NO SAUCE IN THE WORLD by Jill Maio
My mother has come to The End. From my stair above the full pipe I hear the crunch and spit of gravel under tires, and then, cresting the ridge, is the silver Camaro I used to drive, Kentucky plates and all. She parks under the maple tree and waits a minute before getting out, high-heeled sandals unsteady on the rutted ground. She pulls off her sunglasses to take in the junked trailers, the towering barn, and the pair of hand-painted signs – enter at own risk –and better yet, GIT!
Everybody else is way up at the Astral Bowl. You can hear strains of the Suicidal Tendencies CD that has been in Luke’s car stereo all week, and the clack, roll, roll of wheels on concrete. My mom cranes her neck that way for a minute, then gets distracted by the old deer skull hanging like an ornament from the maple, right about even with her own head. A breeze is bouncing the skull on its fishing wire, making it look like it’s telling her something. She doesn’t hear me approaching until I’m past the toolshed.
“Alex,” she says. “Look at you.”
I open my eyes really wide.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I shrug. My jaw is broken in six places. My face is swollen and bruised and I have wires keeping my teeth clenched.
“I had to find out on stupid Facebook,” she says before she gives me a hug, a delicate one. Her fruity shampoo makes me hungry. She steps back and steadies the deer skull, holding it with thumb and forefinger from beneath, like you might hold the chin of a lover. From up the hill come cheers and the echoing thunks of boards slapped against a concrete lip. Maybe Cranium pulled off that frontside grind.
“So, wow,” says my mom. “Tell me there’s a bathroom somewhere.”
I show her into Luke’s house, and after she pees, she calls my name. She’s wetted her hands at the sink and is scrunching some bounce into her hair.
“It’s not what I imagined,” she says, turning from the mirror. “I don’t know what I imagined. People running around with their heads on fire.”
“Not today,” I start to say, but the pain stops me.
They anchored strips of metal along my top and bottom teeth and then used NASA-grade wires to bind the strips together. Very firmly. For a month and a half, I have to drink everything through a flattened straw. When my mom, walking behind me, comments that I’m skinny as a nail, I nod sadly. It’s been two weeks so far. Today, all I’ve had is a banana milkshake with pulverized painkillers, and a half-gallon of grape juice. The neighbor who brings her kids to skate made me a liquid pizza for lunch: tomato juice, parmesan cheese and waterlogged white bread, mixed up in the blender. It looked so much like vomit that I said I was full. Not in words. I rubbed circles on my stomach and held up both hands with my palms facing her. Sometimes, not being able to speak works out fine.
In case I ever do have to vomit, the doctor gave me a special set of wire clippers to keep in my pocket. I think how easy it would be to go snip snip, to open my mouth wide in spite of the pain, in spite of going back to healing square one, and just shovel in meatball after meatball after meatball.
On the way up to the Astral Bowl, with Monk and Prunella padding alongside us, I point out the things my mom will like best: the marooned school bus, the mural of the death’s head eating McDonald’s fries, the treehouses almost hidden by the thick June leaves. She’s still marveling as I help her climb the Astral’s dirt slope. I would have told her to wear sneakers. While I yank a few weeds that have grown over the coping, she sits on a milk crate and watches the guys skate. Luke is in there, carving at full speed. “Look at that,” she says, “all that drive.” But I’m looking at the dark spots where my face hit. I was dropping in. My board flew out from under me and I flipped over and came straight down on my chin.
I sit next to her and write in my notebook, You staying over? I put clean sheets on my bed. “Thanks, baby,” says my mom. “I’ll sleep like a princess.” I write, How was your trip? She says “boring,” and I write 5 hours? 6? and she says, “This is weird – pass the pen.”
Are there any girls here? my mom asks on the page.
I nod, and then write Sometimes. When there’s a party. My mom has had the same boyfriend for years. I ask, How’s Dave? and it seems like she’s writing a whole novel in response, but when she turns the pad around there’s just the word Fine, and then a cartoon of a dog under an umbrella on a beach. Taking the pen, I draw a giant shark leaping out of the water with its mouth wide open.
While she’s working on a sea monster to swallow the shark, Luke shoots out of the bowl in front of us. He picks up a T‑shirt, snaps the dirt off and wipes sweat from his face and neck. “So,” he says, “you like what we’ve done with your son?”
