My Fifteenth Year

I remember pushing my thumbs into the dull points of my canines and wishing I was dangerous. I daydreamed of violence like a pilot dreams of letting the nose of his plane kiss the ground, or a tourist at the top of the Empire State Building dreams of jumping.

My rage was nothing like an animal, alive and bleeding, and more like a cockroach crushed underfoot yet somehow still kicking. I could spend the day in silence, sitting in one class then another, hiding my fear with indifference, my anxiety with apathy. I wanted to understand everything and be understood by no one. I wanted to experience the fall without the bruises and scraped knees and breathlessness. I remember thinking the world owed me something and not the other way around, that I would go out and take it with my two empty hands.

Rachel Ruggera (she/her)

I thought the burning world would be louder, but then again the flames are far away. Here in my dad’s old garden it is just ash and quiet. Only the schick of the hand shovel sinking into soil, the soft fwumpumpump of clumps rolling off. I should have pulled the weeds first. I thought it would be easy to just dig them up with the dirt, get rid of everything all at once, but dandelion roots are surprisingly thick. Next to my growing hole is where we buried George-the-hamster. Or maybe it was Moose – one was eaten by the cat but I can’t remember which. Next to that is cousin Joey’s big toe. The doctor didn’t care when Joey begged to bring it home, but we ran out of ideas for what to do with the little chunk of flesh. So the hamster is marked by a rosemary bush, too stubborn to let me kill it, and the toe by a big rock, the same one that sliced it off. Dad had wanted to smash the rock into oblivion because of safety reasons and because you can never have too much gravel, but Joey had cried and cried until Dad promised the rock he would leave it untouched.

Christy’s eyes are on my bent-over bottom, I can feel them. Even through the smoke and the kitchen-window glass. She said, “Are you crazy? Don’t be crazy. You’re in no shape right now. Besides, no one is supposed to go outside. It’s bad for you.” So I listened and put on one of Dad’s old masks first. It’s the kind that looks a little like those pictures from one of the World Wars, maybe both, the same mask Dad used when he was working with wood or shaving metal or doing something else in the garage that made him a man.

When I insisted on doing it at home, in the garage, in my studio, Christy made her fussy baby look she never quite outgrew, not even after she took her bedside-manners class. She said that being this far along, I should be monitored at the clinic, with more staff than just her and her lowly RN title. I told her it was not lowly, that I trusted her to feed me the pills every thirty minutes. Maybe a painkiller too now and again. Mutterings of “bad idea” and “malpractice” continued, but it became a comforting drone like white noise or a long prayer. Christy checked my pulse, piled blankets on my body because the smoke blocked out all warmth, held my hand and stroked my hair the same way I did for her at night when we were kids because she has always been bad at sleeping. Afterwards, she whisked everything away and cleaned the leftover mess while I was in the shower. So I didn’t have to see anything more than necessary, she said. But the concrete floor of the garage is already covered in paint, some of it accidental and some of it on purpose, so what’s a little extra red, I think.

I didn’t want to do it on my bed because there are already enough monsters underneath, so I borrowed an inflatable mattress from the neighbors. The Woods were too polite to ask why, but we still paid mind to their distress that did not exist and covered the mattress with a plastic sheet. I was cold the whole almost-six-hours, especially my toes, but my skin slicked with sweat wherever plastic touched it. I thought I might just shoot off. But it wasn’t slippery; it stuck to my body like a sticky shell, crinkling so noisily with every little wiggle that I could pretend I didn’t hear Christy ask, “Are you okay? How are you feeling? Do you need anything?” It was strange for her to be the caregiver. People often ask if we are sisters and I think of her as my little cousin but really she is my aunt. This happens in families of thirteen children. My grandmother, my father and Christy’s mother, was pregnant for nearly twenty years straight. Now I understand why she was so mean by the time she died.

The smoke stings my eyes a bit. That’s why I’m teary. And even this fancy war mask can’t keep the smell of it out. Why is wildfire smoke so awful when campfire is so lovely? Like sniffing sparks into my nostrils that light me up from within, a human glow stick. But this wildfire stuff creeping under doors, seeping through even double-paned windows –it’s sickly, head-achingly sweet. The smell comes first and lingers last. It arrives before the daylight dyes orange and shadows sharpen and the sun turns red; it stays long after the smoke and ash. Although I’ve only learned this in the last few years because the world wasn’t really burning before.

