by Carrot Quinn
I place each ornament carefully and then sit and lean in, until I feel as though I am inside a secret world. Here is a dense forest full of stars. I can smell the earth and the clear, cold night. I stand the girl with the songbook in the crook of a twig, where she can see the wooden horse with the red body and the white feet. She’s lost her horse, and she is injured. She calls to the horse. She is fleeing the nutcracker, who hides nearby, watching. The strings of beads are walkways that help the figures move from branch to branch. The girl and her horse need to use these walkways to get to the top of the tree, where the angel holds her magic light. The girl moves cautiously toward the horse. The horse has seen the foil star and is spooked. The foil star is a portal to the dark world, from whence the nutcracker has come. The girl calls again to the horse. She steps on a twig, but the twig can’t hold her weight and she tumbles out of the tree, falling thousands of feet to her death.
* * *
—
There are two boxes in our entryway when I come home from school the next day—one from the mailman and a larger one from the food bank. The food bank box has Stove Top stuffing, canned cranberry sauce, canned pumpkin, and a huge frozen turkey. I look at the instructions on the box of stuffing—we don’t have margarine, but maybe it will still be good boiled plain. The cranberry sauce and pumpkin can be eaten as is, and the turkey just needs to be put in the oven for a long time. I open the box of stuffing and crunch a piece. It’s actually pretty good dry. Like croutons, but more herby. The other box is from our grandparents in Colorado. Their yearly Christmas package is the only time we hear from them. I wonder if there was a time when they tried harder to know us, and if Barbara made it so difficult that they eventually gave up. Or maybe they are awful people, just like Barbara says, and we are better off not knowing them. Like all the stories Barbara tells us, I’m not sure what is real. I know what’s inside the box from our grandparents without opening it: a kitten calendar for me, a remote-control car for Jordan, and a package of socks for each of us. I am most excited about the socks. I open the box and hold the calendar to my face, smelling the plastic wrapping. We visited my grandparents for a time when I was small, and I conjure the memory of their house: smooth wooden floors, a Formica table, the yellow cookie jar on top of the fridge. A box of Cheerios and a white sugar bowl. My grandmother with her hair the color of steel wool, wiping my face and cleaning the dirt from under my nails. That was years ago, though. Today, Colorado feels about as close as the moon.
There’s a knock on the door to our apartment. I startle and drop the calendar, which tips over the stuffing. Outside, I find a third box, addressed to Jordan and me. Excited, I search with my fingernails for the ends of the tape. Inside are six wrapped gifts—three for me and three for Jordan. From “Santa.” Christmas isn’t for a few more days, but I don’t care. I open my packages, the smell of the torn wrapping paper flooding me with feelings. A new pair of jeans. An Alanis Morissette CD. And, incredibly, a Discman.
“Yes!” I shout in the still apartment. There are even batteries for the Discman! I put the headphones over my ears and scoot to the Christmas tree with the box of stuffing. I press play and lean into the tree until I am gone again, in the forest with the lights.
And all I really want is some patience
A way to calm the angry voice
And all I really want is deliverance, ah…
* * *
—
Later that winter I am sitting next to the vending machine in the hallway of my junior high school, practicing calligraphy in my notebook, when I see her. She is pale, with freckled skin and a jet-black bob. She wears a velour dress with a lace-up bodice. She smiles at me as she punches in the number for Skittles and I watch the metal spiral rotate, dropping the bright candy into the hollows of the machine. I often fantasize about an earthquake that upends all the rows of candy, freeing them.
“I see you in calligraphy class,” she says. “My name’s Laura.”
“Do you want to practice together?” I ask. I show her the page I’m working on. She slides down to the linoleum next to me. She tears the corner off the packet of Skittles and offers me a handful. She has a spiral notebook with a velvet cover that matches her dress and a pencil case of calligraphy pens.
“You’re weird, you know,” she says to me.
“Yeah,” I say. I start laughing, and then she’s laughing too. The laughter transforms her. Her face lights up, her spirit escaping via the gap between her two front teeth. It seems as though she can’t stop laughing. Neither can I, and then we’re both sprawled on the cool linoleum, gasping for breath. A few kids enter the hall, heading for the vending machine, but stop when they see us and reverse course. This makes us laugh even harder. I feel as though demons are being exorcised from my body. As though I am turning inside out, but in a good way.
* * *
—
“All clear,” I whisper to Laura. We’re in the Occult section of Barnes & Noble and I am posted at the end of the aisle, watching the people in the store. Laura opens her corduroy shoulder bag and stuffs in the titles we’ve selected together: Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner; Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft; and Candle Magick. I feel like I am floating as we move, together, through the store exits, and in the parking lot euphoria almost lifts me off my feet.
So far in my life, I’d had access to library books and occasionally a seventy-five-cent paperback from the bookstore near my apartment. Now, I hold these stolen books to my face, smelling them, overcome with pleasure at their newness. So what if I don’t have money to buy things? Money is, apparently, not the only way to get what I need.
