gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  Dickhead initiation successful.

  DETAILS

  Rainbolene is not Rain’s given name, in the usual sense. Rainbolene is the name she gave herself when she gave Winthrop all her butch clothes and started growing her bangs low over one eye. She dyes a bright strip through them, the color of a tropical fruit, and she smiles like she’s turning letters on Wheel of Fortune when she’s kicking someone’s ass.

  Rain knows all kinds of facts about how to be found “beautiful according to our current societal norms,” like how part of the reason Vanna White is so famous is that she has a weirdly giant head and people subconsciously find this attractive. And Rain knows how to use these facts. She can put on eyeliner better than anyone I’ve ever seen in real life, but she can’t legally grow tits until she’s old enough to get a prescription for them, for the hormone boost she needs. In Rosary, that age is never. But at eighteen, she can leave this city for Sky. Until then, there’s this. There’s us. Still life with Dickheads.

  MY SO-CAULED LIFE

  Having a witch for an aunt doesn’t exactly put you on the fast track for popularity at Rosary High. Whether or not she is actually doing anything illegal by the standards of the law or the Lord, Aunt Bev is seen as an outlaw here, at best. She’s the Devil herself at worst. Somewhere in the middle, she’s a weirdo, and guess what that makes me.

  Mom’s family was first-wave Rosary and Aunt Bev left as soon as Great-Grandma Helen was safely in the ground. There is some debate about who was disowned first, Grandpa and Grandma Hill or Aunt Bev, but I know for sure that she was never invited back, and as far as the elder Hills knew, no one ever spoke to her again.

  Aunt Bev made it to Sky, bought a used Toyota truck, and started driving it up and down the coast, picking fruit and telling fortunes on the beach, on the side of the road, at bars. Even though she left Mom behind, to go to high school, to fall in love, they never lost touch. Aunt Bev called her little sister from phone booths on the road and Mom answered when she could. They talked whenever Mom was alone, figuring out when this would be thanks to Aunt Bev’s psychic connection and via a sequence of intricate signals—hang-ups after so many rings to let Mom know when Aunt Bev would be calling. Coded responses from Mom, who would be sitting by the phone when it rang, to let Aunt Bev know their parents were now in the room. The sisters’ commitment to each other, always strong, was strengthened by these many repetitions of “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” and “No, thank you, we are not interested,” and like all bonds of forbidden love, it was built to last.

  When Mom was first sick, Aunt Bev returned to Rosary for good, much to every faithful Thumper’s dismay. She planted her crystal ball permanently then, taking over the shoppe and signing her name, Beverly Hill, on the business license right above the words FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. The Bible is clear on its position on soothsaying, but party tricks, apparently, are allowed.

  * * *

  “Truthsaying,” Aunt Bev insisted. I was seven years old. I felt forty. My mother was sick and my weird aunt who wanted me to look into the bottom of a teacup would never stop talking in riddles. “We did not come into this life to be soothed.”

  She put the cup in front of me. She managed to drink almost all of the tea that was in it without swallowing the few leaves at its bottom. “You just have to find the way that gets you through.”

  I didn’t understand her. Who could understand her?

  I took a deep breath. The tea smelled like jasmine. “Through to where? To God?” I was pretty sick of talking to Him, to God. Capitalized. Like a brand, a product. Another in the never-ending series of Rosary television commercials advertising salvation. And until my mom got better, I wasn’t buying it.

  Aunt Bev shook her head but gave no other answer. Just turned the cup counterclockwise, slowly, three times. The porcelain rubbed against the velvet of the tablecloth like Rudolph purring, and as it spun, the tea leaves swirled at the bottom. It was hard not to look at them, to watch them settle. When they did, when the last one finally slipped into place, my eyes danced for a second and jumped. They lost their usual focus, the sight that works in the world, gets you from point A to B without falling over, stops you from stabbing yourself in the face with your fork when you’re eating dinner. Then my eyes became as still as the leaves in the bottom of the cup, and those leaves were all I could see. But I didn’t actually see them at all.

