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MAGAZINE

WALLACE PRIZE 2014

MFC% OC@ @JJL< - N8CC8:< GI@Q< )'(+ MFC% OC@ @JJL< , D8I:? )'(+

Recurrence First-Place Nonfiction

BY JESSICA BLAU

08 Let Sleeping Dogs Fly Second-Place Nonfiction

BY TAO TAO HOLMES

04

The Wallace Prize is the most prestigious independently awarded undergraduate writing prize for fiction and nonfiction at Yale. The Wallace Prize is awarded annually in memory of Peter J. Wallace â&#x20AC;&#x2122;64, a former member of the Yale Daily News editorial board.

The winning submissions in each category are published in this issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine. Judges are professionals drawn from the fields of academia and journalism, and have no connection to the News.

Taut and Bound

19

Third-Place Nonfiction

BY ISABEL ORTIZ

13

Pennies and Pilgrims Third-Place Nonfiction

BY JULIA CALAGIOVANNI

Children with Playthings Second-Place Fiction

BY SHAWNNA THOMAS

29

24 Octavian Love Letters First-Place Fiction

BY JAKE ORBISON

DAILY NEWS

Funeral Third-Place Fiction

by ABIGAIL CARNEY

33

MAGAZINE Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza

Associate Editors Jennifer Gersten Andrea Januta Claire Mufson Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Ian Gonzalez Elizabeth Malchione Douglas Plume Design Staff Amra Saric Copy Staff Adam Mahler Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong

3

FIRST-PLACE NONFICTION

BY JESSICA BLAU BUDGET SUITES, 2001 That spring, we live at the Budget Suites on the edge of the strip. My mother goes in to the business office every Monday and reserves our hotel roomapartment hybrid for another week. We switch units a couple of times. In one room, the air conditioner is broken, and even in the springtime Las Vegas is too hot to just leave the windows open. In another, we have ants.

We get up extra early in the mornings because it’s at least a half hour drive to my elementary school.

The first week, I am late every day and I show up out of uniform because my mother didn’t think to pack any of my school clothes. I spend the whole week in bright colors and jeans before my kindergarten teacher calls my mother in.

“Sorry, we’ll do better,” my mother says that Friday when she picks me up. She walks me towards the exit and my teacher doesn’t get a chance to respond before we are in my mother’s car, a new black convertible that has only two seats.

We drive right by our house on our way to the freeway. I press my nose to the window. My mother doesn’t look away from the road.

W

e used to live in Summerlin, before the Budget Suites, and we continue to live there for a little while after my mother’s first period of independence. I remember looking at our suburban community the year before from my father’s helicopter. There were rows and rows of houses with pools that took up most of the backyards and every few blocks, large plots of grass with palm trees lining the perimeters.

Our house was a two-story copy with white walls and white carpets. My mother hated the whiteness, said everything was always dirty, and spent a lot of time with the vacuum cleaner and a bottle of Clorox.

She is happy, I think, when our mini-apartment is dark-colored. The floor and the walls are brown,

4 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

nonfiction and the single loveseat in the living room that doubles as the dining room is a muted orange. I miss my bedroom.

I miss my white sheets and my plush carpet and my own bed and my cat and my father. But I am glad, too, that she took me with her, that she wants me with her.

We spend most of our time together.

After she picks me up from school, she finds us dinner. We watch movies and we dance to her favorite songs and I do my homework on the floor while she watches me. Then we go to sleep, side by side in the queen-sized bed.

Some nights, we trek down to the pool. I feel like a fish in the water, like it’s where I belong. I alternate between dropping a set of keys to the bottom of the pool and diving down to retrieve them. I like to do it without opening my eyes if I can, by just skimming my hands and my body against the pool’s floor until I can feel the metal against my skin. In the shallow end, I dip my head just below the surface and hold my breath for as long as I can.

My mother doesn’t swim. She stews in the sweltering water of the hot tub with a can of Diet Coke and a bucket of ice. When I get tired, I join her. Every few minutes, I have to get out and jump into the pool, or at least lie on the cement, but she can sit in the water all night.

My mother looks different in the glow of the hot tub lights. Her skin becomes a dark almond and her hair curls and tangles on her shoulders. She almost looks like a mermaid when she puts both her arms in the water, like she’s rising from the sea.

It reminds me of this picture I have of her from when she was younger.

I think she must have been 19 or 20 because her hair is long and permed into curls so tight that she doesn’t even look like herself. She’s sitting on a curb in shorts and a T-shirt, with a travelling pack strapped to her back, and it’s the end of summer, probably, because her legs are tanned and thin. She looks happy. She looks free.

SUMMERLIN, 2004 We meet Charlie at the Starbucks we go to every Saturday morning. My mother’s friend Janie, a blonde 40-yearold who sometimes strips at Cheetahs, is dating Charlie’s father.

Charlie looks like an overgrown boy.

He wears grey sweatpants and a T-shirt, and a thin layer of hair coats his chin.

My mother loves it. I think he makes her feel like a teenager, even though she’s 34 already.

In a few months, once we are both in love with Charlie, he will buy a pet tarantula and name it after my mother.

He’ll ask me if I want to hold it.

“They don’t bite,” he’ll say.

“Promise.”

I will shake my head no, and still, I will cup my hands and close my eyes.

I’ll swear I can feel it crawl across my fingers, its hairy legs scraping past my skin. When I open my eyes, it’ll turn out that there was never anything in my hands, and I will open and close my palms and wonder at the empty space between them.

W

hen Charlie’s sons first come to live with us, a few months after Charlie moves in to our house, I go crazy for Skylar. He’s only 5, blonde, and what I picture my children will look like someday. His shoulder blades are angel wings and he likes to jut his chest forward and push his shoulders back so that we can all admire them.

Petey, the second son, the 2-year-old, is less interesting. He sleeps most of the day, and when he doesn’t, he ambles through the living room, walking along like he’s tumbling or hardly walking at all. I’m not supposed to pick him up and carry him, because I might drop him. My mother doesn’t pick him up either.

I don’t remember either of them, much past that. I have this memory of being in the swimming pool one afternoon. Skylar is there too, but it’s just the two of us. He does laps around the pool, his kickboard hugging his chest, while I lie lazily in the water,

trying to fill my lungs with enough air to keep me afloat without having to kick.

Skylar starts to thrash in the water, and I look over to see his arms beating, his kickboard just out of reach. I don’t remember, really, if I swim over to help him, but I must, because in a few moments, he is hanging on to the pool’s edge, his fingers turning white with the pressure.

Skylar and Petey go live with their mom after a while. I cry for days before I realize that I’m not suited for sisterhood, anyway.

O

n the Fourth of July, Charlie drives us to his father’s house for hot dogs and fireworks. I wear as little clothing as possible and tie my hair up into a tight ponytail.

When we get there, my mother and I go to the backyard to pick fruit. We like to scour the grass for crabapples and oranges and peaches and apricots. She picks them all up at first, dodging only the fruit with gaping holes or maggots worming through the skin. I am more particular. I pick up a peach, turn it over in my hands, and most often, put it back on the ground.

Soon, she is called back to the patio for food. Charlie is standing over the barbeque, his shirt off and his skin just starting to sweat. Periodically, the mist fans on the side of the house go off, and he is pelted with water droplets.

She walks towards him, and when she’s within his reach, he grabs her around the waist. She laughs loudly and tries to twist out of his arms. I trail behind her and nestle into a patio chair.

I like to watch them when they’re together. Sometimes, I wish I was in the middle with them, too, that my mother would pick me up and Charlie would wrap his arms around the both of us.