A lot of moms would not find that funny, but mine has a wicked sense of humor. She holds out her hand to shake. “You’re the man who built all of this, huh?” She looks across the concrete curves of the Astral Bowl to where the last rays of sun are still glowing on the treetops, and does one of those Italian finger kisses. “Magnifico.”
Four times a year skatepunks from all over descend upon The End. Luke’s friends arrive early, claim their usual camping spots, stash all the food and drugs they’ll need for the weekend, and get in some skating before things get crazy. Then come the bands lugging amps and guitars, and finally wave upon wave of kids who heard outsized tales from other kids, or saw it on MTV or in a magazine. If anyone gets their car burned, it’s one of these kids.
Some friends and I came out for the June bash a year ago, just after graduating high school. I was supposed to get a summer job and save money for Kentucky State, but I let my friends go home without me and camped in a treehouse that moaned when the wind blew. I thought I was going to be part of something that was amazing all the time – skating and partying and screaming fuck you to the man – but once I understood what a struggle it is, once I’d seen the vast shitty underbelly that would send most people running, it felt even more important to stay. I didn’t want to be the guy who got scared off by grueling work, moldy fridges, or the chief losing his shit sometimes. If I could speak, I’d tell my mom that she doesn’t know the half of it: The End is like nowhere else, and when it isn’t the worst place on earth, it’s the best.
By dark, everyone has sniffed out my mom’s case of beer and assembled in the Grotto – everyone except for Grady and Cranium, who are in Parkersburg looking at a drum set, and except for the new guy, who has a phone date with his girlfriend and is way up on the hill where there’s cell reception. The new guy doesn’t count, anyway. His girlfriend is going to drive out for the party, and then they’ll go back to Portland or Brooklyn or wherever they live.
The Grotto came with the property – just a three-room wooden house sunken off the side of the driveway – and Luke put in a wood stove, made a tin ceiling of license plates, and papered the walls with old print beer ads. Which is kind of funny because he doesn’t like beer. He likes playing pool though, and the whole place is arranged around his red-felted regulation-size table. Tonight he beats Jon, Link and me, finally loses to Terry, and heads out for the night – but not before telling my mom what a hard worker I am. That makes me as happy as I’ve been since the wipeout. Luke won’t say things he doesn’t mean, even to people’s moms.
I flip the tab on a Pabst can. My mother watches me flatten a straw end and feed it under my canine tooth, where there’s a little space. “Beer through a straw,” she says. “My baby.”
Link lets out a loud fart on the couch where I’ll be spending the night and repeats, “My baby.” It smells like old meat. I wonder if my senses have been heightened since I’ve been more or less fasting.
My mom says, “So how did you all wind up here, anyway?” She always thinks there’s something to learn about people, and in this case she turns out to be right. I hadn’t known that Milkman had come to The End – straight to The End – after five years in jail, or that Bloody Mute, Jon’s old band, once toured with Megadeth.
When my mom’s turn on the pool table comes, Terry beats her handily. Meanwhile, he tells her about his broken back and other drunken injuries, how the lady at the welfare office is going to help him get retroactive disability checks. It’s no touring with Megadeth, but it’s what he’s got. “When those checks come in,” he says, “The End is going to see a lot more concrete.”
“Do you skate?” asks my mom, and he tells her, “Never been on a board in my life.”
“But you’re going to spend your money on building – whatever you call them – skate bowls?” She looks at me and I can see that she is moved. It is moving, people’s dedication to this place, though you don’t really talk about things being moving if you’re a guy.
Around midnight she wants to get ready for bed, so I take her hand for the walk to Luke’s house. In the dark swath between Grotto and house lurk railroad ties, a wide ditch, and tons of rocks to stumble over. Luke refuses to spend extra money on outdoor lights to keep jackasses and drunks from twisting their ankles. My mom wants to peek in his room but I won’t do it. “Lrrcked,” I lie, because she hates to be denied anything and would just needle until I opened the door. But I let her rifle through the bathroom and take a shower, and then we head up to the barn, where my room is. Amenities include a slightly cockeyed door I framed myself, tapestries for a ceiling, and a little spider plant named Boris, who, against all odds and lack of regular watering, has survived for nearly a year now. “Well, isn’t he a handsome thing,” my mom says, moving him closer to the window before kissing me goodnight.
She doesn’t hit the road at sunrise like I thought she would; instead, she sleeps late and wanders the property. Around noon, she comes up the hill where I’m working with Cranium, Milkman and the new guy to rebuild an outdoor stage in time for the summer bash. She has sandwiches and, for me, a thermos of split pea soup thinned down with chicken broth. For a picnic basket, she’s dug up a stolen Price Saver shopping basket covered in skate stickers.
