The Hothouse Lounge Kate Blakinger – First Place Contest Winner
My chest tightens as fire grazes Sam’s skin, but finally he tosses the match he’s let burn down in his fingers, and the pile of brush jumps into flames. Pockets of damp sap crackle and hiss. We retrieve an armful each of empty aerosol cans from the silo, cans Sam stockpiled over many summers spent working at Ray’s Auto Body. He sets them down in a row and sits next to me in the dead weeds. He’s hunched and quiet, his eyes glassy, his body tensed. Sometimes I miss Sam, even when he’s right beside me. I don’t have the right, but I do. “Teeth or hands?” I ask. “Hands.” He’s been having these recurring dreams. In one, all his teeth fall out. In the other, he tries desperately to hold on to someone, but his hands are crushed, useless as empty gloves. Sam is my brother, and he came home from Iraq with a face full of shrapnel. Hard pellets that look like blackheads cluster on his left cheek and spread in painful constellations across his neck, the skin crowded with shiny scar tissue. His body tries to expel what doesn’t belong. Jagged pieces pierce the skin from inside. It’s like the IED never stopped; it continues to explode from inside his face in excruciatingly slow motion. When it gets really bad, he slicks antibacterial ointment over the bleeding bumps and hides them under a cover of gauze. “You know what I did over there, Gracie? I tried not to die. Day and night, I tried not to die.” He pulls up weeds as he speaks. “What else could you have done?” It’s not comfort he wants. He wants to rip open a space in this life that is wide enough for all the fury he feels, but there’s no where to put feelings that sharp. I don’t know how to make room for that anger any more than anyone else does, but I know this is what he needs. Our mother believes a person can heal by force of will. If only Sam would exert a little self-discipline, he could re-take his old life. I’m not sure we can fool ourselves, however hard we pretend. Once I caught Sam with a look of concentration on his face, his fist held out before him, closed and squeezing. When he opened it, inside was a shard of shrapnel that had worked its way out of his cheek, its barb now buried back in the meat of him again. I got the rubbing alcohol. I pried loose the jagged metal, trying not to breathe as I swabbed away the blood. I tucked the piece of the bomb that had killed everyone else riding in his Bradley Fighting Vehicle out of sight in my pocket. Later I looked at it in the light. It was shaped like a country
whose name I didn’t know. I closed my hand tightly around it. The resulting cut healed, of course, left no trace on me. Sam lives out here again with our mother, in this backwater place where there isn’t much to do besides burn things. He sleeps in his childhood bedroom, tossing in the narrow twin bed that hardly fits his adult body while the dormer ceiling, banded with glow-in-the-dark stars, presses down. I make the three-hour drive from the city to visit him and Mama every other weekend. “You ready?” he asks me now. We stand, me in my sneakers; and Sam in his army-issued boots. We pick up as many aerosols as we can hold, and on the count of three, we toss them into the flames and I turn and run to take cover behind the door of the silo like we always do, but then I realize Sam is not beside me, he hasn’t moved, he hasn’t even taken a step back. The aerosol cans explode in the fire, and he just stands there while they slam into the sky, like he’s daring one to firebomb him in the face, like he’d like it to happen that way, and his expression is rapturous, the fire in the sky beyond him a beautiful thing. I tell my mother about the articles I’ve been writing. I make it all up and it hollows me out to tell her lies, but I can’t help myself. The lies pour out of me in a chatty, cheerful voice. She thinks I write a column for the South Philly Review, my neighborhood’s newspaper. She thinks I write about park clean ups and new restaurant openings. “Bring me clippings to pin to the fridge,” she says. “You never remember.” “I will, Mama. I’m sorry.” A black feeling balloons in me. My mother wants me to be happy so badly she changes the subject whenever I vent the slightest frustration. I’ve been cut short so many times. When we talk now, I reflexively gloss over the true substance of my life. I want to ask her if I go running after something with my whole heart and don’t get it, what happens then? But she’d want to know what I was talking about and I’d have to detail to her all the ways in which I’m not the daughter she planned on. I’d have to tell her about my job. I’d have to tell her I’m in love with a girl. She fixes me a bowl of soup, and I eat it slowly, though it’s getting late, and I have a long drive back to Philadelphia. The highways around here are dangerous at dusk, so empty you can press the pedal to the ground and fly forward without feeling like you’re going fast at all, but in the woods that sidle up to the shoulder, deer wait, ready to leap into your headlights and
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