They see me looking at them, and Charlie calls me over.

“Burger or hot dog?” he says once I make my way, barefoot, across the hot concrete.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

nonfiction

T

hat night, after my belly is full and my eyes are starting to drift shut, I retreat to a lounge chair further in the yard. The whole table is still shouting and laughing. I watch Charlie clink his glass against Janie’s, and Charlie’s father holds his glass towards my mother.

“Congratulations,” I think I hear Charlie’s father say, the liquid in the glass sloshing to the brim.

They all smile and I sink further back into the recliner. It’s just dark enough that the fireworks are starting to go off. They shoot into the sky, one after another at first, until the whole sky is filled at the same time. I want to ask if we have any, if we’re setting any off, or if they have a sparkler for me, even.

I shout to them, but nobody hears me over the cracks. They just keep talking. Janie motions her arms in front of her face, and Charlie and his father laugh. My mother doesn’t speak. She leans back in her chair. I can’t really tell in the dark, but she looks almost like she’s grimacing.

6 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

LAS VEGAS, 2006 The second time my mother gets engaged, I am 11 and it is the summer before I start junior high. That morning, instead of dropping me off at day camp like usual, she lets me sleep. When I wake up, at first, I think that maybe she is sick, or one of our cats has run away, or she’s forgotten me and gone to work.

I find her in the living room. She sits on the floor with her legs to her chest, her chin resting on her knees. When she sees me, she unfolds like a flower and motions me over.

“You didn’t go to work?” I ask as I sit beside her, pressing my back against the leather couch. She doesn’t say anything and I’m not sure she’s even heard me.

Instead, she reaches over and holds me and we both stare into the black screen of the television until I can almost see our reflection.

My mother looks beautiful. She has exotic skin and doe eyes and is always distracted. Some nights when I am at

the end of my bath, she sits on the edge of the tub and braids my hair. I dip my chin into the bubbles that come to the tub’s rim as she tells me how glad she is that it’s just the two of us, that it’s always been just the two of us. She weaves her hands, fingers looping one under the other, until my hair is tied back so tightly that my temples stretch towards the back of my head. She finds me a towel.

Sometimes she comes back to my room after she thinks I’m asleep. She sits on the end of my bed as though she is keeping a vigil, as though she is a child afraid to be on her own. My mother doesn’t like to be lonely. My mother is only my mother some of the time.

As I sit and stare at her through the television screen, I find my arms worming their way around her back until she isn’t just holding me, but we are hugging. I ask her if she is sad and she tells me she isn’t. I wonder if she is telling the truth.

“I’m getting married,” she says, her mouth moving against my hair.

nonfiction “Oh,” I say and nod my head as though I believe her.

B

y the fall, my mother has a new boyfriend. His name is Clyde and he’s a bouncer at a club called Cherry. He likes to take her out on nights that he’s not working. I stay home alone and when she calls the house phone late at night to make sure I’m OK, I sometimes just let it ring.

LAS VEGAS, 2006 I am friends with a girl named Echo in sixth grade. She has long blonde hair and a smattering of freckles across her face. I like her because she thinks I’m funny and she braids my hair for me, but mostly I like her because my mother doesn’t.

She invites me to her house for a sleepover once. I’ve been there before, in the daytime, but my mother doesn’t let me spend the night because Echo’s parents are never around and her sister is a high school dropout.

I beg and whine and plead with my mother until she gives in.

“You never let me do anything,” I tell her, until finally she gets tired of listening to me ask if I can spend the night, or just tired of me in general.

Echo and I go to her house on a Friday after we finish school. She lives within walking distance, but just barely, and by the time we make it there I’m sweaty and I miss being picked up in my air-conditioned car.

She lives in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. For a long time, hers is the only cul-de-sac I’ve ever really seen.

She has a pet iguana and three dogs. I only see her parents once before they leave for the night.

We spend hours on her computer and downstairs doing our makeup.

When it starts to get dark, we lie on the couch and watch MTV. Her brother, who’s 14, comes home just after nine.

Justice is tall and attractive. He has dark hair and isn’t interested in me at all. When he walks in the house, he

looks at us only briefly before he stalks upstairs to his bedroom. Soon, he calls Echo up, and when she comes back down she sits on her legs and asks me if I want to go smoke with her brother.

“Um,” I say, “I don’t smoke.”

“That’s OK, you can still come with us,” she says, tilting her head to the side.

T

hey have a garden shed in the backyard. It’s made of wood and the door is closed shut with a padlock that only looks half on. Justice smashes it in with a hammer and we pile inside.

At first, I think it will just be the three of us, but then the door is wedged open again a few minutes later, and a large Hispanic boy holding a sweatshirt in one hand and a gun in the other walks in. I recognize him as the boy that lives a few houses down on their street.

He closes the door behind him and we each sit in a corner of the shed. Echo and I sit on stools, Justice on the floor, and the boy on a wooden box. Justice lights a blunt and passes around a bottle of alcohol.

“Are you scared of this?” The boy says to me, motioning to the gun between his feet. I don’t say anything.

I wonder, sometimes, how long it would take for my mother to panic if I didn’t come home in the morning, if she would call the police right away as soon as she called me and I wasn’t there, or if she’d wait me out, thinking that I was just trying to hurt her.

He asks me again, but I don’t respond, and he loses interest. He watches Echo, instead, who’s choking on the smoke she’s just tried to inhale. When she starts to cough harder, he takes her outside by the arm, and I can hear her vomit on the rocks.

I

wake up early the next morning and call my mother on my cell phone.

She doesn’t answer the first time, so I call again.

“Will you come pick me up?” I say.

“Now?” she says. She sounds like she’s just woken up.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m ready to go.”

“I’m coming,” she says. Her car doesn’t pull up for almost half an hour, and once it does, I run out to meet it in the middle of the street.

“Did something happen?” she says when I slip into the passenger seat.

“No,” I say.

“You sure?”

“She just has to go somewhere with her parents,” I lie.

I buckle my seatbelt and press my back into the leather seat. I can’t help but think she shouldn’t have let me go.

CENTENNIAL, 2008 The night we move in to the new house, the car rumbles under the weight of our possessions. The movers won’t arrive until the next morning, but we have what was most important anyways: the cats, our clothes, and my mother’s dishes.

The house is empty and beautiful. The kitchen cabinets are a cherry red, and the appliances all stainless steel. There’s no carpet, just wood floors, and the walls are dark beige. I imagine that we will be happy in this house, together.

While my mother takes a bath, I unpack the few linens we have in the car.

I spread out blankets in the middle of my new bedroom and toss the pillows on top. I walk through the house, slipping my socks against the hardwood floor, until my mother gets out of the shower and I take her place.

When I get out, she is already asleep. I slide on top the makeshift bed without turning the lights on.

She faces away from me, her dark hair spilling onto the pillow. I curl my knees to my belly and slip my hands under my head.

I almost want to call her name, to say “Mom” and have her wake up long enough to look over at me and tell me goodnight, but I don’t say anything. I lie awake and watch her body move with her breath. I stare so hard that she starts to blend with the background, her body enveloped by the dark, until it’s almost like she isn’t even there and I’ve been alone all along.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

nonfiction and the single loveseat in the living room that doubles as the dining room is a muted orange. I miss my bedroom.

I miss my white sheets and my plush carpet and my own bed and my cat and my father. But I am glad, too, that she took me with her, that she wants me with her.

We spend most of our time together.

