LOCAL GIRL by Jenny Hanning

From the roadside, crouched low, half hidden by grass gone fallow, she watches the car’s progress. She watches as it slows – and – yes, sails past the turn, a slot hollowed from the larger darkness, and so easy, really, to miss. As the taillights fade, she allows her body to loosen. Small movements – the opening of her hands, her straight spine released from rigidity – but they start a shiver through the grass, and a new hatch of mayflies is disturbed. All around her they rise and drift in a thin, green fog. Then, through the trees there is the distant red splash of brake lights, and as the car swings a U, doubling back, the murky arc of headlights coming toward her again.

At her back is a possibility of escape – a field in full weedy bloom, yellow yarrow and thorny milk thistle bleeding to the black edge of a pinewood. She could disappear there. Become lost in the wet, dark density of overgrowth and deadfall. She shifts. In the pines a rain owl begins to call – whoo, who cooks for you – whoo, who cooks for you – and the thought: disappear – leaves her, even as it comes.

She stays as she is, at the roadside, with the signs and wonders of the tamer world. In front of her is a dirt two track. Across it, a man-made stand of birches evenly spaced in rows. Against the loose nap of night the trees have become slim skeletons holding poses of surrender. On their far side – she knows – hidden in the dark, just beyond the strength of her sight, is a still-water pond and a trailer raised on concrete blocks.

Insects – everywhere. She sweeps a hand across her face. The air is alive. Insects everywhere – doubled-up, quadruple winged, hinged together at their abdomens. Mayflies move with the cut of her hand. Divide and re-collect. Divide and re-collect. Briefly, something buzzing tangles in her hair – a sharp picking of wire legs across her scalp – then tumbles free. The car finds the turn. Her hand drops. The whole of her body devotes itself to watching.

Sentinels, the headlights lead. In winter, in the cold, their light would hang in perfect silver circles. In the hot, damp air their beams are shapeless. Their color shifts: pink to gray to a diaphanous ghost-white.

And – what’s this? She looks down. A fly? Yes. A fly, struggling, stuck to the back of her hand, trapped by the dampness of her body’s heat. She watches it fold and unfold translucent wings. The long whip of its tail, narrow as a hair, drags across the ridge of her knuckles. She sees the straining movement, but cannot feel a thing. One scrape of her palm and the mayfly’s body is a tiny, wet ball. Another, and it becomes a streak of iridescence. She turns her hand to see if the color will change with the angle. But there’s only faint shine, like the left-behinds of eyeshadow after washing with soap and water.

The car. Headlights dip below the pine tops. For a moment their beam is splintered and sharp, then they disappear completely. Now – she hears it – the turn from tar to dirt, gravel singing off the fenders. Closer, and the roadway tightens. Low branches drag over metal.

More than a minute, but not two, and the car will pull alongside her. She shifts the pack at her feet to her shoulders. The load settles. She stands. There is a thing her mother would say: There’s nothing to do for it now. The car will come. She will go with it. To herself, she says, “There’s nothing to do for it now,” and steps out from the grass into the roadway.

Upright, she smoothes the skirt of her dress, and straightens to a pose fully human. Here: a girl fit for inspection.

Ahead of her, light spills between the tree trunks. Particles of suspended water – humid tonight; her hair curls against her neck – fall into the headlights’ path and are lit. A moving puddle of radiance. This is what people alone in the dark mistake for ghosts. How sad.

In the pinewoods a dog begins to bark. Another answers, fainter, farther off. They call back and forth. A third joins – close. The fine hairs on her body prickle. In the space between one bark echoing out and another overlapping, she can hear the nearest dog. There – just through the birches, up on its feet now, pacing on a chain.

       She lay for a moment, listening: her own breathing, early birdsong. Chicka-dee-dee-dee. The dawn was an orange sensation through closed lids. The wall behind her, bed flush to it, shivered. Tiny, unending vibrations passed into her. Reaching back, she laid her palm to the paneling. She could hear the thrum of the refrigerator, feel the hot glow of its laboring motor. From outside, came a new sound, a muted metal chafe like pennies shaken in a fist.

She opened her eyes. In the bed next to her, a boy with red, red hair sprawled naked on his belly, arms raised above his head. His skin was white and scabbed, marked by clusters of mosquito bites scratched raw and healed over. While they slept, the sheet had pulled away from the mattress. The ticking was flecked with blood.

