as she lifted her head, looked around, took stock of herself and her surroundings.
She’d been tied to a chair. Wearing nothing but her tank top and panties, she’d been tied to a chair, with her wrists caught behind her and bound together behind the wooden chair’s back, her feet forced apart and tied to the chair’s legs. Another rope had been lashed across her chest, holding her upright and biting into her breasts, crushing them into sore, throbbing mounds against her chest. Another had been knotted to the rope perpendicular between her breasts, then the double ends pulled down, between her legs.
That was the one she’d felt waking up, the one she didn’t like, the one that made her ill that someone had put something there; sicker than even the residual effects of what must have been chloroform. When she shifted, the rope grated under her bottom; when she pulled on her wrists that rope pulled too, catching her short and stopping her from moving too far. The other end of the rope must have been threaded through the back of the chair, and knotted to her wrists.
With a hiss, she jerked on her arms, rocking the chair with little clack-clack-thuds of the feet against the plain, smooth concrete floor—but she froze when the rope pulled tight against her panties. No. No, she didn’t want that, and she pressed her knees toward each other as if she could push the sensation out; the rubbing, hot burst of friction ignited her sensitivity when she least wanted it, when she was on the verge of tears, on the verge of screaming with panicked confusion, her blood thin and hot as her pulse roared through her veins like the Corvus River during summer floods.