After she picks me up from school, she finds us dinner. We watch movies and we dance to her favorite songs and I do my homework on the floor while she watches me. Then we go to sleep, side by side in the queen-sized bed.

Some nights, we trek down to the pool. I feel like a fish in the water, like it’s where I belong. I alternate between dropping a set of keys to the bottom of the pool and diving down to retrieve them. I like to do it without opening my eyes if I can, by just skimming my hands and my body against the pool’s floor until I can feel the metal against my skin. In the shallow end, I dip my head just below the surface and hold my breath for as long as I can.

My mother doesn’t swim. She stews in the sweltering water of the hot tub with a can of Diet Coke and a bucket of ice. When I get tired, I join her. Every few minutes, I have to get out and jump into the pool, or at least lie on the cement, but she can sit in the water all night.

My mother looks different in the glow of the hot tub lights. Her skin becomes a dark almond and her hair curls and tangles on her shoulders. She almost looks like a mermaid when she puts both her arms in the water, like she’s rising from the sea.

It reminds me of this picture I have of her from when she was younger.

I think she must have been 19 or 20 because her hair is long and permed into curls so tight that she doesn’t even look like herself. She’s sitting on a curb in shorts and a T-shirt, with a travelling pack strapped to her back, and it’s the end of summer, probably, because her legs are tanned and thin. She looks happy. She looks free.

SUMMERLIN, 2004 We meet Charlie at the Starbucks we go to every Saturday morning. My mother’s friend Janie, a blonde 40-yearold who sometimes strips at Cheetahs, is dating Charlie’s father.

Charlie looks like an overgrown boy.

He wears grey sweatpants and a T-shirt, and a thin layer of hair coats his chin.

My mother loves it. I think he makes her feel like a teenager, even though she’s 34 already.

In a few months, once we are both in love with Charlie, he will buy a pet tarantula and name it after my mother.

He’ll ask me if I want to hold it.

“They don’t bite,” he’ll say.

“Promise.”

I will shake my head no, and still, I will cup my hands and close my eyes.

I’ll swear I can feel it crawl across my fingers, its hairy legs scraping past my skin. When I open my eyes, it’ll turn out that there was never anything in my hands, and I will open and close my palms and wonder at the empty space between them.

W

hen Charlie’s sons first come to live with us, a few months after Charlie moves in to our house, I go crazy for Skylar. He’s only 5, blonde, and what I picture my children will look like someday. His shoulder blades are angel wings and he likes to jut his chest forward and push his shoulders back so that we can all admire them.

Petey, the second son, the 2-year-old, is less interesting. He sleeps most of the day, and when he doesn’t, he ambles through the living room, walking along like he’s tumbling or hardly walking at all. I’m not supposed to pick him up and carry him, because I might drop him. My mother doesn’t pick him up either.

I don’t remember either of them, much past that. I have this memory of being in the swimming pool one afternoon. Skylar is there too, but it’s just the two of us. He does laps around the pool, his kickboard hugging his chest, while I lie lazily in the water,

trying to fill my lungs with enough air to keep me afloat without having to kick.

Skylar starts to thrash in the water, and I look over to see his arms beating, his kickboard just out of reach. I don’t remember, really, if I swim over to help him, but I must, because in a few moments, he is hanging on to the pool’s edge, his fingers turning white with the pressure.

Skylar and Petey go live with their mom after a while. I cry for days before I realize that I’m not suited for sisterhood, anyway.

O

n the Fourth of July, Charlie drives us to his father’s house for hot dogs and fireworks. I wear as little clothing as possible and tie my hair up into a tight ponytail.

When we get there, my mother and I go to the backyard to pick fruit. We like to scour the grass for crabapples and oranges and peaches and apricots. She picks them all up at first, dodging only the fruit with gaping holes or maggots worming through the skin. I am more particular. I pick up a peach, turn it over in my hands, and most often, put it back on the ground.

Soon, she is called back to the patio for food. Charlie is standing over the barbeque, his shirt off and his skin just starting to sweat. Periodically, the mist fans on the side of the house go off, and he is pelted with water droplets.

She walks towards him, and when she’s within his reach, he grabs her around the waist. She laughs loudly and tries to twist out of his arms. I trail behind her and nestle into a patio chair.

I like to watch them when they’re together. Sometimes, I wish I was in the middle with them, too, that my mother would pick me up and Charlie would wrap his arms around the both of us.

They see me looking at them, and Charlie calls me over.

“Burger or hot dog?” he says once I make my way, barefoot, across the hot concrete.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

nonfiction

T

hat night, after my belly is full and my eyes are starting to drift shut, I retreat to a lounge chair further in the yard. The whole table is still shouting and laughing. I watch Charlie clink his glass against Janie’s, and Charlie’s father holds his glass towards my mother.

“Congratulations,” I think I hear Charlie’s father say, the liquid in the glass sloshing to the brim.

They all smile and I sink further back into the recliner. It’s just dark enough that the fireworks are starting to go off. They shoot into the sky, one after another at first, until the whole sky is filled at the same time. I want to ask if we have any, if we’re setting any off, or if they have a sparkler for me, even.

I shout to them, but nobody hears me over the cracks. They just keep talking. Janie motions her arms in front of her face, and Charlie and his father laugh. My mother doesn’t speak. She leans back in her chair. I can’t really tell in the dark, but she looks almost like she’s grimacing.

6 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

LAS VEGAS, 2006 The second time my mother gets engaged, I am 11 and it is the summer before I start junior high. That morning, instead of dropping me off at day camp like usual, she lets me sleep. When I wake up, at first, I think that maybe she is sick, or one of our cats has run away, or she’s forgotten me and gone to work.

I find her in the living room. She sits on the floor with her legs to her chest, her chin resting on her knees. When she sees me, she unfolds like a flower and motions me over.

“You didn’t go to work?” I ask as I sit beside her, pressing my back against the leather couch. She doesn’t say anything and I’m not sure she’s even heard me.

Instead, she reaches over and holds me and we both stare into the black screen of the television until I can almost see our reflection.

My mother looks beautiful. She has exotic skin and doe eyes and is always distracted. Some nights when I am at

the end of my bath, she sits on the edge of the tub and braids my hair. I dip my chin into the bubbles that come to the tub’s rim as she tells me how glad she is that it’s just the two of us, that it’s always been just the two of us. She weaves her hands, fingers looping one under the other, until my hair is tied back so tightly that my temples stretch towards the back of my head. She finds me a towel.

Sometimes she comes back to my room after she thinks I’m asleep. She sits on the end of my bed as though she is keeping a vigil, as though she is a child afraid to be on her own. My mother doesn’t like to be lonely. My mother is only my mother some of the time.

As I sit and stare at her through the television screen, I find my arms worming their way around her back until she isn’t just holding me, but we are hugging. I ask her if she is sad and she tells me she isn’t. I wonder if she is telling the truth.

“I’m getting married,” she says, her mouth moving against my hair.

nonfiction “Oh,” I say and nod my head as though I believe her.

B

y the fall, my mother has a new boyfriend. His name is Clyde and he’s a bouncer at a club called Cherry. He likes to take her out on nights that he’s not working. I stay home alone and when she calls the house phone late at night to make sure I’m OK, I sometimes just let it ring.

LAS VEGAS, 2006 I am friends with a girl named Echo in sixth grade. She has long blonde hair and a smattering of freckles across her face. I like her because she thinks I’m funny and she braids my hair for me, but mostly I like her because my mother doesn’t.

