I say, Remember that time you told me sugar ants were sweet? And I ate some?
Lucas sniggers, his body loosening with the laugh.
You were such a dumb little kid, he says, smiling. Ma was so mad.
Our father had been madder, his expression grave at the sight of my swollen mouth. He’d kissed my forehead before pulling his leather belt from its loops in search of my brother. I don’t remind Lucas of this.
He says, Remember Abuela used to call us both pequeño chucho for years and we thought it was just a pet name, until the Mexican cousins told us it meant we weren’t pure? And you cried!
We both cried, I say. But then we pretended to be dogs that Easter. Howling and lifting our legs on the furniture. Remember everyone thought it was so funny except Abuela? Mamá said we hurt her feelings.
Remember. Remember. Remember. The black moccasin in the community pool. The P.E. teacher’s false eyebrows. Lena Crosby and her pink glitter thong. This part is easy, time breaking open to slurp us smoothly into the simpler past. Where Lucas and I had bitten and scratched and punched and kicked and tricked and teased each other and still we went to sleep side by side. Shelby listens, her presence gentle as a chicken’s egg.
Lucas is still laughing about the last thing we remembered when I say, Do you remember the year he put the presents on the roof? Because we forgot to leave the window open for Santa? We had no chimney and our father warned us that if we forgot, Santa would skip our house. Lucas goes quiet and I press him. Remember? We woke up and started crying because the tree was bare but then he climbed up on the roof and there they all were in a plastic sack? We believed in Santa that year. My brother says nothing.
Remember he used to sing to Mamá on the porch after dinner? And at bedtime he sang us to sleep?
He only sang when he was sorry.
No, because he loved us.
You and I remember things differently, Lucas says, and I’m offended that he thinks memory would work any other way.
But you remember “por la sangre,” I say, dangling the words before him like tainted bait. Lucas spikes his burger wrapper to the asphalt and an ugly part of me hopes he remembers how he failed, and that it haunts him.
What’s it mean? Shelby’s question darts between us, a startled neon fish.
Basically, blood is thicker than water, I tell her, but I’m still looking at Lucas, whose face is tilted to the stars.
Shelby scratches a scab on her ankle and her voice hitches an octave. There are speculations, she says, that that’s a misquote. That actually the phrase might be: The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, which would have the opposite connotation than how it’s commonly used. She says that in Arabic lore it gets even stranger. They say, Blood is thicker than milk.
But neither of us is listening to her. My brother is leaning away and I’m now on my feet. I can feel my eyes glittering, a tight fury around my body, black as that pool snake. I had wanted to spin him one more memory, something good that could ease this hurt—but my tongue feels bitten. I say the wrong thing.
Remember what he looked like in the hospital the last time you saw him? Lucas stands too and the night shrinks down until it traps us. We aren’t touching, but I can feel his body shaking and, like a bat, I use this to pinpoint my own location. I feel blurry and grateful—how much love it takes to hate this much.
I remember, Lucas says in a low, dangerous voice, and we broadcast the memory between us: our father attached to all those tubes and Lucas leaving, refusing to speak. Lucas, a perfect match. I run after him down the too-bright hall and grab his arm; I swing him toward me and his hand is balled into a fist. I clutch him. Please do this, I beg, please. It’s a scene, some bad TV-movie, but no one blinks an eye. This is normal here. People surge around us as if they are river and we are desperate stones. Please, I say. Por la sangre. And Lucas looks at me, and behind his quiet rage lurks an unmistakable pity. He asks me, After everything, how can you believe in that? and I have to barricade him from my life to keep from knowing the answer.
Come on, we’re all tired, Shelby says, and now she’s the one tugging my brother’s arm. Our moment breaks and I know tonight I won’t get what I wanted. Shelby collects our trash into a grease-stained bag and they turn to go. Our father taught me to swim, to play dominoes, how to pop the meat from a crab claw. Our father is waiting in my room.
What did he teach you? I call out after my brother and he actually stops. Lucas looks at me, says, How not to be a man.