  Aunt Bev said, “Tell me.”

  * * *

  That first time: a butterfly. It was almost perfectly made but for the tiniest tear out of one wing. I can see it even now, down to every scrap of jasmine making up its body, the straggling leaves pointing like antennae.

  Later, I saw other creatures too. A limping bird. A tailless lizard. And when all of them were injured somehow, wounded, I told her if all I am going to see is pain, I’d rather do my math homework.

  That afternoon, she pulled out the bank ledger. And I learned two crucial lessons: one, profit and loss are equally important. The other, never run your mouth around Aunt Bev.

  * * *

  “It’s a language,” she’d say, as she threw the I Ching and asked me what I saw. As she spread her tarot pack out like a fan and then pulled out cards for me to look at more closely. She talked to me about all of its currencies. Sticks. Coins. Swords. Cups. “But your own language.” And I didn’t see any wounded animals in them, but I didn’t see anything at all. The lines on Aunt Bev’s palm were only wrinkles. Her crystal ball, only glass.

  Finally, before Mom’s cancer got deadly serious about taking her away one piece at a time, I read tea leaves for Aunt Bev, for real. And then I never wanted to read them again.

  * * *

  “Why would you wear only half a bra?” I asked her, looking up from the teacup slowly. Returning to the room was like looking up from a book when someone is talking. Part of me was still holding my place in that cup.

  She’d been waiting for me, her own cup of tea read through, its message kept to herself, as usual. And I didn’t need a gift to see the color of her face change to a sick kind of yellow when I asked this question.

  She recovered, too late, said, “Tell, then ask.”

  Statements first, then the question. That’s the number one rule of fortune-telling. Even if I’m not sure what I’m seeing myself, the customer will be able to place it, or create a place for it, if I lead them well. This is the part where trust comes in. Trusting whatever you saw. It’s the hardest part to learn. The Rosary Bible Thumpers would be surprised how much faith is required to keep the shoppe’s supposedly godless heart beating.

  I used my best grown-up psychic voice then, thinking that maybe I’d finally done it. After all of these afternoons, I was on to something. I made the statements describing what I saw and asked the only question that is allowed. “There’s a clothesline, and hanging on it, a bra. Half of a bra. Does this mean something to you?”

  * * *

  This was before I thought about bras enough to even reject wearing them, before I knew that cancer could return and spread and how it, like just about everyone and everything else, loves breasts. And so I walked right into this ugly mortal truth with my otherworldly vision. Aunt Bev’s poker face slipped, the only time I ever saw it fail her, but I wouldn’t understand what I’d done, or seen, until a year later. After the first surgery.

  That day, Aunt Bev squeezed my hand across the table, and though her eyes were full, she focused on the work, as usual, and gave me a different kind of bad news.

  “Helen, the tea leaves are your guide. No mistake.”

  Not tarot cards with their pretty fairy tale of lovers and squires and horses, not a crystal ball sparkling with magic. Nope. Soggy old tea, wet with the spit and worry and wishes of some dumbass not brave enough to go out and make a future for themselves.

  Gross.

  HAND CANCEL

  Dad’s fortune has run out, but he wasn’t always like this. Like most dads, he was something else before, more like a man
. And I can’t put my finger on it. Not anymore. When we remember something, that’s a memory. But there’s no word for the thing we can’t recall. So there is no word for what Dad is now. Or there is.

  Dad is a forgot.

  Have you ever gotten in the car, backed out of the driveway, made it all the way to the stoplight, and only then realized you were still wearing your slippers? And went on to where you were going anyway? If you have, then you know what it is like to be my dad. At first, you can’t remember to change before you leave the house. Later, you realize no one cares if you do anyway.