She invites me to her house for a sleepover once. I’ve been there before, in the daytime, but my mother doesn’t let me spend the night because Echo’s parents are never around and her sister is a high school dropout.

I beg and whine and plead with my mother until she gives in.

“You never let me do anything,” I tell her, until finally she gets tired of listening to me ask if I can spend the night, or just tired of me in general.

Echo and I go to her house on a Friday after we finish school. She lives within walking distance, but just barely, and by the time we make it there I’m sweaty and I miss being picked up in my air-conditioned car.

She lives in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. For a long time, hers is the only cul-de-sac I’ve ever really seen.

She has a pet iguana and three dogs. I only see her parents once before they leave for the night.

We spend hours on her computer and downstairs doing our makeup.

When it starts to get dark, we lie on the couch and watch MTV. Her brother, who’s 14, comes home just after nine.

Justice is tall and attractive. He has dark hair and isn’t interested in me at all. When he walks in the house, he

looks at us only briefly before he stalks upstairs to his bedroom. Soon, he calls Echo up, and when she comes back down she sits on her legs and asks me if I want to go smoke with her brother.

“Um,” I say, “I don’t smoke.”

“That’s OK, you can still come with us,” she says, tilting her head to the side.

T

hey have a garden shed in the backyard. It’s made of wood and the door is closed shut with a padlock that only looks half on. Justice smashes it in with a hammer and we pile inside.

At first, I think it will just be the three of us, but then the door is wedged open again a few minutes later, and a large Hispanic boy holding a sweatshirt in one hand and a gun in the other walks in. I recognize him as the boy that lives a few houses down on their street.

He closes the door behind him and we each sit in a corner of the shed. Echo and I sit on stools, Justice on the floor, and the boy on a wooden box. Justice lights a blunt and passes around a bottle of alcohol.

“Are you scared of this?” The boy says to me, motioning to the gun between his feet. I don’t say anything.

I wonder, sometimes, how long it would take for my mother to panic if I didn’t come home in the morning, if she would call the police right away as soon as she called me and I wasn’t there, or if she’d wait me out, thinking that I was just trying to hurt her.

He asks me again, but I don’t respond, and he loses interest. He watches Echo, instead, who’s choking on the smoke she’s just tried to inhale. When she starts to cough harder, he takes her outside by the arm, and I can hear her vomit on the rocks.

I

wake up early the next morning and call my mother on my cell phone.

She doesn’t answer the first time, so I call again.

“Will you come pick me up?” I say.

“Now?” she says. She sounds like she’s just woken up.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m ready to go.”

“I’m coming,” she says. Her car doesn’t pull up for almost half an hour, and once it does, I run out to meet it in the middle of the street.

“Did something happen?” she says when I slip into the passenger seat.

“No,” I say.

“You sure?”

“She just has to go somewhere with her parents,” I lie.

I buckle my seatbelt and press my back into the leather seat. I can’t help but think she shouldn’t have let me go.

CENTENNIAL, 2008 The night we move in to the new house, the car rumbles under the weight of our possessions. The movers won’t arrive until the next morning, but we have what was most important anyways: the cats, our clothes, and my mother’s dishes.

The house is empty and beautiful. The kitchen cabinets are a cherry red, and the appliances all stainless steel. There’s no carpet, just wood floors, and the walls are dark beige. I imagine that we will be happy in this house, together.

While my mother takes a bath, I unpack the few linens we have in the car.

I spread out blankets in the middle of my new bedroom and toss the pillows on top. I walk through the house, slipping my socks against the hardwood floor, until my mother gets out of the shower and I take her place.

When I get out, she is already asleep. I slide on top the makeshift bed without turning the lights on.

She faces away from me, her dark hair spilling onto the pillow. I curl my knees to my belly and slip my hands under my head.

I almost want to call her name, to say “Mom” and have her wake up long enough to look over at me and tell me goodnight, but I don’t say anything. I lie awake and watch her body move with her breath. I stare so hard that she starts to blend with the background, her body enveloped by the dark, until it’s almost like she isn’t even there and I’ve been alone all along.

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The Octavian Love Letters fiction

FIRST-PLACE FICTION

by Jake Orbison

H

ail. Everybody hail Augustus.

Augustus, who didn’t need glasses; Augustus, my friend.

Augustus and I haven’t spoken in ten years, and he is not missing.

A

ugustus was all this and he was no dream. I saw him, was with him.

Augustus, does he notice me?

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Something dark rustles and shakes the bushes. We don’t talk. It is — watching — us. We both know it’s out there, but Augustus just lies back with his arms at his sides, looking up at the sky. He and I are sitting on the Upper Field, where we had gym, next to the auditorium.

It is night, though, and we are alone.

The ground is wet so I’m sitting up, but

illustrations by Aube Rey Lescure Augustus is lying on his back with his arms at his sides.

I say, Something is out there, right? …

Something is there, I mean. Auggie? We should either go out there or leave.

Augustus?

He turns his head to me for a moment, then back, and it suddenly dawns on me that he’s quiet because he’s nervous.

fiction He holds his thumb and forefinger up, and pinches them close. So close. So close to what? The sky? He starts waving them around, his thin pincers, and then waves goodbye with his whole hand.

Good-bye. Good-bye to what, Auggie?

The sky? I look up and I see what he’s actually doing — he’s handling the stars, rearranging them. An expanse lies right above him that’s completely rubbed clean. Hundreds of thousands of miles across, infinitely in, Augustus wiped the natural lights to the side like a pastry crust. One by one he drags them inside the frame again. I can see tiny squares first. Then little triangles attach, which makes them trapezoids for a moment, then octagons. Eight octagons, each part of three larger polygons, but when I go back to look for a moment at the little squares, I can’t find them.

When he finishes, Augustus stands and traces the shapes with his forefinger, as if they were Braille — as if he could read Braille, and the story he were tracing were just breaking his heart. He looks back down at the wet grass, and up again at the stars. Then at me, and then down once more to the wet grass. He bends his knees, pauses for a moment to prepare, and finally shoots like a cricket up into the sky. Faster and faster, farther and farther, he flies until he’s almost as small as a star himself, the fire of ignition trailing behind him. He goes around tracing the shape in flight the way he had just done with his finger.

I stand up and yell Wait! Auggie! Hold on — I’m coming! I spread my arms out and try to push off the ground — Wait!

— but nothing. I jump and tumble back onto the grass, where I feel again a rustle in the trees that face the street. This can’t be real, I think, of course! Augustus would never leave me here.

Wake up. I slam the ground and feel it reverberate in my hands. Wake up!

Pounding now with my fists: WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP!

A

ugustus came in like the hiccups.

The teacher, Ms. Blaire, had her hand on his back and said, This is Augustus. Everyone say hi. He’s going to

be joining our 1B class, okay?

And then, all in toy voices: Hiiiii Auuguuustuuus.

Augustus you sit down right here next to Archie, okay?

Okay.

Augustus this is Archie. Archie this is Augustus.

Hi Augustus.

and in the middle of the Upper Field, there would be Augustus hysterical, just crying his eyes out because the green team was losing at soccer. The green team was actively, almost aggressively bad at handball because the gym teacher knew he was good and made his team bad so it would be even. He was never even supposed to win! Augustus!

A

A

ugustus had green eyes and didn’t talk much, usually. I had an icepack that kept my lunch cold. It was either peanut butter and jelly or turkey, but I didn’t like either since the turkey made everything smell and the bread of the PB & J got too soggy, as soggy as the note from my mother, with the ink bleeding back onto the sandwiches: HI BABY BOY. HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A GOOD DAY AT SCHOOL. XOXO MOM I don’t remember whether I liked school or not then. Not until Augustus and I became friends for sure, but I guess that’s when you start liking and not liking things anyway. That was much later: We started trading lunches when I was seven.