“Take a break,” she commands, and the guys dig in with grubby fingers.
She calls to Grady, Luke’s sixteen-year-old son, who ambles down from the ghost shack, grabs a sandwich and disappears again. I work a straw under my canine. Kieran, the new guy, starts going on to my mom about what a trouper I am. She screws up her face when he refers to me as Frank. The guys have been calling me Frank or Frankie lately, because I sound like Frankenstein’s monster when I try to talk, and he thinks that’s my regular name. They call him Karen, which is pretty much how they were pronouncing it anyway, but I wrote it in big letters on my notepad and chuckled hn, hn, hnnn – you can chuckle just fine with your jaw wired shut – so everyone knew I wasn’t just spelling Kieran wrong.
“I only want to make sure you’re ok,” my mom whispers. “Take you home for a while, if you want. Or at least take you shopping.”
She hangs out in the grass nearby, playing with the puppies while we get back to work. She looks happy, like she doesn’t mind all the things there are to mind at The End. The heat and the bugs and the sour old men drinking beer. She goes crazy for one all-black puppy in particular. I watch her lead him around with a stick gripped in his teeth. The way she’s bending lets you see down her shirt, and that’s what Cranium is watching.
I grunt at him.
He says, “Shit, Frankie, if I had a MILF for a mom, I’d have shared a lot sooner.”
I toss a chunk of two-by-four at his head; it’s my best comeback.
The grocery store smells like melting freezer ice: a little sweet, a little coppery. We pick up a tub of tropical vanilla protein powder to add to my milkshakes, and cubes of beef bouillon for quick liquid snacks.
“Who normally cooks?” my mom wants to know.
“Ehhy,” I say and she nods. Terry, one of the sour old men and not yet forty, had shown her around the kitchen this morning.
“That poor scrap – he wouldn’t have anywhere to be without The End, would he?”
Breezing up and down the aisles, my mom loads the cart with fruits, vegetables, pasta and cheese, packets of spice, hamburger, a party pack of chicken thighs. I motion at the mounting pile, and she shrugs. “I feel like I should pitch in a bit.”
We take it all to the check-out, where old lady Marybelle gives me a raised eyebrow, no less effective for being penciled on. “Someone got real banged up, didn’t he?”
I nod.
“That happen skateboarding?”
I nod again and make a sheepish expression.
“Well, God love you. What’s that Luke up to today?” Luke flirts with her when we shop, and you can tell it’s the highlight of her day. I wonder if I’ll ever be like that – charming old ladies left and right – or if it would have started by now.
“So you know Luke,” says my mom. She leans in like they’re sharing a secret. “What’s it like to have this famous skateboarder living outside of town?”
Pursing her lips, Marybelle says, “Well, I don’t know from famous skateboarders. He’s always friendly.” She pushes the cash drawer closed. “You this young man’s mom?”
“I was for nineteen years. I think Luke’s his mom, now.”
Marybelle’s eyes cloud in confusion, but she smiles politely, and as her knobby fingers tear off the receipt, she tells us to have a great day. “And for God’s sake be careful,” she calls after me.
After loading all we bought into the trunk, I take out my notebook and write, Heading home tomorrow? My mom grins. “Maybe. Maybe not.” She’s a teacher and it’s summer. As if to demonstrate her freedom, she gets in the passenger seat, kicks off her shoes and props her feet on the dashboard. I learned to drive with her sitting just like that in this very car, with the radio blaring all over Louisville. Sometimes she’d direct me over the river and cheer, “Crossing state lines!” I’d be hunched and straining, forehead practically pressed into the windshield, so desperate I was not to make a mistake. To this day, I’m the most careful driver I know. Zero points on my license and designated chauffeur of The End – because when you’re driving a stickered‑up, falling-apart limo full of skate punks, you’d better be prepared for police lights in your rear-view mirror.
On Route 16 we pass an Amish horse and buggy with a thick-bearded man at the reins. My mom gawks. I slow down and wave, as Luke always does, but I’m not sure if the man sees me. They’re not kindly, the Amish, like those beards would suggest. According to Luke, they started arriving a few years ago with their hoes and tillers, Berzer County property being the cheapest this side of Somalia. You don’t think of Amish going around sniffing out a good deal, but here they are, minding their own business on their own cheap land just down the road from where we do the same. Selling squash and sugar pies and occasionally a batch of meth. According to Luke. I can’t articulate all this aloud, obviously, but I know my mom would be interested. She’s wiggling her toes and trying to tune something decent in on the radio. Eventually she gives up and turns the volume down.