She studied the boy’s bare back, his arms, widest at the elbow, the line of his neck, the two bright kiss-curls at the base of his skull. He owned a soft, seashell glow, dirty white and luminous. Ridiculous.

She closed her eyes and sought a comparison less feminizing. Thought of bedsheets snapping in cold, salted wind. Better. An upward scrape of lids over hot, tired eyes, and she resumed her study of him. He was that old linens color, washed thin. Around them the sheets were soft chaos, damp from the heat of the morning and the heat of their bodies. His body – she startled, blinking open her eyes; she had let them close again.

She rolled onto her belly and began, barely, to touch the boy. Under the skate of her fingers, his skin was fragile. Each little hurt to it, vicious. She ran the edge of a thumbnail across his shoulder to feel the thin layer of fibrous muscle, and underneath it, prominent bone. The boy was still, lost in the uninterruptible sleep of the exhausted. Her calluses caught where his skin’s texture changed from smooth to rough. Her touch stuttered. Pick. Pick. Orange crust flaked away, building under her nail, but there was no blood when the scab pulled loose.

Once, her mother had told her that the Pilgrims slept with the covers pulled over their heads all summer, one arm stuck out for the mosquitoes. They were together – she and her mother – in close, swampy darkness, hiding under a blanket. When her mother spoke, she could taste her breath. Above them mosquitoes whined. The sheets clung to their bodies. They were slow cooking. Her mother took her hand, sliding it toward the top of the bed. “You have to give them something,” she said, “or we’ll never get any peace.”

On her hand was a thin stripe of blood, a mosquito swatted in sleep. Wetting it with her tongue, she rubbed the mark away on what was close: a pillow keeping space between their bodies – her body and the boy’s. The night before, he held the pillow out. He offered, “We can share.” But she wouldn’t sleep so near to him as that, him breathing into her face, her breathing into his. A gesture, the boy had put the pillow between them. He punched it flat. They would both go without.

But in sleep one of them had turned to it, cuddled it, flattening its middle. Feathers displaced to either end, it had the look of road kill. She traced the outline of the petals on the pillowcase, and thought of herself, very young, waking in the dark hours of morning: light coming down the hall, but all she could see was the blown-up pattern on the fabric under her cheek, and she lay still, staring at the texture of the weave, listening to her father in the kitchen stirring his coffee, spoon ringing off ceramic while her mother’s voice lifted and fell in the cadence of apology.

Her fingers curled. Under them the pillow was damp. She bent her head – and – there on the case, was a stain, dark at the center, edges dried white.

One time – when it was late at night and raining and the rain had sounded so much like breathing that she hadn’t known she wasn’t alone until she felt cool air licking up around the round of her calves as the blankets raised – her mother eased into bed with her. She reached up with both hands, wanting to pat the little, full bellies of her mother’s cheeks. And barely touched skin before her hands were caught, then pushed away. But she had felt, in that whisper of contact, the hard heat of her mother’s flesh still swelling, and between her fingers were fine granules, the secretions from her mother’s split skin turning gritty as they dried to seal the injury closed. Her mother’s arms were around her, and her mother’s fingers were flexing at her waist, pulling her, positioning her, splaying over her stomach. The angle of the wind changed. Wet branches rubbed. They groaned. Her mother’s hand was in her hair, stroking. She could smell juniper and newspaper print and baby powder. Even half asleep, half dreaming, she knew the combination. It was her father’s cologne. Under his scent was the sad, gray smell of rain, and under that, her mother’s: ammonia, feathers, and dust.

She was lifted, floating from the bed. Her mother’s hands were cool and damp. Quietly, with lips pressed to the shell of her ear, her mother sang: Little Johnny jumped up and said it must be Spring. I just saw a ladybug and heard a robin sing. Don’t you like my smiling face? Don’t you like me singing here? Here in this sunny place?

She pushed a finger into the center of the stain on the pillowcase. When she could, she liked to read the thick fashion magazines. About relationship uncertainty, they said: dump him if his mouth tastes bad. In daylight, the boy’s room was an aftermath. Clothes covered the floor. A half-dozen, half-empty glasses of water sat, ringed from slow evaporation. On the side-table, the crust of sandwich had curled in on itself, a desiccated C, but the stain on the pillow had no odor. She pushed her tongue into it. It was like nothing, like standing openmouthed, sucking air.