Later we’re sitting in the woods behind our school, in the warm light of afternoon. Laura pulls a citronella candle and a few jars of culinary spices from her bag and places them on the wet late-winter snow.
“Hopefully my mom won’t notice I took these,” she says.
“Here’s a good spell,” I say, smoothing a page in Candle Magick. “It says we should cleanse the space first.”
“We need smoke,” says Laura. She produces a tiny wooden box, from which she pinches a cone of incense. She holds a lighter to its tip until a red ember begins to smoke. “We should walk in a circle in the clearing. Counterclockwise. While asking for a blessing from the goddess.”
“Can we do Isis this time?” I ask. I’d just discovered the goddess Isis. She’s been around since ancient Egypt. Born of the earth and the sky, she listens to the prayers of both slaves and the most wealthy. She gave birth to the sun god, Horus. According to the library books I checked out, when Christianity was trying to assimilate paganism, they turned the mother and child images of Isis and her son Horus into images of Mary with baby Jesus, and images of Isis with the body of her dead husband on her lap were transformed into the crucified Jesus, lying across the lap of Mary.
The forest observes us silently as we walk around the candle. I imagine Isis, drifting like incense smoke among the bare winter trees. Keeping us safe.
The candle flame shakes in the breeze. I cup my hand around it.
“We close our eyes to make the spell,” I say. “We don’t have to say it aloud.”
“I’m gonna think about Jeremy,” says Laura. Jeremy is in eighth grade. He has greasy bleached hair and wears ball chain necklaces. He carries his skateboard with him to school and smokes cigarettes behind the gym. “Do you think I can get him to like me?”
I giggle, and then stop myself. “This is serious!” I say to Laura.
“I know,” she whispers, moving her fingers through the candle flame. “I am serious.”
I close my eyes. The world behind my eyelids is full of shapes, movement, flashes of light. What is the real world, and what is the world of the imagination? I picture my mother, alone in our apartment. Crouched on the floor of her bedroom, chain-smoking. Lost in the stories of her mind. What’s happeni
ng in her mind is more real than eating, or sleeping, or any other functions of her physical body. More real than day and night and the passage of time. More real than me and Jordan.
Protect Barbara, I think. Isis is in the boughs of the spruce trees, under the sky that’s waiting to rain. Isis is watching me. Protect her. Keep her safe. Please.
* * *
—
I’m changing for gym in the girls’ locker room when I hear the laughing. I’m wearing the same gray sweatshirt I always wear and have just taken off my jeans. My changing spot is as far from the other girls as possible, an empty bench at the very end of the lockers, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no real privacy here. I look up, embarrassed, and the girls turn away. They’re laughing at me because I’m not wearing any underwear. It’s not that I don’t own underwear, it’s just that I don’t have any laundry detergent, and there isn’t any money to buy some. Isn’t it better to wear no underwear than the underwear I’d already worn for a week? I don’t say this to the other girls, though, don’t tell them that my family can’t even afford soap. That we also don’t have towels, and that my shoes are too small. That our kitchen counters are cluttered with greasy Burger King bags and the trash can overflows onto the floor.
My head hot with shame, I fold my jeans carefully and hurriedly pull on my gym shorts.
That day after school I sit on the front steps waiting for Laura with my hands stuffed deep in my coat pockets and think about how badly I wish that someone would take me away. I want to be rescued. Protected. Fed regular meals. Where the fuck is my father? Why hasn’t he shown up yet? Maybe he hasn’t been in prison, like I imagined. Maybe he really is dead. It’s breakup, that messy season between winter and spring, and the snow along the road is black and littered with trash. Winter is tired, worn out. Ready to be subsumed in the riot of spring. Laura and I have plans to ride the city bus together to the west side of town, where we’ll hang out in a burger joint “doing our homework” until her mom gets off work and can pick her up. Laura will eat french fries and I’ll fill a paper cup with free pickles from the condiment bar. After Laura’s mom picks her up, I’ll ride the city bus home. The thought of home turns my stomach. I don’t want to hear the eerie laughter coming from Barbara’s room, the way it echoes in the dark apartment. Laura knows nothing about my home life. She notices how hungry I am, how bad I smell, but she doesn’t ask, and I don’t offer. It’s better this way. If she knew the truth, she wouldn’t want to be friends with me. I don’t deserve friends. I am trash. Nobody has ever wanted me. Not even my father, wherever he is.
Laura rushes out of the double doors of the school, breathless.
“Kurt Cobain is dead,” she says, sitting beside me on the icy steps. “He killed himself.” She’s rifling through her bag.
“No way,” I say.
“Come on.” She grabs my hand. “We have to do something.”
There’s a bare patch of earth in front of the school, warm in the weak April sunlight, and we arrange our candles there.
“We’re going to contact his spirit,” says Laura. “To help his passing.” We make a pentacle out of black Fimo clay baked to hardness in the oven, and Laura pulls this from her bag and places it in the center of the candles. She cups her hand against the wind and lights each candle. Her broomstick skirt pools around her, and her shiny black Mary Janes are tucked neatly under her body. I wonder where she got the money for her clothes. From her mom? I often wander the clothing stores in the mall, touching things, memorizing prices. There’s a pair of black corduroy overalls that I want. How hard would they be to shoplift?