“I’m leaving Dave,” she says. She has her little smile on, the one that means she’s totally serious. I keep looking from her to the road and back. “It’s way overdue. I mean, if I really wanted to be with him I would have married him by now, right?”
I want to ask when she decided this, and if she’s already done it or is still in the planning stages, and where she’s going to live, because the house belongs to Dave. All I can get past my teeth is, “Oo her?”
“I’m sure. I only realized today, but I’m sure.” She smiles again. “With him I just feel empty all the time.”
Back in Louisville, when my mom didn’t want to cook or when we were both up late and hungry, we’d go to the 24‑hour Hilltop Diner – a vaguely Greek place with a six-page menu listing every conceivable variety of omelets, sandwiches, soups, cutlets, spaghettis, puddings and pies, seeming to demand that I order something new every time. My mother would always ask for strawberry waffles, and after I’d had a few bites of my ham-and-potato salad or my something-nasty-and-peas, she would always let me trade.
That’s where we met Dave – or where she re-met Dave, because they’d been in high school together. My mom kept peeking around the booth divider, trying to figure out if it was him or not, and eventually he came over, saying if he’d known one day Vicki Shifflett was going to be stealing glances at him, well, he would’ve been in much more of a hurry to get through high school and college and all the years since. Hokey, for sure, but it was also kind of sweet, and holy shit, what I wouldn’t give for a plate of strawberry waffles now.
My mom can’t get over the fact that there are no chairs in the house. There is also no couch, no table, no TV; Luke doesn’t like to sit still. “Where will we eat?” she asks as she rinses spinach under the faucet.
I point to the door, propped open onto the humid, buzzing evening. In winter we just eat standing around the kitchen. The rest of the time we go outside and sit on stumps or milk crates.
“Well, at least you’re not turning into a couch potato, like most of your friends will do.” Her eyes flicker for an instant over a cockroach on the counter, and then crinkle as she gives an assuring smile.
A girl Luke dates is over, an aspiring tattoo artist who comes downstairs in a jingle of bracelets to ask if she can help with dinner.
“How about the drinks?” my mom says. “I bought fixings for White Russians.” When the girl heads for the fridge my mom whispers, “She’s Luke’s girlfriend?”
I shrug.
“God, she’s young enough to be yours.” My mom shakes her head and then elbows me. “Maybe she has cute friends.”
I know most moms don’t take such an active interest in their son’s love lives, but it never helped; I didn’t date any more girls or any hotter girls than my friends with normal moms did.
Terry is first to say how delicious the meal is. He forks a steaming hunk of Chicken Florentine into his mouth and looks at me. “Poor Frankie.” Then he tells me not to worry, as soon as the wires come off I’d be getting a tuna taco from Stacie. God, that gets old. My tolerance of lame jokes is pretty much wiped out now that I can’t joke back.
My mom doesn’t know I’m being ribbed, and, alarmed, she says, “Alex is allergic to fish – you didn’t know?”
Terry turns a little pink under his alcoholic gray skin. “Sorry, Vicki – we weren’t really talking about–” and my mom says, “Oh god. Seriously, yuck. You guys can do better than that, can’t you?”
Cranium cackles but doesn’t offer anything. He’s already drunk on the White Russians.
“Fine,” she says with a grin. “Everyone has to come up with a more interesting term by the end of the night and I’ll pick the best.”
Milkman doesn’t hesitate. “Muff diving. Eating a peach. There’s a prize if we win, right?”
I roll my eyeballs but nobody sees.
Stacie, as I assure my mom on a notebook page, is not a subject of interest. She’s a local loudmouth I hooked up with, drunk, a few days before my wipeout, and I’ll probably be living it down for another year, as there is nothing to talk about here, and endless time to say it. No kidding; the people who just come here for parties have no idea how deadly boring The End can be – will be – once they’ve packed up, slapped bumper stickers on their cars and headed off to tell their tales. The rest of the year, days just trudge by, one after another, weighed down by hills and thickets and mud and sky.
Everyone is more or less done with their meals and watching Luke teach the black puppy to roll over for chicken scraps. I suck up the last of my cream of spinach soup, which is the best thing I’ve had in weeks. So are the White Russians, though they’re making me bitter. Peering down my nose at Karen rolling a cigarette with one hand, I can only think what a smarmy guy he is. He licks and lights it, blows out a thin stream of smoke. “When do people start showing up for the big bash?” he says.