A

ugustus hated to lose and used to cry during gym. He would build things in homeroom, and wouldn’t talk much except for when he extended his greasy paper bag towards me, thankfully, at lunchtime; class didn’t interest him, but he liked to compete.

The only thing he liked more than winning was the sports themselves: how they looked, how they worked, and how it felt to know how to win and to do it. He was always picked first because he was very athletic looking, despite his silence. He would get red running back and forth, and he would get angry. He played physically, but his team still never won. When I said anything, which was not often, I would say, Augustus, it was everyone, not just you. You couldn’t have done anything — how could it be your fault? But he would cry. Everyone would run around, squeal, and giggle,

ugustus lived on a street with no other buildings, just his. It had red jutting bricks and wooden windows and a fence that stretched on either side to the corners of the streets.

Splotches of yellow and purple paper flowers came up from out of cracks in the gray sidewalk like they were blossoming, but they had always been there, even in March. The lot behind had tires and glass and grass and purple and yellow flowers and other things, all spread evenly across the block, fenced in by wooden signs like the windows, saying “PRIVATE” and “NO TRASH.” We didn’t usually walk past his house to get to my house. When we did I said, We could stay here?

And he said, No, you wouldn’t like it.

Do you like it, though?

No. But he liked me so he let me come with him. Augustus lived on the third floor, the top floor. Inside was darker than outside, even though it was dusk.

There was nothing really. A rug. A boy older than us was sleeping against the wall, and his sister sat on the chair. There was a T.V. giving off a weak blue light to the rest of the room and the kitchen also was small, dark, and full.

Hi Auggie.

Hi Judy. This is Archie, my friend.

Hi Archie.

Hey Judy.

Would you like to sit?

No, thanks, I’m ok.

That’s my brother, Marcus.

Augustus said that he loved his siblings, but the rug was his favorite part of the apartment. It was an oriental rug.

Its exterior was constant, complicated, contained within itself. Your eyes could glaze over all the little curves and lilts,

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fiction and if you had years you couldn’t find all the shapes inside. To enter the design of the rug, to really get into it, you had to not know what you were looking for, and get lost. If you were looking for rectangles you could find four of them, and six triangles, all organized into two tilted squares, but you would miss everything octagonal, and you would miss the fish swimming in the veins of the shapes and you wouldn’t have to deal with the stains. You said it works (but not as well) with text on the page, and that you would look at the big books even before you could read so well.

A

ugustus would smile when I talked about other people. I started with our teacher, Ms. Bleckner — eighth grade. She was small and had one leg shorter than the other. A gigantic ass. And I said to Augustus, Aren’t ugly people supposed to be nice? And he looked at me wanting to disapprove but when he caught my eyes we both broke.

He was mean only through me. No, I’m not trying to be mean, I said. But aren’t people who aren’t physically attractive supposed to be attractive in other ways?

You’re a dick.

I just mean like, why is she so fucking mean all the time? Like I do the readings.

And I don’t mess around in class. But when she sees me in the hall she says hi ironically. And I’m like, What? Do you not mean Hello? Are you making fun of me by saying hi?

What does she say?

She just says hi. But, no, she says it shitty. And it’s supposed to be funny or, like, cool or something. Does she not say hi to you?

I … I don’t know, I guess.

Exactly. Next time you guys are gossiping, tell her she’s hurting my feelings.

A

ugustus was really very attractive.

He had grown out of his boy body before the rest of us and looked like a statue. A colt, a lion, Adonis. Very angular. The way people looked at him you could tell. And it’s the only reason he ended up not being thought of as

26 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

strange. People looked at him, and when he didn’t engage they thought that he was just being cool. I hope I didn’t think that too, but I can’t remember. I would say, Augustus, what about Sarah or Sara?

No, he’d say. Neither of them.

I’d say, You don’t think they’re cute.

They are definitely cute.

So then why don’t you try for one of them?

Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.

Augustus and me, and Sarah and Sara were at my house once in tenth grade, in the backyard. It was probably three o’clock, gray out and all of us sitting on the wet, black trampoline. We sat around the edges, and they both sat next to Augustus. We were talking about 9/11, and Augustus said that he didn’t remember anything from that day. I said he did remember that day and that he was a liar. Sarah said that she doesn’t remember anything before 2004, and that she only remembers things after that because when she was 12 she was riding in a car with her dad and brother and one of them said, It’s such a nice day out.

So she replied, Yeah, really nice.

And to think in fifteen years we won’t remember any of this.

Her dad and brother looked confused.

Then, laughing her brother said, What?

What?

Why won’t we remember any of this?

Yeah, Sarah, are you saying you’re going to murder us?

What? No, I just mean, I don’t remember stuff from ten years ago, even important stuff. So why would I remember this?

Augustus and Sara laughed, and Sarah got mad because she hadn’t found the humor in it yet, Sara said. Or maybe she just doesn’t understand why they were laughing. That’s when she took me inside.

I remember Sarah’s bra was blue and thick with laces and that her skin was darker that mine. I remember her breath was particular. I looked out the window onto the wet trampoline and saw Augustus smiling, really smiling back at me like he knew exactly what she had

just said. She had asked me to pull her hair and asked me to be tough. That’s when I started laughing. When she left upset (crying?), we both when out to the trampoline, but she got there first and said Sara we have to go.

Uh … no … just … Go back inside.

No, I mean it — we’re leaving. But Sarah had lost Sara’s attention; so she started screaming, LET’S GO … PLEASE, PLEASE LET’S GO ... LET’S GO! YOU’RE BEING SO MEAN, PLEASE! Nothing.

FINE. I’M CALLING MY FUCKING MOM. THANKS A LOT. I waited with her at the end of my driveway in silence. Maybe I tried to say sorry or something.

When she got back in the car, they were still on the trampoline.

I paused.

I climbed up because nobody told me not to. I stripped because I was alone in my clothes. I kissed Sara because she caught my stare and didn’t let go of it until I fought or flew. I kissed Augustus because I wanted to, but we never talked about it. I didn’t feel natural or bad, and I realized that I had wanted to only when I did it. Augustus’s jaw was very strong, and it made my jaw submit. Augustus ground his teeth. Augustus looked angry. I talked in his ear because that’s where my mouth was, and I kept going because it made him feel good. It was finally not cold anymore. When we were finished, Sara was gone, and we worried about what exactly had made her angry.

I remember it wasn’t cold even when it got dark.

A

ugustus and I were alone in the library a lot of the time at school.

Augustus and I switched clothes to see if anyone would notice. We kissed upstairs in the library to see if anyone would notice. Who could tell that when we were alone, the boy I looked at was the boy I loved; and I the boy who followed, the boy who watched. Sara had seen the first time but she acted like she didn’t know. She would see us together and wave. She neutralized us with that. Augustus did the same thing

fiction with everyone, especially with my mom. But I never found out who really noticed or knew. Probably some of the guys on his basketball team did; he liked them the most.