Next to me is a bunched-up growbag; on my other side is a little shrub in a black plastic pot. I wanted a bell pepper plant because Christy said it would be about the size of a bell pepper assuming I really was eighteen weeks, and I had to be because there hadn’t been anyone since Paul. But at the gardening place yesterday, the petunias, the few that were blooming, stopped me not too far from the entrance.

Petunia was my father’s middle name. I had always thought it Peter because he had always said it was Peter. It was only on his death certificate I learned otherwise, discovered that my grandmother had had a peculiar sense of humor before she got too cranky to have any at all.

A lady in a green employee shirt came over, said she had seen me there for the last five minutes and that petunias were a wonderful annual. I asked what annual meant, although my head was stuck on, I’ve been standing here for ten. Oh, she said, do we have a gardening novice?

The garden was my dad’s. I’ve just mowed the grass since he died. Oh. I’m sorry for your loss.

It’s fine.

Perhaps a perennial would be a better fit. They bloom every year. Sure, I said. I didn’t mention bell peppers.

I’m fond of this butterfly bush myself. It’s good for our zone, and it attracts butterflies and hummingbirds.

I didn’t bother to ask what she meant by a zone. I just said, That sounds nice. Because it did. It does.

Digging my hole, there are shooting pains in my abdomen. Christy might have been right – I should have waited. I should have just put the growbag into the freezer next to the ice cream like that is a perfectly normal thing to do. Christy wouldn’t have said anything. She always let me boss her around, although she held out a surprisingly long time when I said “no clinic.” There would have been screamers because there always are. They would have spittled into my face about burning in Hell. And Christy knew as well as me that I would have spittle-screamed back, “Look at the sky! We are all of us burning in Hell already!” Maybe Christy was tired of my shit, even my hypothetical shit, and that’s why she caved. Or maybe she felt bad about pushing a test between my legs last week. Just to be sure, she had said. But I knew the weight gain was only depression, the missed periods were stress, the gut cramps IBS, the nausea poor diet and saccharin-y smoke. I knew that was all it was.

During the worst of, right at the end, I squeezed Christy’s hand and stared at one very blue painting propped against the wall. The painting isn’t done but I will never work on it again, so I suppose that makes it finished. I started it after Mexico with Paul. I wanted to swim down through the shades of aqua again, down to where it was quiet but a different kind of quiet than here in the smoke. Peaceful and cool but not dead. Down there I waved my hands at the sky, said goodbye to the waves where Paul’s legs were kicking. I walked on the ocean floor, kicked up sand in soft plumes, float-hopped from rock to rock. Alone and with little bubbles floating from my lips.

But a pink plus is like a buoy no one asked for. I could no longer make myself heavy enough to sink through the acrylic depths, no matter how hard I waved. Up in the furious waves, my body tumbled violently with everything I could do and couldn’t do, everything I wanted and didn’t want, anyone I should tell, everyone I didn’t have to, how I should decide, what was best for me, why this had to be so, so hard. Crashing against my head too were the three words I never announced to Paul. We had been so shaky for so long; Mexico was a last effort. No – it was a preplanned trip that neither of us wanted to lose money on, so we said it was a last effort when actually it was a last hurrah. So I decided to decide on my own. And I decided this decision because I have nothing except for my dad’s old house, and no one except for Christy, and… No. Like Christy said, I don’t need to explain myself.

It was only an hour ago that the bell pepper slipped out of me (although “slip” seems like the wrong word, considering the pain and the effort). That was that – now it’s at the bottom of my hole. I hesitate to cover it with soil, am tempted to open the growbag and look inside at the little alien that’s half-me. But thankfully the sides of the hole and the pile of displaced earth are unstable. Everything quakes, crumbles, falls. The bundle is disappeared. It is gone. I pull the butterfly bush from its pot and shake it over the hole like I have seen neighbors do. The roots hold firm to the soil. I massage them with my bare hand to coax them into releasing.

Around the freed, unruly roots I push with my hands what’s left of the dirt pile. Pour and pat, pour and pat, like the green-shirted gardening lady said. When the bush can stand upright on its own, I lean back on my knees. I don’t bother to clap my hands before taking off my mask. Let there be dirty marks on my face, let Christy panic if she can see through the ash, but I need my face uncovered. We said words for George-ormaybe-it-was-Moose, we gave a eulogy for Joey’s toe, but nothing comes to me now. My head is silent. This is okay. No screams or waves left; no pretty words. I am okay to just sit in the quiet, burning world with quiet, burnt thoughts. I am okay because it is just me and my butterfly bush, face-to-face.

Fairytale

Lauren Foster (she/her)

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