Luke points to my mom. “Well, she already showed up.”
“Hey, Vicki,” says Milkman, “are you sticking around?”
I turn sharply to face my mom, who smiles. “If an old lady can handle it. And if it’s okay with Alex.”
When did she decide that? From under her eyelashes she gives me a look that I recognize from the National Geographic channel as a trick to make me share my bananas. The party is a week away, and a week can be a long-ass time.
Luke is saying, “Handle it? You’ll have the time of your life. You’ll get wasted, get your ears blown out by bands, trip over people screwing, people puking – if you’re real lucky, people doing both at once.”
“I can’t wait,” laughs my mom. She lifts her face toward Luke. “Alex told me the parties were to get girls here.”
“Well, Alex needs all the help he can get.”
Karen tells my mom it’s going to be his first End bash, too. She smiles, but then leans over to me and whispers, “What is it? I just don’t like that kid.” I tip my glass toward hers; they touch with a satisfying ching.
“Hey,” Luke says. “Impersonating Stalin.” I look around waiting for everyone to get it. Of course Luke would win.
When I’m finished with dirt-hauling the next day, my mom brings my skateboard down from my room. I notice that she’s wearing sneakers: brand new Keds with white soles. Her tank top also looks new. She says, “I thought I might get a lesson. You know, when at home . . .”
My line goes unspoken: do as the homies do.
I have us start on soft ground so she can get used to the feel of the board. It’s late afternoon and the grass is warm from a full day of sun. I direct her feet over the truck bolts, and, standing in front of her, bend my knees and rock back and forth, bounce around, balance on each foot. She follows my lead. I have her move her back foot up the tail for steering, and she does okay with that, too. “Probably turn pro by the end of the week,” she says.
We take the board into the full pipe, where she tries to do the same stuff, but on a hard surface the board comes alive, dumping her within seconds. She laughs.
Retrieving the board, I show her how to push off. I can’t remember ever learning to skate; I think I just dicked around and collected bruises until I got the hang of it. My mom paws the ground with her right foot, brings it onto the board and yells, “Shit!” She can’t adjust her position fast enough. She reels, limbs going haywire, and winds up flat on the ground holding her arm.
Makes me miss it. I’m not supposed to skate until I get the wires off.
She sits at the bottom of the pipe, taking a breather, musing about different skating styles. “Cranium is all rangy and loose,” she says, “while Kieran makes me think of a pocketknife. And Luke skates those bowls like he has to conquer every inch, over and over again. Same way he probably goes out and gets those young women.” She stands. “Looks like my style is teetering and flailing – let’s get back to it.”
I hold both her hands and try to keep her steady while guiding her back and forth. Like a little dance. I turn my head pointedly, trying to tell her not to look at me, but at where she’s going. She gets the looking part down after a minute, but puts way too much weight in her heels, and as soon as she lets go of my hands, down she goes.
Sprawled on the ground, she says, “I like trying new stuff. It’s so easy to do the same things day-in‑day-out and just rot away.”
Something in her voice unnerves me. I put my hand in her hair, which is spread out on the floor.
“Thank you,” she says. “This was great. Don’t ever get old, honey.”
I’m dropping into the Pacific Bowl. I had thought it was the shallow end, but as I bring my front foot down I see a thirteen-foot drop below me, and I go, and the downward rush is better than anything in this world. Every one of my bones knows that I am unstoppable, that I have stepped, to the micro-millimeter, right in the magic position, and my feet are never leaving that board. I frontside ollie, air to fakie, 720, backside grind revert, fakie ollie kickflip, and it’s easy as breathing. I don’t want to wake up, but when I open my eyes, I don’t want to go back to sleep. I want to skate.
I put my socks and shoes on and head toward the barn, where my skateboard waits under my bed. It’s about five o’clock. The sky is still dark but starting to hint at morning, and the whole property is peaceful and quiet. When I was first living here, sleeping fitfully in the treehouse, I saw a lot of this time of day, when shadows start taking on substance and name: deer, maple tree, tractor. A couple times I heard Luke and Grady skating and wanted to join them, but it was special holy father-son time; the two of them were out there on their own untouchable plane and I could only have ruined it. So I watched from the tree while they commanded the bowls like creatures from a myth. Or like me in my dream.