“Close your eyes,” says Laura. I hold her warm hand in mine and do as I am told. “Our beloved Kurt Cobain. We bring you gifts from the realm of the living, into the world of the dead. Speak with us.”
The ground is damp, but the air that moves across my face is warm. Laura’s palm is soft against mine. I move my fingers over hers, feeling each one.
“I don’t think he’s here,” I whisper.
“Shh,” says Laura. “I feel something.” I open one eye. Her brow is furrowed, her mouth turned down. She’s wearing copper-colored lipstick. Wet n Wild. I was with her when she bought that one. “He’s sad.” Laura looks as though she might cry. “He was sad. That’s why he shot himself. He didn’t want to be sad anymore.”
“Kurt Cobain, you can be at peace now,” I say. The candles are dancing. They flicker and go out. I gasp.
“He’s here!” I say.
Laura opens her eyes and we sit staring at the dead candles. I dip my finger into the wax and watch it harden on my skin. Clouds race over us. The air smells like wet earth.
2005
“Does anyone want to go dumpstering later tonight?” I ask. I’m standing next to a fire in my friend’s backyard. Someone I’ve never met before raises her hand. The light from the fire flickers on her face. She’s wearing paint-stained Carhartts and a puffy vest. She’s small, and her hair is cut short. She looks like a twelve-year-old boy. She tells me that her name is Finch.
After meeting my father, I returned to Portland, where I began to regularly harass him with emails. What is my extended family like? What parts of the country do they live in? Do they want to be friends with me? Could I meet them? I imagined them as writers, thinkers, creatives; interesting people who lived in historic houses in old cities and grew gardens full of dahlias. My father replied to my emails with short, cheery messages, but never answered any of my questions. Why won’t you answer my questions? I finally asked him.
My family doesn’t want to know you, he said. You need to learn to let the past be past.
I was enraged. His family? It was my family too. Right? Or maybe it wasn’t. Was family something I was entitled to? Did my grandmother on his side, who I had never met, really have no interest in knowing me?
I stopped emailing my father. His cheery messages were a façade. He was afraid of me, thought I was someone horrible come to wreck his life. He didn’t want a kid.
I felt lost and confused. My father—and, by extension, my entire family on that side—was a fantasy I’d constructed with nothing but my own hopes and dreams, longings, hot air, and ghosts. That side of the family was a helium balloon I’d lost hold of at a birthday party and now it was floating away, up toward the clouds. The balloon was a speck against the blue of the sky, glinting in the light. I had to squint to see it. Then the balloon was gone.
No one was out there, waiting to claim me as their own. No one was curious about me. No one wanted to know me.
My heart became the Grand Canyon. My heart was massive, yet contained nothing. The winds blew through it. Buzzards perched on the rim, waiting to feast on animals that had fallen to their deaths. Snow fell, muting the landscape. My heart was the loneliest place in the world.
I knew that if I allowed myself to feel these things completely, I would become untethered to the earth and sink into the blackness, where I would be lost forever. So I decided I wouldn’t feel. Joe became another thing I couldn’t feel, so I broke up with him.
* * *
—
Cold drizzle falls in the black street, but the inside of the Trader Joe’s flower dumpster is warm and we pull armloads of bouquets, wrapped in paper, from under our feet and drop them into a milk crate on the ground. We strap the milk crate to my bike rack with an old inner tube and ride through the empty intersections, rain needling our faces. Finch lives in an old house with a wide porch, and the wooden steps are slick with mildew.
We drop the milk crate on the floor of her bedroom. The only items in the room are a futon pushed up against the wall, a handful of photos on the windowsill, and a small stack of books. Tall windows overlook the overgrown yard. “My housemates are never home,” says Finch. She opens a Pabst Blue Ribbon and sits on the bed. The can gleams in the light from the streetlamps. I sit on the bed too. I’m wet from the ra
in but warm from riding, and my face feels flushed.
“You don’t own a pillow?” I ask.
“Nah,” says Finch. She picks a wilted paperback up off of the floor. “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” she says. “Have you read this?” I shake my head and she begins to read aloud, about the hundreds of bones in the mandible of a caterpillar. I lie back on the bed and let the dense prose work its way through my body. The natural world, the incredible unknowable ever-present machinations of the natural world. The wonder and the magic.
I pull off my shoes and wrap myself in the comforter on the bed. Finch stops reading and lies down next to me and I feel the warmth of her body, smell the damp scent of her hair. The comforter is just big enough for the two of us, as long as my arms are around her. Outside, the rain is ceaseless.
* * *
—
I don’t hear from Finch for three days and then she leaves a message on the landline at the house where I’m staying.
“I just got back from riding to the coast,” she says when I meet her on her front porch in the morning. “It took all night. I didn’t sleep.” It’s springtime, and warm yellow light pools on the grass. Finch opens a beer. “Do you like Patti Smith?” she asks. She puts a CD in the stereo in the hall.