In my room, listening to the soft sounds of them on the other side of the wall, I conjure the memory that would have saved us: Lucas and I small, before our parents cut his hair. We are snarls of black curls and big dark eyes. We are doppelgängers, genderless, whole. We wrap a sheet around our shoulders and climb into the kitchen cabinet, where we pretend we are unborn, and we have always been together.
In the morning, I take the first shift. Lucas slouches in the passenger seat with his hand over his eyes like he’s hungover and Shelby sits in the back with our father between her thighs. Finally, there is desert and the sky is a blue wonder against the barren mouth of the road. Our silence feels complete here. We stop for packaged pastries, weak coffee, some gas. We drive. We stop to pee or to pretend to, just for one moment alone. We drive. We say nothing. We almost burst from saying so much nothing.
We’re on the 40, just past Wildorado, when Shelby lurches forward between the seats, her finger an arrow at the glass. Look out! she cries. I jerk the wheel to the right and swerve hard around whatever is in the road. We bump onto the shoulder and something pops, the car lurching, breaks grinding, and we slide on the sand before we stop, dust feathering around us.
What the fuck! Lucas says the same time I do. I take the key from the ignition. We get out to check the damage.
Shelby says sadly, It was a coyote.
Lucas squats at the front right tire and even before I ask, I know that was the pop.
Jesus Christ, he says, his hands on top of his head.
Why didn’t you check this before we left? I ask him, my mind spinning to the orange light on the dash. He says, This had nothing to do with me. You hit something.
I cut a glance at Shelby. I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t trying to avoid hitting something already dead in the road.
Shelby says, I’m sorry! at the same time Lucas growls, Don’t get started on her.
Fine, whatever, I say. Let’s put on the spare and get out of here. Already the sun is baking us, wanting to strip us to our basest selves. There’s sweat in my hairline and on my upper lip. Today I am not beautiful.
I don’t have a spare, Lucas mutters.
What? Who travels without a spare! I yell, and now we’re squaring up, face-to-face and close to touching. Almost.
I’m just doing this for Ma. I didn’t want to be out here in the first place! he tells me.
If it weren’t for you, maybe we wouldn’t have to be.
This spawns the kind of quiet that gathers lightning. Lucas leans in even closer and whispers, Not all of us pretend to forget. Just because you can’t face what he did, what you let him do to you—
I strike his face, and when I do it, I mean it. The sting of the blow warms my palm and spreads, jubilant, through my body. This physical connection, however violent, is what I’ve been waiting for. What I’ve missed.
Shelby pushes between us, as if to protect us from each other, but when she stands facing me, her arms outstretched, I understand exactly what she’s standing between and where her lines are drawn. Y’all cool off, she commands, all her wispiness evaporated. My brother and I are winded, both shocked, and I know my contact translates differently in our separate skin. Lucas swats the air.
Forget this shit. You wanna go to Santa Fe? I’ll drop you at the bus station.
Shelby tells him to stop it. She checks her cell phone, then hi
s. No service, she says. She takes deep, yogic breaths. If she suggests I do this too, I know I’ll lose it, but instead she says she and Lucas will walk back to Wildorado. We’re not too far past. She tells me to stay with the car. Lucas and I neither agree nor disagree, but I fling open the car door and stretch sullenly across the backseat. Shelby digs through the glove box and tosses something into my lap. A switchblade. She says, Just in case, and they go.
Hot and exhausted, I stare at the sagging roof, blinking back despair, and now I’m with our father, the lions rutting in the tawny grass. The lights are off in the bedroom, so the creatures blaze. I am six and the dark is a jaw around me. In the shadows, our father transforms. He’s only Arlo, and his close, adult musk overwhelms me. They’re having sex, Arlo tells me, his hand a dry heat on my belly, and when he says it, something I don’t have language for enfolds me like a womb. His hand is still and conscious, with its own heartbeat, and I’m a good daughter—loving him and afraid. I am as still as his hand, but the dark swallows me all the same.
