Grind

Because he was 1/8th Cherokee his cheekbones were high and broad, his body hairless.

But the Southern blood made him who he was. You could hear it pulse in every word.

His t-shirt stuck to his back, it was August and 100 % humid.

The other kids were spending their lunch hour packed like popsicles, into the air-conditioned dining hall of the High School’s recently renovated and aptly named, Burger Building.

He had the yard to himself.

The heat had melted the tar to soft black toffee and his skateboard wheels couldn’t build up the speed he needed for an ollie over the biology books he had placed in a pile. A hurdle.

He picked up his board by pushing his foot down on one end and flipping up the other side, so it smacked into his palm like a high-five.

He walked over to the wide, stone steps of the school. The metal handrails were freshly painted, hunter green.

The sweat slid down his neck and pooled in the small of his back between the two dimples God had placed like signposts at the northern edge of his ass.

He pulled at the collar of his t-shirt and blew air down on his chest. But it did not cool him.

In one rapid motion, as if someone had fired a gun, he suddenly took the steps two by two and lept up onto the handrail, his skateboard under his feet he slid down the length of it.

A sound like a knife being sharpened. Metal against metal.

He smiled as he saw the moist grass at the bottom of the steps speed into view.

His left foot caught on the edge of the railing and snapped off the end of his leg.

Pop. Like a tongue clicking.

Slam. Like a trunk closing.

He sat on the ground and watched the color spread, blue and red across his ankle.

He lifted the leg as if exercising it. His foot dangled limply and swayed slightly like his sister’s silver teardrop earring, lilting in the breeze.

Coin

When my parents were out and the sitter was on the phone with her boyfriend I would drop pennies out the window.

We lived on the twenty-second floor.

My dad kept a jar on his desk and told we that when it is was full he would give it to me. So I already considered it mine. I’d check to be sure no one was walking by before tossing, but it was still exciting.

I’d let my gerbil, Frank, walk around the den. He’d make little poops that blended in with the brown, checkered carpet.

My dad stepped on some once, but I didn’t tell him.

In my mother’s bathroom (she had her own) I would try on her makeup. Pushing too hard on my lips I snapped the red one in half. She rarely wore it.

I was lucky like that.

I wanted clogs, but wasn’t allowed. At the dinner table, I would sit on my right leg until I got pins and needles. Protest.

One day coming home from school, Pete the doorman gave me 10 packets of Sweet n’ Low.

“Softer than pennies”, he said.

Ash

The noodles stayed in the colander the whole weekend. They took up half the kitchen sink, got in everyone’s way, but still, there they stayed.

My mother was making a point.

Grace had said she would pitch in. Pasta salad. She had cooked an entire box, left it to drain and gone into town to buy a pack of Parliaments and Diet Pepsi, which only she drank.

They were still there at breakfast the next morning when I tried to wash the pan I had cooked the eggs in. My mother sponged the counter and looked at the back of Grace’s head.

Grace’s friends were camping in our yard. They were driving cross-country.

A small girl with freckles on her arms and enormous breasts. The boys were tall. One had a front tooth that crossed almost entirely over the one to next it. The other had a tattoo of a bird in flight, on his inner right forearm.

The toothy one mowed the lawn for my father.

Grace talked loudly about her plans to move to Spain.

Pulling the roast out of the oven, I could tell my mother was thinking: leave, now.

Grace didn’t have a passport. But she wanted to see bull fights.

“Blood. Beasts.” She’d say.

The tattooed boy, I think his name was Ryan, said his father had been to the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

Plastering himself sideways, tight against the rough Spanish walls as the bulls tore through, he had lost an eyebrow.

“ Could have been much worse”, Ryan said.

The next morning they left, leaving little molehills in the yard where their tent spokes had been. My father pushed them back in with his foot, like divots on a Polo field.

Grace stood at the sink looking out at the paperboy making his way up the driveway. Her long cigarette ash dangling over the noodles.

Bark

We drove around the neighborhood looking for the dog.

Dan in one car with Sarah still half asleep. Me still in my pajamas, with Jesse, in the other.

Sometime during the night, he’d dug his way through hedge. The thickest one that we wrongly thought would keep him in.

Jesse broke the news theatrically, and ran back out to start looking, leaving his tiny wet footprints, ghostly on the kitchen floor.

Morning dew.

My head throbbed. We had stayed up too late the night before, arguing about the election and plastic surgery. I had fallen asleep against Dan’s chest and my hair had tangled in his watchband. I touched the big messy knot and pulled at it vainly with my left hand. I wondered whether he would notice the blonde strands, when he checked the time.

Dan was heading towards the beach. I was heading into town.

We passed a woman I didn’t know. She was walking slowly but looking over her shoulder at something that wasn’t there.

On Main Street, Jesse asked if we could get pancakes. I told him I didn’t have my wallet and sharply asked how he could he think about food with the dog missing.

I regretted it later.

At the police station, I explained.

Sarah cried for about a week. Jesse would just sit quietly before bedtime, listening carefully for the scratchy metal sound the tags had made on his collar when he ran toward us.

Dan and I would stare, our feet propped on the old air mattress, at the hedge through which he had left, hoping it would part.