A

ugustus’ father died when he was forty and his youngest, Augustus, was four. His father wore ties and sweated much of the time. He took him to basketball games and got mustard on his burger and shirt. He practiced law and played the trumpet for Augustus, who, unlike his siblings, loved it at night and found it easy to sleep to. He loved his wife; his wife loved him; It wasn’t easy for a minute, his mother would say his father said. He taught Augustus to love the West and even the Bronx he was born in. He took Augustus on his weekend runs and one Sunday, dropped on the sidewalk. Augustus tried to lift him and got tears on his sweat-darkened shirt. Augustus’ mother didn’t blame him. Augustus’ mother didn’t blame him — as if she even could, but he did break her heart. She really didn’t like to talk about it, and neither did Augustus. There isn’t much to say about that.

A

ugustus slept over many nights then because who was going to stop him? My mom? His mom?

The only time our mothers talked was when Ms. Weller, of classroom 3W, told my mom we were switching lunches.

My mom said, Augustus has his own lunch. I make that lunch for you every morning, with a note and everything, Archie. That you would just give it away like that really hurts my feelings.

I’m sorry mom I just didn’t think it was that big a deal. And Augustus really likes them.

Oh well I guess it’s too bad that I’m your mom, huh, and not Augustus’ mom.

I like your lunches, mom. I’m sorry.

It’s fine I really don’t care one way or another, Archie, but you’re going to start buying your lunches at school.

The next day Augustus gave me his lunch, and I said your mom wasn’t mad?

Mad about what?

That Ms. Weller told them we’re switching.

Oh, no, My mom didn’t say anything about that.

But the next day you said that my mom had called your mom and that she thought I was trying to be nice to you because my lunch was better than your lunch and that your lunch wouldn’t cut it for either of us. She would never say it, but she thought that you were beneath me, and that my lunch was pity.

She thought you wouldn’t have ever understood that, but she thought that I did and I was being condescending.

I asked you if that was true and you say it could have been. It ended up not mattering because she wasn’t around much.

A

ugustus insisted on having me around. I could always be social.

I know that people generally like themselves. My mother liked herself. It was almost like a game: how close could I get the imitation without giving it away to the one I was imitating. As I got older and better at it, I did it to my mom (my tour de force) for Augustus if we were all having dinner together or something.

I was really good at it with her, and as Augustus said, It’s like two mirrors facing each other since the conversation isn’t really about anything and no one cares. Both of you were just trying to stop talking but everything you said make the other person say something, and then the first one responded and it just kept going like that.

People couldn’t do that with Augustus, you couldn’t mirror him because he

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fiction could, well, first, he could tell, and he would just plainly ask you to stop. But it would also be impossible, even if he wanted to see you try, because he was too honest and silent and inarticulate in his actions. He did things without agenda or joy or anger or sadness. I don’t know what that makes him — a cave?

The sun?

But he liked having me around, just as I liked being around, and when other people wanted to be with him they knew they were going to be with us. Most of the time, we liked to be alone, though.

We would sit in my backyard and eat dinner we had cooked for ourselves (tacos usually, often breaded chicken).

We would go inside to watch TV or play games. I liked to compete with Augustus because I liked to watch him win, really earn it and win, and to watch him try at something. That said, he did take it quite seriously; we couldn’t play that much because it drained him. We would only have sex after we had played something, usually a video game so we weren’t tired.

In school I knew Sara told Sarah, but after that I’m really not sure. What’s

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more, I’m not sure who, if they found out, would care. It might make them feel privileged or left out, either would make them uncomfortable. No one would get it, and no one would really be happy or scared for us. They would just want to know, I’d bet. I would want to know.

A

ugustus had a cold in senior year. He couldn’t sleep so I didn’t sleep, and I sang him a song while he was coughing under the bed covers. He said, Stop, how am I supposed to sleep if you’re singing to me?

I said, I was just doing it to try to make you feel better.

I’m not saying it’s not nice, I’m saying it isn’t helping.

Okay, I’m sorry for not helping.

I wasn’t asking you to apologize.

Okay, sorry for apologizing.

You’re not listening.

I’m sorry for not listening, Auggie.

I’m sorry for letting you sleep off your goddamn flu in my bed.

I’m not going to apologize for asking you to stop.

I’m sorry for taking care of you and wanting you to be well and singing you a song. I’m sorry I’m not a perfect bedmate, who knows that Augustus can’t be sung to after eight p.m. I’m sorry my bed isn’t the fucking floor in front of the television and that it’s too soft and caring to sleep in.

Okay.

I’m sorry.

Okay.

I’m so sorry.

It’s okay, stop apologizing.

I’m…

It’s fine I know I just love you.

It’s fine don’t

worry about it.

Then I was silent because I had just told him I loved him, obviously. The worst part was that Augustus knew what I wanted. He knew I slipped it in and he didn’t say it back for either or both of two reasons: one, he really just didn’t love me; or two, he saw that I said it in a moment of contrition in order to make him say it back, which was true — I thought that saying it while he wanted me to forgive him would have been too obvious.

I just said, Okay. I’m going to go sleep on the floor outside.

Okay, he said, and Augustus went to sleep.

A

ugustus didn’t go to college.

Augustus wanted me to leave.

Augustus didn’t pick up his t-shirts from my house. Augustus still might come get them. Augustus wouldn’t notice. Augustus would want me to throw them out. Augustus wouldn’t care. Augustus? You can keep him.

Augustus can cook tacos by himself.

Augustus rests not even thinking of my bed. Augustus isn’t thinking of me now.

Augustus thinks of Augustus sleeping.

Augustus drifted. Augustus tapered.

Augustus grew and shrank again.

Augustus ate. Augustus yelped. Augustus snickered. Augustus slept. Augustus slept again. Augustus slept for years without rousing. Augustus is sleeping. Augustus is wheezing. Augustus misses the sound of my singing. Augustus faces the mirror and watches nothing reducing, thinning out into nothing, and nothing blocks him. Augustus grew up with a sad parent. Augustus wants to be only a sad son. Augustus likes to go bird watching.

Augustus has noticed his nothing is definitely smaller. Augustus’ mother finally died, and he thought someone he knows should know. Augustus didn’t know not to. Augustus called. Augustus, I’m sorry. Augustus, I’m proud of you.

Augustus, I’m so, so sorry. Augustus, you look tired. Augustus, do you want to come over?

Augustus, you are hard for me to remember. I am not able not to.

fiction

Children with playthings SECOND-PLACE FICTION

BY SHAWNNA THOMAS ILLUSTRATION BY THAO DO

“M

y cousin Jeannie has a nose like a e-le-phant!”

It’s true — Jeannie the Meanie does have a nose like an e-lephant.

But no one else seems to think so.

Mama smacks my hand and Jeannie’s face crumples up like a black licorice wrapper. Uncle Harold Rose tells Jeannie her nose has “character,” Mama tells Jeannie her nose is a “special gift from the Almighty Father.” I start to speak, see Mama watching for my lips to move, then see her see me look at her hand fixing to raise again.

“Jeannie, you got a nose like a Disney Princess,” I say.

Jeannie’s face uncrumples, Uncle Harold Rose nods like a puppet doll, and Mama lowers her hand.

In my own private head, I say, “Princess Dumbo.”

It ain’t like I started nothing. Danville’s real hot and sticky today, and the grocery felt even hotter. Figuring I didn’t mind the dust from the roads sticking to my skin outside the grocery more than my overalls sticking to me inside the grocery, I asked Mama if I could wait outside on the steps. That’s where I was sitting when Jeannie sat down next to me and flicked my braid. I wasn’t gonna let Jeannie bother me, though. Mama promised me some black licorice. I figured that was better than a fight with Jeannie, so I paid her no never mind.

Then she flicked it again. So I flicked her nose.