I claw up and out of this memory, back into the car where, at least, there’s light and Arlo is only ash. Only father.
I know Lucas is bluffing. That Shelby will talk him down. They’ll come back with the tire and we’ll go on. We’ll honor our parents’ wishes. But I imagine myself rising, exiting the car and opening the urn, the small puff of dust like a constricted cough. I imagine fishing through the fine silt of our father, snatching a hunk of bone and laying it on my tongue, the muscle flinching at his grit, and while he’s still between my teeth, tipping the urn and letting him go to roam this lonesome road with the other restless things.
I shift against the backseat, skin sticking to the vinyl, careful not to upset the urn. My shirt is damp under the arms now, two dark patches growing like eyes and I can smell myself. Root vegetable. Earth. A murkiness. I try to sink down into the depths of my own scent, try to linger, to like it. But it’s too intimate and I’m an animal of habit. I jolt up, scrabbling for fast-food napkins in the center console so I can blot away the stink. Out the window, Shelby and Lucas are specks converging on the horizon, at that particular distance where it’s hard to tell if someone is walking toward you or away.
Exotics
Among themselves, the members called it the Supper Club; to us it was only our J-O-B, and no one, not them or us, spoke of it outside the building’s walls. Concealed in the center of the city in a plain, tan-brick building that could have been the dentist’s or the tax attorney’s office, the club was exclusive in the way that too much money made things. We couldn’t have joined—not that we wanted to, we often said. Even if our fathers had handed us riches from their fathers and their grandfathers before them, made off of the lives and deaths of black and brown bodies, none of us would want to be complicit in such terrible opulence; we only swept up the place.
We took the jobs. Of course we took the jobs. We were citizens with citizens’ needs: food and housing and medical care. Our children wanted and we desired they be allowed their want, that they sometimes have it satisfied. We didn’t ask for much, much less than the members themselves, only that we might afford to be human, and in this way, the pay, cash in hand, was hard to beat.
Once a month, the members gathered in the night, wearing elaborate half-face masks in the likenesses of pigs and dogs and cats that hid their eyes but left their mouths free. While we poured tart cherry mead, fetched fresh cloth napkins, procured new spoons for ones that had fallen, we observed them: a walrus tipping back raw oysters; a big-eyed cow knifing marmalade onto toast; a peacock shimmering in a gold dress, sloshing pink champagne onto the floor. We cleaned it up. We swept crumbs from the linen. We cleared plates between courses and some of us might have drawn our fingers through ribbons of decorative sauce or nudged unbitten nibbles into the palms of our hands. If we caught one another doing so, we pretended that we hadn’t. At every dinner, our faces were bare; the members wanted to know us, though they pretended we had no power. We didn’t know that we did. They conversed around us as if speaking through air, and we came to know most intimately what they thought about the world. One night, over fugu ceviche, a jackal said: The Revolution was never about freedom. We just wanted more kings.
They were the kings, so they laughed.
The Supper Club specialized in exotic meats—the dining table raised on a platform, the eating itself the art. The members devoured main courses of stuffed gator over dirty rice, emu in raspberry sauce, anaconda slivered into hearty stew, and slabs of roasted lion they joked came direct from Pride Rock. They declared ortolan passé, though once we witnessed the tiny bodies disappear beneath the further shroud of napkins, and through their wet smacking, heard the crunch of delicate skulls. They were jeweled animals eating lesser animals, and to each other, with our eyes, we communicated our disgust. We did not prepare the food or choose it. Of course, we served them; we did only our jobs. We fed our children and kept the roofs above their heads. We watched the members gorge themselves in January, February, March and April and May. We collected our unmarked envelopes as they licked extravagant gravy from their fingers.
In November, the members cried, Next month must be the rarest! Bigger, better! We deserve! Their mouths always watering for the next meal before they’d finished the last. A panda draped her arm across the gilded chair of a buffalo, her husband, and said, For Christmas let’s have something truly special. Maybe the last of something, and us the only ones to taste.