  He’s pale and shuffling and quiet. I almost don’t know how he carries on. But then I do. God, of course, but also, the union. Unions aren’t favored here in Rosary, but until Rosary secedes, like some Thumpers wish it would, we’re stuck with at least one, because when Rosary got its own PO, the postal workers union came with it. Dad can never get fired from the post office, no matter what a terrible job he might do. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor death warming over will deter him from his appointed blah blah blah. Even right after Mom died, when he was too depressed to shower or shave, when he stank like sadness on a turd, they didn’t send him home. And I’d wash him up, help him strip down to his boxer shorts, striped blue like his uniform, swimming around his skinny legs. I’d put him in the shower, slide the door shut, and talk him through it.

  “Time to get cleaned up, Dad,” I’d say, perched on the toilet, rubbing the fuzzy seat cover’s yarn between my fingers, its yellows and oranges settling under me like an interior-decorating sunset. “Take off your boxers and toss them over.”

  And Dad’s response, “Unghhhh.”

  “Move around so you get wet everywhere, okay?”

  “Unghhgghg.”

  “Is your hair wet, Dad?”

  “Unnhnnh.”

  “Pour some shampoo into your hand now, the purple bottle, and rub it around in your hair until there are bubbles.”

  “Mmmmmph.”

  THE GOOD NEWS

  The treasure chest of porn that Winthrop’s dad hides so poorly in his bedroom closet contains actual books, not dirty magazines. The covers have all been torn off, so if there were some saucy images under the titles, those are gone too. Words only. Mr. Epsworthy is old-school. Besides, even if we could somehow get porn here, Mr. Epsworthy says the internet gives you cancer. I don’t know what kind of messed-up disease you can get from whacking it to dirty books, hand rot with a side of silverfish maybe, but he seems fine.

  Winthrop and I read through the entire collection before the end of our three-day suspension, taking turns reading to each other or teaming up and performing a scene together for Rainbolene’s benefit. I mean “performing” as in reading aloud like an old-time radio play. Winthrop and I are not actually performing the various ridiculous sex acts we read about. That would be weird.

  And somehow reading pornographic stories aloud together is not weird. That’s right.

  That is, if you can even call them stories. It’s mostly that there are these women who are falling all over themselves to bonk as many strangers as they can while they talk about it the whole time, the bonking. They’re always remarking on the bonking and the remarks fall into five main categories.

  Directional: “Right there in my pussy.”

  Observational: “My nipples are on fire.”

  Hyperbolic: “I love your monster cock.”

  Encouraging, in the manner of a stereotypical cheerleader: “Yeah, oh yeah.”

  The fifth category is only sounds, moans that the pornographic book’s author has tried hard to faithfully render: “Unhnnh.”

  Reading this dialogue out loud is a crucial friendship-building activity. We work hard at keeping a straight face while we do it and mix things up by employing British accents or singing the words out, or reading them like one of the poems assigned in Ms. Millen’s English classes with all the weird line breaks and no punctuation:

  right

  there in

  my pussy my nipples

  on fire I love

  your monster

  cock yeah oh

  yeah u

  nhnnh

  When there isn’t the riveting dialogue, all the characters sound like my dad did right after my mom died. Like he still does during the holidays or the weeks before Mom’s birthday. It turns out that depressed dads and people who are fucking so hard they’ve lost their minds sound exactly the same, like a keyboard attacked itself.

  POSTAGE DUE

  I know it’s weird to be in charge of your dad’s showers, of getting him from one task to the next, to be the sun that rises in his mornings and the crease in his uniform, the fine-edged blade of his razor scraping against his neck. I know there are programs for daughters like me. Even in Rosary. But to get to those programs, to even walk in the door, much less raise your hand and say your name, first you have to survive your childhood, and in most cases that means your parent has to survive it too.

  So you run the shower.

  You test that the water’s not too hot. You clip his gross toenails and no matter how many times you do this, needing the strength of both hands to close the clippers over their mess, or how often you tend to them, his toenails still make him look like he actually did crawl out of a grave. Maybe your mom’s. You wash his underwear and that means you see and you touch the stains there. One of adulthood’s little secrets. You grow up about five years in that first moment over the washing machine, your dad’s dirty shorts in your hand. Shit stains are how adults are made.