When she raised her hand again, I cupped my hands around my mouth and told everybody in Danville who could hear bout her big ole e-le-phant nose. Shame I ain’t see Mama and Uncle Harold Rose coming out the grocery.

“Bug, you ready to go?” Mama asks, shifting her packages from one arm to another.

I see Uncle Harold Rose ain’t carrying no packages and Mama’s nearly dropping hers. Never mind he twice as wide and tall as Mama.

I see a package slipping from Mama’s arm and catch it before it falls in the dirt.

“Yes, Mama.”

“Say goodbye to your Uncle and Jeannie.”

“Bye Uncle Harold Rose, bye Jeannie.”

“Bug, a proper good-bye.”

I sigh and nearly stomp my foot. I give Uncle Harold Rose and even Jeannie a proper hug.

He sort of pats my head like a puppy, like he don’t know where to put his hand between my braids or he just don’t want to touch them at all. “Take care now, Laura. We’ll see you tomorrow for Jeannie’s birthday party, of course.”

He will, but I ain’t gonna say so like I’m happy bout it.

Only thing I like bout my rich cousin Jeannie is her house. Jeannie lives in a big ole house near our church. Last year,

Jeannie moved to a brand new house up in Richmond, but Jeannie moved back to Danville last week, I figure just to “try my patience,” like Mama says. Her house in Richmond was prettier, with two floors and a pool and everything.

Her house here in Danville is still bigger and prettier than our little house though, even with its peeling white paint and dusty windows. They have a garden and a pond nearby.

Mama and me have to go into town to the public pools, as Jeannie always reminds me. I don’t much like Aunt Ashley or Jeannie’s daddy neither, but I s’pose they just can’t cope with what the stork gave them.

Mama switches my package for her loaves of bread. “There. Now take my free hand, Bug. You know I don’t like you prancing all across the road, them cars come out of nowhere, just kicking up dirt every which way.”

“Yes, Mama.”

I take Mama’s hand and follow her down the porch steps, planning on throwing dirt right back at them ole cars when she ain’t looking.

I

stand on my tippy toes as tall as I can, the plaster cold on my back. I peek out the door.

Clear.

I sneak around Mama’s sleigh bed and over to Mama’s long table, picking up the white jar, twisting off the top. I stick

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fiction my nose in and sniff deeply. Yuck. I use my finger to scoop out a little and wipe it on the back of my free hand, figuring it will smell better if I put it on. Before I can smooth the cream in, I feel the cool wetness of a washcloth and the sharp burn of a wooden spatula.

I snatch my hand back. “Ow, Mama!”

“You think it hurt now, wait till I use it on your butt! Go run that hand under some cool water.”

She moves to swat my backside with the spatula, but I turn too quickly for her, so she only catches the tail end of my tail.

When I come back, I find Mama sitting at her table, rifling through a drawer with one hand, holding the phone to her ear with the other. Mama closes the drawer and hangs up the phone. Then she turns to me and wags a finger.

I ain’t moving, I think. Then she waves the spatula.

“Yes, Mama?”

“What I tell you bout coming in here and messing round, Bug?” “You said ‘Don’t come in here messing round, Bug.’ I just wanted some cream.”

“What cream?”

I point to the jar on the table in front of her. “The one you wear that smells like peaches. Jeannie said I smelled like water and wrinkled up her ole ugly nose.

I want to smell like peaches too.”

Mama wants to laugh, I swear it. “Chile, water ain’t got no smell, don’t mind Jeannie. And what I tell you bout talking bout Jeannie’s nose? Just cuz folks steal your fruit, don’t mean you lower yourself to their melon patch. And this ain’t lotion, Bug. This is perm.”

“Perm?” I stare at Mama. She has her hair pinned in all these clips. Next to her on the table are the wooden spatula, her big bristly brush, a green jar, and her plastic comb.

“Yeah, perm. The white stuff I used to put in my hair to straighten it.”

My nose scrunches up. “Why?” “Because your daddy liked —” Mama turns away. Then she changes the subject like she always does when Daddy comes up. “Bug, if you put it on your skin, it can burn you. That’s why I told you bout 30 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

messing round in my room —” “Well how come you keep it if you don’t use it no more, Mama?”

Daddy left a long time ago, when I was four.

Must be a mighty old jar, I think.

She pushes the white jar to the side, back where it was. “I guess I just keep forgetting. You ready for me to fix your hair?”

I shake my head. “I gotta get Patty!”

I run back to my room, push the cover off my bed, snatch up my doll, run to the doorway, hear Mama’s voice in my head, run back to my bed, set down my doll, pick up the cover, fold it in a square, place it on the bed, pick up my doll again, run back to Mama’s room. Before my foot crosses the doorway, I really hear Mama.

“Don’t be running on my rugs, Bug. You could hurt yourself.”

I smooth out the rug with my foot, then come round to her front. “Me and Patty ready.”

Two years ago, on my seventh birthday, I told Mama I wanted a Patty doll, and Mama said she couldn’t afford it, ‘cause Patty dolls were seventy dollars. Patty has oodles of hair. Patty has skin like a Snicker bar and eyes like the caramel inside. She has a backpack and a jacket and best friends and a plain black dress and a mole and licorice curls everywhere. When I woke up on my eighth birthday, Mama was still at work, sweeping the floors of the grocery.

Under my pillow, I found my Patty doll.

I hold up Patty. “Can we do Patty’s hair?”

Mama stops parting her hair and looks over at me holding Patty. “Not now, Bug. I have to do your hair first. Jeannie turns nine today, remember?”

“Imma bring Patty to Jeannie’s party.

Wait till she see how pretty Patty look.

Bet she wont go flapping them ole shark lips.” I say the last part in my head, eyeing Mama’s spatula again.

When Jeannie told Aunt Ashley she wanted a Patty doll, they was all sold out in Richmond. So Aunt Ashley drove down to Danville, only they was gone there too. Wasn’t a Patty doll left in

Virginia. I just know it tears Jeannie to bits.

I bring Patty with me whenever I have to see Jeannie.

“Soon as I finish our hair, I’ll do Patty’s.” Mama promises.

“I don’t know why I even got to go to Jeannie’s ole party. Birthday parties are for kids, besides.” I mumble.

“And what are you, child?”

“I’m almost ten Mama, that’s like adult years.”

This time, Mama does laugh. “Girl, come round here. And stop complaining, you ain’t even been in her house yet, you might sleep over tonight and never want to come home.”

I think on that.

At Jeannie’s old house in Richmond, there was a big pool and a real record player and a big fancy TV in a wooden box. Jeannie and I would fight over the remote all the time, on account of I wanted to watch Huckleberry Hound and she wanted to watch Leave it to Beaver. I told Jeannie I couldn’t hardly think of nothing sillier then naming your child Beaver and she shouted back, “Your Mama calls you Bug!” I called Mama that night to take me back to Danville.

“Her house wasn’t that nice, Mama” I huff, but I come round and sit beside her, watching her finish her hair.

W

hen Mama finishes, she sets to making me pretty.

Mama’s always tryna make me pretty. Not like I’m ugly or nothing, but I like my puffy Afro and overalls just fine, thank you. But Mama likes hair barrettes and pink jumper dresses and Mary Janes and “dolls in little girls’ hands.” Mama always wins.

I pull away as Mama’s comb cuts through my Afro. “That hurts!”

Mama sucks her teeth, but puts the comb down, reaching for her grease.

“Wouldn’t hurt so if you stop twitching.

And if you let me fix your hair more often, it wouldn’t be so nappy.”