I climb the creaky barn steps as quietly as I can, but even if I wake my mom, it’s worth it to get this ride while there’s dream magic still in me. I push open my door, quietly, quietly, and creep inside to find the bed empty. Untouched. For half a second I wonder if she went back to Louisville, but her book and some clothes are still piled atop my dresser. A sick feeling washes through me.
I cut downhill through the trees to Luke’s house. Right inside the doorway sprawl my mom’s new Keds; their loose blue tongues seem to say that the year of having my own life has come to a screeching end. Up in the bedroom, I know she’s entwined with Luke and sleeping like a princess. No, not like a princess. Like a fat, full queen. I’m not sure if the feeling in my stomach is hunger or anger, but I dig out the leftover chicken from the Florentine night and put it through the blender with hot water from the tap.
If you ever get your jaw wired shut, don’t even think about liquefied chicken; it leaves a disgusting film inside your teeth and you can’t reach them to brush it off. I swish my mouth out a dozen times and still can’t get the bad taste out, even when the sun is rising and I’m drinking coffee at the computer, messaging Dave.
I spend the day in my own bed. My mom comes in just as I’m falling asleep; I feel her freeze when she sees me there, and then I hear her take some clothes and tiptoe away. A whole morning and half an afternoon of ocean-bottom sleep go by before I am woken by Kieran in the doorway. “Hey Alice, Luke says to get your ass up the hill.” Alice. Clever.
It feels too quiet out; I rile up Prunella just to hear some barking. She follows me uphill where we find Cranium and Milkman in the hot sun, staring tiredly down some lengths of two-by-four. I let Milkman unload his drill and pocketful of screws on me, and then I ask Cranium where Luke is.
“Just left for the hardware store. We broke the last circular saw blade.”
“Mmhay,” I say. “My mrrm?”
“She’s around. I guess your stepdad’s here, too.”
I let the news settle like something solid in my gut. It’s what I expected. It’s what any man worth his salt would do. I grab a bottle of lemonade from the cooler and get to work on the stage, expecting my mom to appear at any moment – or at least for Luke to show up and tell me what’s going on – but it stays quiet. And I keep working, even after Cranium has headed off to take a shower and I’m all alone up there, hand-sawing through planks, drinking lemonade and pissing in the weeds.
Eventually I hear Luke’s bellow, calling me down for dinner. I walk down the hill and see everybody’s on the front porch, including the dogs, who know they’ll get scraps, including my mom, and including Dave. He’s a tall guy and seems to lean to one side, especially when he’s not sure what else to do. I give him a wave and he waves back.
Luke is pacing as usual, talking on one cordless phone wedged between face and shoulder while prying another open with a butter knife. “I can’t hear you,” he keeps saying. He should just fucking learn to write e‑mails. Phones around here are always getting left out in the rain or knocked onto concrete.
“Howdy.” My mom greets me with her little, serious smile. She’s wearing the outfit she arrived in, including the sandals. “So,” she says, “Dave and I are heading back home tonight. I know it’s early to eat, but I’m making a goodbye dinner.”
“Mmm,” I say, more glad than ever that no one expects words from me.
She says, “There’s beer in the fridge, Alex.”
As soon as I go through the kitchen door, my stomach clenches. On the stove is a huge, sizzling pan, pouring oily, fishy steam all over the room. Oh god, fish. I run back outside, try to gulp in some fresh air, but it’s much too late. My insides knot and twist. I grope in all of my pockets before remembering that the clippers are with my stuff in the Grotto, and all the while the puke is rising, caustic and sour. Squeezing my eyes shut, I feel it filling my mouth and worming into my sinuses. I drop to my knees in the grass. It seems to take forever for a belly’s worth of liquid to shoot out my nostrils and between cracks in my teeth, and I choke and gag and swallow and retch some more.
When the worst is over, I stay on hands and knees, sneezing like a cat, trying to clear my nose of the burning stuff.
My mom is on the ground with me. “Oh, honey,” she says.
I hear someone laughing. Cranium, or maybe Kieran. I concentrate on the grass and a black beetle cleaning its legs of my vomit. I think for some reason of loudmouth Stacie, and I feel sad for her.
My mom rubs my back with a long, flat palm. “You poor thing,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” I meet her eyes and they look panicky and despairing and, above all, tired. I wish I could do something, or at least say that I’m sorry too, but the knotting and heaving starts all over again.
Jill Maio’s stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Memorious, and Los Angeles Review.