Pop

In the toy store, the stuffed animals were lined up on the shelves in neat rows.

The more expensive, bigger ones, perched high. The cheaper tinies, within my reach.

Once a month he would take me there.

Reflecting on my behavior, scratching his chin in deep concentration, he would finally point dramatically to the chosen shelf, from which I would pick.

The month I learned to jump into the pool without holding my nose, it was a high shelf. In response to my refusal to eat green beans, a low.

But still. I always got something.

He wore a straw hat with a wide ribbon band. A shiny black and red button, like a bullseye, perched on its left side.

Evenings after dinner, he'd put the hat on the table and rub the button, from underneath the hat would appear gum, candy, coins.

He delighted me.

When I got a bit older and boys would come to pick me up, sitting on the couch with a scotch in his right hand, he'd casually put out his cigarette on his tongue. Then he'd laugh. To take the fright out of them.

He showed me how to do it once. I was sitting on the toilet, my knees tucked under my chin watching him shave. He took the butt from his mouth, leaned down and presented his curled tongue, pooled with a little spit, for my inspection.

He'd put ketchup on everything my mother cooked and it made her crazy.

We'd play Blindman's Bluff in the yard. He'd spin me and spin me.

I ran straight into the pool once. He dove in after me.

I cried over my new denim overalls.

He peeled them off me gently and went inside to get a towel.

I stood there shivering on the grass, streaks of dark blue running down my legs.

Cold, but knowing he would be back soon.

Cut

It was the year that I cut my hair and regretted it. Now it was short, like a boy's and on rainy days I couldn't manage it. It made me angry. Weak.

That's probably why she got him that year. She was stronger then. I remember watching her walk away from me in her tiny green terry cloth skirt, her butt cheeks slipping out slightly like ripe grapes, loosened.

We had battled over things before. The necklace with the shark's tooth that Dad had changed his mind about and tossed into the cup holder in the Jeep. The last of the expensive perfume that Julia's friend from college had left in the guest bathroom.

I always won.

I hated the way my new hair stuck to my forehead like brown moss. I had a patch of pimples underneath now.

From behind the shed that Pete had built as penance the Summer he had crashed the car, I could see them moving towards eachother in the day room.

He was shorter than we were, but perfect in every other way. His jaw formed an exact right angle and at dinner with our weak chinned family, it was a constant topic of conversation.

His family had been coming down for the Summer since we were little, but it wasn't until his brother nearly drowned in the lake that we noticed him.

He spent one Summer teaching me to burp. We'd sit on the edge of the low wall and look over the bluff, our thighs nearly touching. We'd compare tans. Drinking Coke in glass bottles from the vending machine with peanuts curled up in the bottom. Southern style.

Once in a while he'd kiss me. Salty and sweet. I always craved a bowl of ice cream afterwards. I don't know why.

I saw him reach for her. His hand at the small of her back got tangled in her impossibly long hair. I felt the stubble at the base of my neck.

They'd come back from days lying on the dock, with matching sunburns. He'd let her peel the dead skin off his back. In long strips.

He touched me once that year. Just long enough to mess up my hair on his way out to the yard through the kitchen where I was chopping carrots.

At the end of each season, we'd all stand in a line and wave goodbye to his family as their shiny boat sped toward the mainland. But that year, he had set himself a challenge and wanted to row. So we watched him back away from us, like an insect scurrying on water, until he we couldn't tell him apart from the gulls feeding on the waterline in the far distance.

I picked at a splinter in the heel of my hand that I gotten climbing the elm in our yard, and I knew that I would never cut my hair again.

Pool

He was sitting at the bar drinking a beer and doing a crossword puzzle in ink.

I don't like men who wear shorts in the evening, and he was.

But we were born on the same day, five years apart and to me, it seemed like a sign.

That night, I walked home barefoot in the city streets, except for the last two blocks. Because he carried me.

Slung over his shoulder like a sack of wheat.

The blood rushing to my head, I could see the glitter in the pavement through my upside down hair.

He took me swimming in a blow up plastic kiddie pool on his roof. He wore a mask and a snorkel.

I thought it was funny.

Some days he'd wear a black bandana over his bald (shaved) head. I hated it but didn't tell him, because he made me the best fresh crab cakes and I didn't want him to ever stop.

His place was dirty, but there were two beautiful paintings of trees.

The nights that I slept over, I would wake up, my face, hot, pressed against the itchy sheets, and he'd be gone.

It upset me, but then I would hear his loud voice coming from the apartment next door. He had insomnia.

He'd had his teeth knocked out in a bar fight and the new ones were big and bright.

When he smiled, it looked crowded in his mouth and I wondered if it felt strange, tight.

At 6:24pm on a Thursday he told me that the arch of my brow unnerved him.

On the Friday, I put my toothbrush in my jacket pocket but accidentally left a pair socks under his couch.

His legs. No, it's private. He'd never forgive me.

Sometimes, when I am in the city, I see him.

Across the street, walking. Pushing his sunglasses absently back up onto his head, wiping the sweat off his brow. I always wonder how they stay put. He still has no hair.