       She was at the back of a little variety store. It was a family place, pickled eggs and blocks of maple fudge on the counter. Behind it, an old man was slowly thumbing his way through the paper, marking advertisements with a pencil nub. He did not bother to watch the aisles. He did not bother to watch her. He did not ask her, when she came in, with an alerting jangle of bells, to give him her pack to hold.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she answered.

Under a cardboard sign, hand-lettered: Business Center, she was making dime-a-piece photocopies of a babysitting flier. A redheaded boy was nearby, sipping slush through a wide, purple straw. Like a satellite, he circled her at a distance. When he orbited close, he raised a hand waist high and waved. Hello. From a pocket of her backpack, she retrieved a cell phone, made pretend of reading the screen. Forty cents left of her dollar – four copies. The machine was slow. When she cut her eyes to the side the boy waved again. Hello. Hello. She pushed buttons on the phone.

He came up next to her. She could feel the nearness of an unfamiliar body. She could smell him. In the periphery of her vision she saw the riotous colors of the chip display – orange and neon green, peppermint stripes, metallic red – and the white interruption of the boy’s skin, his pale arm extended, cup held out to her. “It’s a suicide,” he said.

Confusion, a blink’s worth, brought her attention to him. The cup then briefly held it. She saw – a hologram – squares of motion and shifting light. The entirety of the cup was wrapped with a pixilated image in flux between two men: one smiled, so the other snarled. Hero and villain – the same actor – artificial twins. Each warped the other. They would not settle: good or evil. What was in the cup was almost black. “Suicide,” the boy said. “That’s all the syrups mixed.”

The copy machine was warm at her back. It made heavy, clattering noise. From its dark aperture – a sigh and a page that was gray, but readable. She added it to her small pile, squared the edges. The boy stood watching, fiddling the straw with his tongue. Her fingertips were smudged dark. She rubbed them down her thighs. Chin tipped toward his hands, she said, “That’s nasty.” A clear dismissal.

There was not, then, a full arm’s length between them. The boy moved closer. She could smell sweet syrup and the cologne he was wearing and the odors of his body – a waft of compost moving with him. She looked up, looked at him directly. He was – young. He lowered his head, scuffing the toe of a sneaker back and forth over the linoleum. He said, “I like nasty.” She watched the flush travel his neck and color his ears with blood. Later, he made a better showing of bravado, nearly meeting her eye to say, “I’ll fuck you in every room.”

When the copies were done, they walked together up and down the main street, tacking her fliers on corkboards at the recycling depot and grocery and post office. She pointed where she wanted. On tiptoes, the boy moved tacks, transferring advertisements and business cards and photos of free puppies. She claimed prime space.

BABYSITTER
Local girl
Available on short notice

Over time, moving slowly north – a thicker sky and denser woods, whitetail deer bubbling with maggots in every roadside ditch, and the stars, nightly brighter overhead – she had learned that “local” drew the people who weren’t. New Yorkers and Californians maintaining the gone-by tradition of summering on the Atlantic. Nostalgic for different days – the stony beaches and ten-pound gulls of their childhood memories, when their mothers had carried them out of the ocean and up to a warm bath – and so, disappointed with the present reality, mornings and evenings that were violet and gray, the low fog that hung for hours, the chill in the air blowing in off choppy water. No common sense, these visitors in fine-purl sweaters and boating moccasins. They were temporarily plucked clean. They trusted her with everything – with their children, asleep upstairs.

In sleep, the children, tucked too tight into too big beds, turned and turned. They sighed. Dreaming, their soft eyelids pinched tight, their wet, full mouths opened and closed, their hands reached, and found air. Sweat darkened their hair, poorly washed, still pungent with seawater. In sleep, they were as hot as if they’d been left all day in the sun. She loosened the blankets, watched them twist and flop. Freed, their little limbs went every-which-way. Before she left, she laid pillows on the floor. If, with no one watching, they tumbled from their high beds, their little bodies would be caught and cradled before the boards could bruise or break them.