  You know the mole on his right shoulder intimately, monitor it for changes, can match it up with yours, in nearly the same spot, and you think about whether you should have yours removed, to get away from him and this sadness you might have inherited, or if you should get a tattoo around it, a temple to your connection on your skin. The waving inky lines of the USPS canceling the stamp of it so it can’t be reused. So it can’t be sent anywhere else ever again. Just like a body, stamps are designed for one trip only. The postmark city and the date in the circle beside it always the same, the day Mom left us and time stood still: April 11, 2013, Rosary CA.

  EPISTLE

  My mom. Breast cancer. At least that’s how it started. It isn’t a new story. It wasn’t a new story then either. I was nine. I wasn’t too young to know that she was going, but I was too young to see that Dad might slide away, was sliding away to join her and his precious Holy Father in Heaven, so that finally even the USPS suggested a medical leave of absence because he’d missed too many days just sitting in the dark at home while I was at school, then throwing frozen tater tots into the cold oven when he realized that I was home and that he had at least one mouth to feed.

  It was Aunt Bev who was paying attention and it was Aunt Bev who finally took over soon after the issue of Dad’s medical leave came up. One night, after Dad had gone to bed and I was brushing my teeth at the kitchen sink, so the light from the bathroom in the hall didn’t wake him—as if anything could wake him—Aunt Bev let herself in with her key, one that saw very little use. Despite sharing the same favorite person in the world, Aunt Bev and Dad are only a teenage girl’s arm-length away from all-out religious war. Which is to say, unless it is because of me, they don’t hang out a lot. So it was a surprise to see her walk in the door.

  She shushed me, the finger with the silver serpent ring against her lips. Then she pulled off her cowboy boots—she always wears cowboy boots—and padded around me in the kitchen until I finally moved out of her way and just watched. She filled a big metal pot, the biggest one we have. It used to hold a whole chicken in the time when Mom made soup every week, then the chicken stock that she would drink slowly, then slower, then not at all. Aunt Bev rinsed the dust out of it, filled it, put it on the stove to boil, and added a few drops of rose-scented water from her bag.

  She went down the hall.

  Dad wasn’t snoring but making that moaning sound like he does sometimes. I thought Aunt Bev was going to wake him or quiet hi
m, maybe soothe him, put her hand over his mouth, smother him. Instead, her hand went straight under the pillow and she pulled out a stack of letters I didn’t know was there. A handful of letters held together by extra-wide, extra-strength, USPS-grade rubber bands. Dad even reached for them, his nails scraped across the sheet as Aunt Bev moved away, but he didn’t wake up. He slept like the dead.

  Back in the kitchen, Aunt Bev turned off the light and the house went completely dark except for the blue flame of the stove curling up around the bottom of the big pot like it had been missed. She sat down on the linoleum and unwound a shawl from her neck, her lucky one. She would say her “blessed” one, and then tell you a story about climbing a mountain, starving herself for the length of a waning moon to get it—be given it—from a shepherd who lived there. It is dark green with red goats pasturing across it and she laid it on the floor that night and then unbundled Dad’s letters and unfolded each of them. Even in the gaslight I recognized my mom’s handwriting on the pages, the way she dotted the i in her name with a tiny flower, one single bloom sprouting up in the middle of Evie.

  And then Aunt Bev tore those letters into strips. The flowers too.

  She loves me. She loves me not.

  Letter by letter, a pile of word parts grew high on the fabric, on the linoleum, on the floor of this house that my mom and dad bought together the year before I was born, when the last of my grandparents died and they had only each other and a tiny inheritance to make it possible. I can still hear the sound they made, the strips of paper ripping. Like leaves fallen from trees. Like feet falling on snow. Like the past coming apart. Like letting go.