On the night of the last supper, while we set the table with crystal stemware and festooned mistletoe above the archways, we heard the sleepy cries from the kitchen, the shh-shhshing of the chefs. We heard the lullabies, ones that had been sung to us and that we now sang, the melodies cleaving down to our bones. We were angry! Of course we were. We didn’t want this. We didn’t condone it—but what could we do? We brought the dishes to the table to gasps of nearly erotic anticipation and stepped back and dropped our eyes. If we didn’t look, we could still pretend. Their silverware filled the room with music.
My God, we heard a canary say quietly to a sheep, her hands at her mouth. We knew, if they could, they’d eat Him, too.
And afterward, once the floors were clean, the table stripped, the dishes washed and the cutlery polished, once it seemed that the club had never been, we stood in line for our money. As a bonus, a nod to the year of our dedicated service, each of us was given a white bag as we left by the back door. Merry Christmas, the chefs said. Bon appétit. We took the bags; we tucked them under our coats. None of us spoke. What could we say? In the parking lot, stepping into our used cars, avoiding each other’s eyes, we shrugged. We excused ourselves. Anyway, we might have thought, haven’t we always eaten the young?
An Almanac of Bones
Kit showed me the Polaroids on the bus after school. They were taken in the woods behind her grandfather’s farm—tree roots thick as branches disappearing into black dirt, everything dappled in moss; pine needles on the ground; the kind of evening light hobbyists thrilled to paint. The skull was half-buried in leaves and a Kit-sized shadow crossed into the edges of the frame. In another photo, she’d uncovered it, and her hand rested on its top. In the pictures, her nails were tangerine, the now-chipped polish glossy and intact. The bus bumped along, knocking us gently together.
Across the aisle, two eighth graders were kissing, slouched down so the bus driver couldn’t see. The boy’s hands were out of sight, most likely on the small of her back, tracing the pinkish skin underneath her shirt. I imagined thought bubbles above their heads. His read: I am so cool and hers: I hope this looks cool. I watched them like I wasn’t watching them, like Kit pretended not to watch them, and counted to twenty-seven before they took a break.
“Sylvie, what kind of animal is this?” Kit asked when they were through, as if she were only waiting for me to speak.
I examined the skull. There was no lower jaw and half of the right eye socket was missing. The teeth w
ere impressively jagged, some broken, and the head torpedo-shaped. This always delighted me, how extraordinary things could look outside their flesh—it could have been a Martian or a baby raptor head. I told Kit I needed more data.
“Come back to my house,” I said, and at my stop we both got off.
It was a dry autumn day, the sky high and clear. The path to my house was a long dirt trail surrounded by a field of grass and what passed for hills in Florida. Sometimes I rolled down those hills with my arms stiff at my sides, as if I were an unstoppable wheel going bigger places than here.
We went inside and left our backpacks in the foyer, stretched our shoulders and shrugged the school day off—the algebra question we got wrong in front of everyone, the pizza sauce we dripped on our white shirts, the way the boys were kissing all our classmates, but not us. My grandmother waited in the kitchen.
“Sylvie,” she called, and Kit and I went in and sat at the island where she fed us tuna sandwiches and tall glasses of Florida-style SunnyD. I loved that about my grandmother, that she was never thrown. I brought home a friend and she didn’t bat an eye, made an extra sandwich as if she were planning to anyway. That’s how I imagined she got me—that my mother dropped me off and my grandmother just shrugged and raised me as if, all along, she had wanted a second child.
My grandmother was still beautiful, even with what she called her marionette lines and the permanent crinkles at the corners of her eyes. She said gratitude kept her young. She wasn’t particularly tall, but the way she carried herself, you’d think she was at least ten feet. No one could look down on my grandmother. She had warm hands, a thoughtful face, and long silver hair she wore in a braid down her back. I hoped I would be like that someday: my hair over my shoulder, posture immaculate, fixing sandwiches in my own home in a man’s Hawaiian shirt.
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