Downstairs – pocketfuls of quarters and wrinkled bills, left out, on end tables, on bookshelves, in crackle glaze dishes by the front door. Cottages full of hurricane lanterns and Shaker furniture, but the sideboard drawers were a menagerie of gadgets. And there were spare rooms that smelled – when she slipped into them, swollen doors jolted loose from their frames – never used, but that had silver-backed boar-bristle brushes arranged on dresser tops, and marine ivory statuettes of seals or bears or bare-breasted women on the bedside tables. Everything forgotten. In a corner – in all sorts of corners – a mouse had died from poison, and unseen, left to decompose, become fluffy and blue.

In her pack, wrapped in clothes: a thin fold of bills, a GPS, a camera, a sock of quarters and dimes, an opera length string of pearls still in their velvet box, and gold studs in the shape of lobsters, a polished tourmaline set in each crusher claw.

       At the center of the town was a narrow park, still green in the heat, and they – she and the boy – went and lay in the shade on the floor of the gazebo. The boards were carved with names. The more recent were splintered at their edges, gouges in the wood pale. The older names were stone smooth and near black. She found her mother’s in a heart by itself, lichen bordering the letters like filigree.

The boy pulled an errant blade of grass and pinched it with his thumbs, palms together. He asked, “You know how to whistle like this?” The sound was shrill and pained. He lowered his hands to tell her, “Once I got a piece with an ant,” then brought them back up, whistling again.

She took his wrist, pulling down. “That’s a predator call.” The high, wobbling scream it produced still shuddered in the air.

He nodded, pleased. “I know somebody who got a lucivee into the yard like this.” As he spoke, he sketched the cat’s dimensions, too big to be real, then puffed his cheeks, hands coming up. She winced. He dropped them, laughing. “Joshing you.” He flicked the grass aside. Smiled. His cheeks dimpled.

She turned away. When she was small, she had seen a lucivee dead in the snow, a clear tire track through its middle, fur and innards and bones soft as mud, holding the pattern of the tread. The tufts on its ears were blacker than the tar. They twitched in the wind. It was springtime. The black tuft on an ear moved. The cat was dead. The cat was listening. She was too young to understand that it couldn’t be one and do the other. She looked back at the boy. “It was probably a coon cat.”

He was affronted. “It wasn’t.” Then, with authority, “It wasn’t.”

She had looked away from the body on the roadside, but can remember the diamond pupils of its eyes were still clear and sharply pointed. Its blood was fresh, still red. She was with her mother then, a little girl. Her mother had taken her hand. “There’s nothing to do for it now.”

The gazebo boards were rough. They smelled of fresh-turned earth. She could feel the warmth of the boy’s hand, not touching, hovering at the hem of her shirt. Somewhere she had learned that lichen growing on bare rock were breaking the rock down, transforming it to dirt to feed from. Everything eats. Everything shits. “There aren’t any lucivees left.” With a fingertip, she gently traced the heart around her mother’s name. “We’ve killed them all.” She glanced back at the boy. “They’re dead.”

He frowned and thought, then offered, “There used to be real Indians here.”

“We killed them too.” Under the lichen the wood was rot-soft. She pushed and it gave, disintegrating into powder.

“Not all of them.” He slid two fingers under the edge of her shirt. “There’s a parade.”

“A parade?”

The fingers tried to stroke. There wasn’t the space for it. “It’s for awareness – “

“Awareness?” Minority Veterans? Forest fires? Local history? The dangers of –

“– about not drinking and beating your wife. But sometimes there’s a camel with bells.” He grinned, dimpled.

He’s twelve, thirteen. No. She replaced that thought with another: cartoons – two or three little, short-legged men in turbans, each bouncing on their own yellow furred dome. She asked, “How many humps?”

The boy hitched himself against her, pulling close and shuffling back. Quick – once, twice. It took her a moment – two humps. Clever boy. A Bactrian camel then, with bells, and women with blackened eyes, and the men with them, sober and repentant? Or there waiting to see the camel?

A soft breeze blew over them, pushing the boy’s smell at her, the cologne and the sweat, the particulars of his un-bathed-boy-on-a-summer-day body. She breathed out, long and slow. The wood dust around her mother’s name lifted. Tumbled away. The heart lost an edge. Nothing to do for it now.

To the boy, she volunteered certain information. She told him her mother had grown-up nearby, and that one summer they had come back – she and her mother – and they had lived on one of the islands in the bay. She told him a story, how a squirrel stole a tube of her mother’s lipstick, attracted to the sweet beeswax in it, got it open, then left behind a trail of candy-pink, clawed prints traveling up the parchment of the birches. It was mostly a lie, but it made the boy laugh.

He fit his fingertips to the knobs of her spine. “Was it Paradise? Or Mosquito?” The island, he meant. One of his fingers worked lower. A small, high noise slipped out of him. He turned on his belly. The twist of his arm was unnatural.

“Mosquito.” A ceiling, a floor and three walls, open at the front – the little building where she and her mother kept their things and slept. An Adirondack Shelter. Ceiling, floor, and three walls, open at the front. She called it home, counted its parts, named them: ceiling . . . floor . . . wall . . . wall . . . wall. . . . Every night bats spun from the corners chirruping. Every night her mother slid into the blankets beside her. “No one knows we’re here. We’re all alone.” The sun set late and rose early. Twice a day the split-log walls were gold.

Once, late at night, when the dark was absolute, she woke panicked, pressed to her mother’s back. There was a footstep. She felt the sound of it like it had come down across her throat. A doe with giant ears was standing, its front legs on the floorboards, rear legs in the dirt, a tube of her mother’s lipstick clasped delicately between its teeth. She could see the tiny blinking of the mirror set in the top of the tube.

The boy’s hand was sweating. Her skin was sweating. “Paradise and Mosquito,” he said. “That’s like Iceland and Greenland.”

She rolled to her back. Under her, his hand flexed. She felt each of his knucklebones. Above them, the ceiling of the gazebo was covered with chicken wire, and somehow, a red playground ball was trapped behind it.

“Iceland,” the boy explained, “is green, and Paradise has the bugs.”

In the slow shaping of her smile, she could feel the places in her face where muscle hooked to bone. She touched her cheeks, skimmed her fingertips up to the delicate fold where her ears connected to her head. Men sometimes took other men’s faces as trophies. She had read it. The essential cut was behind each ear. The dead weight of the body against the pull worked as fulcrum and lever. Faces peeled cleanly from the material underneath.

She told the boy she was couch-hopping. Nowhere to stay – to sleep. His father – he had already said – worked in the shipyard where a new destroyer had launched, and was away for three days to test it. His pinky found her coccyx. What he was doing was uncomfortable, but didn’t hurt. He rubbed at the round of bone. “You could come home with me.” His other hand circled her wrist.

She thought of her mother, her mother’s fingers in her hair, bobby-pinning a Devil’s Paintbrush from the bank of the river behind her ear. The petals bled. Her mother’s fingertips were stained. There was a playground song: Mama had a baby and its head popped off – Mama had a baby and its head got crushed. She can remember singing it, and the pads of soft, soft little fingers stained red, stems and blooms separated, crushed in the grass. “We want to look so pretty when we go home.” Her mother’s hair was already done. An hour, her mother spent, crouched in the grass with a compact mirror balanced on her hand or on her knee, trying, trying to get the up-do right – a French Twist – until finally she quit, and pinned a cluster of mayflower to the side where the hair was folded, hiding the lumps.

She had held her mother’s wrist. “I don’t want to go.”

“Come home with me.” The boy’s eyes settled on her clavicle. “I’ll fuck you,” he said, “in every room.”

In the dark, they tried. The boy said, “Come on. Come on. Come on.” but was never hard. The heat between their bodies grew, was wet and awful. His small bed, ridden, squealed and pitched. Smells intensified. June bugs droned, darkening the window screen in patches, their barbed legs hooked through the mesh.

She put her palms against the boy’s shoulders. He let himself be pushed, kneeling back in the cradle of her legs. She said, “I’ll show you something. We’ll do something better.”

He brought both hands up and dragged them through his hair until it stood on end. “We don’t have to do anything else.” His chest was blotched – heat, or embarrassment.

She squeezed his arm, the thin bicep. “A real game.”

       In the kitchen, they stood shoulder to shoulder at the refrigerator, letting cool air play over them. Each in a t-shirt. His fell to mid-thigh; on her, the shirt was shorter. He was still growing. She was nearly done. To keep herself covered, she held down the hem.

On the top shelf of the refrigerator was a metal bowl – a dog’s watering dish – full of eggs. She took one. A short, soft feather was stuck to the shell. At the sink, she rinsed the egg in water that ran warm from the cold tap. To dry it, she rolled the egg across the belly of her t, her other hand pulling on the hem.

The boy, curious, watched from the open door of the refrigerator, his narrow body boxed in light. “What’re you doing?” He cocked a leg and sighed.

Arm raised, she found the cord for the hanging kitchen bulb. Pulled. A low electric pop – and – fly-specked yellow light. The boy blinked.

Between her thumb and index finger, she turned the egg. “Do you have a rooster?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you get the eggs everyday?”

“Yeah.”

She turned the egg again, again, again. Lifted her arm and held it near the bulb. “Did you ever get a sitting one? With a black eye and veins?” She had – cracked a fertile egg into a frying pan, where it skidded through melted butter, yolk netted by blood, a developing eye staring up.

She touched the egg to the curved glass of the bulb. She had to push up on her toes to reach. The hem of the t-shirt rode over her thighs. She pulled down. It was too short to cover her. Light from the heated twist of filament passed through the shell, through the protein and the mucus inside, and through the shell again. There was no shadow. She said, “It’s dead.” Satisfied.

The refrigerator abandoned, the boy was sitting at the table, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I cracked into a chick once.” He stretched and yawned then stood, drew his arms up and tucked his head against his shoulder – an imitation of a chick’s fetal pose. “It had eyelids.” He yawned. “And stringy feathers. Was all wet.”

She set the egg on the table. “I need a glass of water.”

The boy went to the sink. She heard the faucet jutter and the sluice of water hitting then filling the glass. He brought it to her. “What are we doing?” She gestured: sit.

The boy’s bare skin squeaked against the varnished wood. He laughed, “Listen.” He pushed himself back and forth across the chair. “Those beans.” He laughed again. “They always get me.” He made a fan with his hand.

She waited. Air bubbles clung to the side of the glass. Dissolved. The boy folded his hands on the tabletop, became first still, then silent. She rapped the egg against the table’s edge. The shell fractured, but didn’t break through. “I’m making a crystal ball.”

And, the boy became a whole new boy – shy and delighted. He asked her, “Tell my future?”

Pressure from her thumb clove the egg. She tipped her hand and let its insides slide. Cold, thick liquid, the white rolled over the broken edge of the shell, pulling the orange ball of yolk with it. Glug and splash – water was displaced. The yolk fell. It dropped toward the bottom, then stopped, rose and bobbed mid-glass, while the mucus of the white bloomed, a sudden birth of tendrils unfurling.

She bent to the boy. Her lips touched the place behind his ear where the hair was soft. If she were going to take his face, the first cut would go just there. She asked him, “What do you see?” A flower? A squid? A camel with bells, a fat burning sun behind it? A woman with her arms open? A body, open? She said, “You’re supposed to see a coffin.”

His chin on the tabletop, the boy’s eyes were level with the glass. Inside it the yolk floated up, and midway, began to sink, uncertain of which direction to move. Eventually, he said, “My mother’s was made of cardboard.” The yolk descended slowly. She waited. “But – ” the boy looked up at her, “only because she was cremated. It still cost – ” under his eyes, were lilac quarter moons. It was late. He was tired. “I don’t know – five hundred dollars? Or eight.”

She didn’t know what her mother’s coffin cost, or what it was made from. “Did she kill herself?”

“No – ” The boy’s head came up. “It was an accident.”

She looked at him – his wide eyes – and then away from him. In the dark, the window above the sink became a mirror. She saw herself. She preferred the boy.

He said, “She was making breakfast, and she was going to make sausage patties, but the meat was froze and she was trying to jimmy some off with a knife and it – ” he snapped his hand toward his face making a fist, holding it near his eye. “It went into her brain.” Then, he was watching her and waiting. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. He began to dig at his arms, peeling the scabs from the mosquito bites there. She laid her hand over his, weighting it; he’d scar if he picked. He continued. “There are accidents like that all the time. Like, a nail or a knife? It ricochets and sticks somebody in the eye and they – well – doctors, they pull out what’s stuck and pump – ” Under fine lids, his eyes swung, pinkish lashes fluttering as he searched for the word, “ – juice – medical juice, a – ” it came to him, “solution – and it’s okay. But,” he brought his other hand up, made a fist again, “it went through to her brain. The knife did.” The boy paused. His hand lowered, coming to rest on the table, where it uncurled, palm up, helpless. “She died.”

“Do you think,” she thought of her own mother, “somebody maybe killed her?”

The boy was looking at her strangely. He made to pull his hand away from hers. She let him go. “It was an accident.” He was adamant. His neck and face were red. “What’s wrong with you?”

She held up her hands, palms out. Yes, see – helpless.

The boy turned away, turned to the glass. He made a pillow from his hands and laid his cheek on it. The yolk rose and began to sink again. The refrigerator hummed. June bugs were droning. A rain owl began to call – whoo, who cooks for you – whoo, who cooks for you. The boy moved the glass closer. Its contents rearranged themselves. They contracted and spread, steady, like a slow beating heart. “What happens,” the boy asked, “if I see a coffin?” He looked up then. He looked at her and he smiled, dimpled, sweet-faced.

She had slept on the inside of the small bed, her pack at her feet. The t-shirt she wore was stuck all across her belly and to the hollow between her breasts. The oniony smell of the boy’s sweat was on her hands, her thighs. Easing over his quiet body, she went to the window. It was half open. When she turned the crank, the handle spun and spun. The gear was stripped. Outside, small birds in the low branches threw shadows on the lawn. Chicka-dee-dee-dee. Clover everywhere – blooming white. A dog was attached to the trailer by an eyehook screwed into the siding. It walked to the end of its chain – and that was the sound she could not place when she first woke – links dragging through the grass.

In the kitchen, she found a twenty folded inside a handwritten note: Pizza! and a wood-handled knife with a wide blade. On the table, the yolk had settled at the bottom of the glass, the white spreading from it in thorny arms that broke the surface of the water. She up-ended the glass into the sink, burst the warm yolk with her finger, and sent it all down the drain.

In the bedroom again, she straddled the boy’s back. He slept, dead to the world. When the knife went into him, he bucked, but she was heavier and held him down.

It was not hard work, but afterward she was weak. Her hands went limp; she couldn’t make a fist. She set her phone on the rim of the tub, and took a long bath in cool water. She lay back, all but her head and the rounds of her knees submerged. When the water warmed, she pulled the stopper, then used her toes to refit it and turn the faucet for cold. She lounged until she was bored with it.

A woman called at three, wanting a sitter for six. By then, she had been through the trailer, added a few little things of value to her pack, and re-dressed in clean clothes. She did not go back to the boy’s room.

In the medicine cabinet she found a bottle of Lilac Vegetal, glowing acid green, and a yellow perfume in cut crystal, the stopper shaped like a bow. It smelled the way she expected something described as smelling of sunshine to smell . . . or. . . . After a moment it came to her: gold walls – the smell of gold walls. She dabbed it at her pulse points and behind her ears.

       She opens the passenger door of the car, and settles herself into the deep seat, her pack secure in her lap. The woman offers her a brief look, a brief smile. “I didn’t realize,” the woman says, “that anyone lived out here.”

Her answer is honest. “No one really does.” She holds her hand out, “Pleased.” The gesture is ignored. A second passes. From the tall grass, crickets can be heard through a cacophony of other insect sounds. Humming and gnawing, and the high, whining song made by the rough rub of crooked legs or spiky wings colored like panes of neon-veined glass.

The woman shifts the car into gear. “Tell me,” begins her question, not asked to receive a reply. “Isn’t handshaking out now?”

The dashboard light is faint and flattering. She can see the veins in the woman’s hands, lit rich, night-sky navy. Following them up, in the hollow of the woman’s throat, rest two little charms: blue lacquered baby shoes, set with birthstones. Clean red and yellowed-green. Summer boys.

As the woman turns the car from the two track onto the main road, its headlights cast out over the field. They catch a small tar-papered building, the door and window at odd angles in their frames. In the unkept grass a hundred, a thousand, a million, tiny insect eyes snap on, lidless and red.

“The rules,” the woman says. “Bed by ten. No soda. We don’t allow television.”

She can feel the woman’s eyes, but her forehead is pressed to the fogged window glass. The car is cold enough to keep milk fresh. The air feels frail. It smells of hoar frost. “Do you think,” the woman asks, “you can entertain them?”

She has drawn a fat heart in the condensation. All her skin is goosebumped, chilled lavender across the knuckles. The cold is inside her. She starts to write her mother’s name with the pad of her pinky. To the woman, she says, “I know some real good games.”

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Jenny Hanning’s stories have appeared in Meridian, Ninth Letter, and Shenandoah.