Mama greases my hair, separates it into little pieces, and wraps ribbon around

fiction each piece, braiding the ends. With little white flower-shaped barrettes, she traps the braids, pinning them to my scalp.

Using a jar of Vaseline, Mama greases me until I’m shinier then the pennies I hide in my pillowcase on laundry day. By the time she knots the ribbons on my dress around my waist, locks the door, and we’re walking down the dusty road, I’m cursing Jeannie to H-E-double L hockey sticks.

I hate Jeannie. Well, not really. I hate that Jeannie is always the “Queen” when we play “Princesses.” I hate that Jeannie cuts the line when we double dutching.

I hate how Jeannie’s daddy always buys her new jump ropes and candy and dolls.

When Mama drops me off at Aunt Ashley’s and rings the bell, I try to bargain with her. “How bout I give Jeannie her present, then I come home with you, Mama?”

“What’s wrong, Bug? I happen to know Jeannie’s gonna have chocolate cake.”

Well I didn’t know that.

I shake the image of chocolate cake from my head. “Jeannie’s mean. And Aunt Ashley always calls me Laura when she knows I like to be called Bug, like Daddy called me.”

Mama’s lips thin out like they always do when I mention Daddy, but they are full again when she kneels down beside me. “You know I gotta work, Bug. But how bout this: you go and have fun at Jeannie’s for awhile, and if you really don’t like it, you can call me, and I’ll come pick you up.”

“And I can take these stupid clips out my hair?”

Mama sighs as she stands, but she nods. “Deal.”

Mama rings the doorbell. I pick a chip of the peeling white paint from the door.

When I look over the porch, I see that Aunt Ashley’s red Cadillac is missing, the one she bought when they left for Richmond. I wonder if they are out.

Then, Aunt Ashley opens the door, dressed in her usual white dress and white shoes. Mama says Aunt Ashley don’t know if she wants to be an angel

or an Avon lady.

Aunt Ashley fingers my barrettes with a frown. She’s much lighter than Mama.

Her eyes are big like Mama’s, though.

Her hair is straight like Mama’s used to be, but much shorter. But with the little bags under her eyes, she and Mama could be twins.

Mama clears her throat and Aunt Ashley lets go of my hair. “Laura, Georgia, come in.”

Mama gives me a small push forward.

“I’m already late. But Bug’s real excited to see Jeannie, ain’t you, Bug?” I don’t answer. Ain’t right, calling your own mama a liar.

Only thing worse than being one.

Aunt Ashley smiles. “Come along, Laura. Jeannie is in the yard, getting ready to eat.”

“You member what I said about melon patches, you hear, Bug?” Mama asks.

“Yes, Mama.”

I follow Aunt Ashley into the house, linking my pinkie fingers behind my back to remind Mama of our deal.

A

fter I finish two large slices of cake and finish taking pictures, I wait for Jeannie to open her presents.

But Jeannie is busy flouncing around in her white party dress. Aunt Ashley tells her to put on a hat so she don’t darken in the sun. I tap Jeannie on the shoulder, ‘cause I see that she forgot the tag on her new dress. Before I can tug it, Aunt Ashley pushes the tag back in, hiding it under the collar, only now the tag on Jeannie’s sweater is poking out too.

I look round the house till Jeannie is ready.

At home, ’cept for a cross and a to-do list, Mama’s walls are bare. Here, there are so many pictures of Jeannie on the wall; I start to wonder if one picture is just moving when I blink. Jeannie’s first birthday, Jeannie’s baptism, Jeannie’s first boo-boo. Then, on the table in the living room, there are so many family pictures, like they wake up every day, take a picture, and frame it. Jeannie, Aunt Ashley, and Jeannie’s daddy, Uncle Harold Rose, everywhere.

When no one is looking, I flip all the pictures downward.

Aunt Ashley and Uncle Harold Rose treat Jeannie’s birthday like the second coming of “our Lord, Jesus Christ,” as Mama says. Aunt Ashley hands each present to Jeannie, who is sitting on Uncle Harold Rose’s lap. Then Aunt Ashley claps like one of them monkeys with cymbals every time Jeannie figures out how to unwrap a gift, and Uncle Harold Rose nods, his big ole nose up in the air, like he just knew Jeannie would love every present he picked. All seventeen of them. I know, ‘cause when she’s done, she leaves them lying all over the floor and I count them.

Even readying for bed is a pageant for Jeannie. Aunt Ashley unfolds and refolds four nightdresses before she is satisfied.

Jeannie sits on her lap in Aunt Ashley’s room while Aunt Ashley ties her long hair up in a ribbon. Uncle Harold Rose is in his bathroom, shaving, but he comes out to tell Jeannie how pretty she looks.

I change into my pajamas and wait for Jeannie in her room.

Once dressed, I yank Patty from my backpack, wanting to show Jeannie Patty’s new hairstyle. Following Mama’s hands in the mirror, I braided the very front of Patty’s hair.

Jeannie decides she wanted to play with Patty and I say no. So she tugs at her hair.

I smack her hand like Mama does when she sees me eating grapes at the grocery.

Jeannie smacks my hand back and tugs Patty’s hair again. “I don’t like this Patty.”

I want to say “So,” but it is her birthday, so I just roll my eyes.

Jeannie ain’t finished. “Look at her hair. It’s nappy!”

She says “nappy” like she has Listerine in her mouth.

I fold my arms. “Her hair is really pretty! Nappy is kinda like pretty.”

“Says who?” She asks.

“Says my Mama.”

“Says when?”

“When she braided my hair this

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fiction morning.”

Jeannie been wanting my Patty doll for two years and there ain’t no way she’s showing me otherwise, I think.

But then Jeannie runs out the room and comes back with a doll box. “Look what my daddy got me. It’s the new Patty doll. He says it’s the prettiest one, just like me. She came out just yesterday.”

My Patty doll don’t have light eyes or yellow skin or straight hair or combs.

Jeannie waves her doll. “My Patty doll is pretty. Your Patty is ugly. And you can’t even comb her hair, look!”

She rips the comb from the back of the doll box and drags it through my Patty’s hair. Or she tries to. The comb gets stuck. When she frees the comb, she wipes it on her skirt then uses it to comb through her Patty doll’s hair. The comb never gets stuck.

“See!” Jeannie’s long straight hair swings side to side as she goes on and on.

I shift from foot to foot, feeling my face get all warm. “Yeah, well my Patty doll is still better!”

“Nuh uh!” Jeannie’s standing right nose-to-nose to me now.

I breathe in deep. I try to remember what Mama says bout low down melon patches, but it’s all scrambled in my head now. “Well she ain’t ugly neither!”

“Yes, huh!”

“Says who?”

“Says my daddy! My daddy ain’t never called your Patty doll pretty!”

My fingers turn to fists. “Yeah, well my Patty doll looks just like me and my mama says I’m pretty all the time, so my Patty is pretty!”

But Jeannie don’t back down and uses her free hand to hold up her fingers. “My mama says my Patty is pretty and so does my daddy! That’s two points for me and one point for you! I bet your daddy never called your Patty doll pretty!”

Then she tosses her ponytail over her shoulder to flounce away.

I don’t remember my fingers unclenching, my eyes squinting up, my arms rising to reach Jeannie’s back.

But then Jeannie’s crying and she’s

curled up on the ground and her Patty doll has a crack down the side of her face and I hear Aunt Ashley and Uncle Harold Rose calling and I know I’m in big, big trouble so I run downstairs to the living room.

I

32 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

want to wait outside for Mama, but Aunt Ashley won’t let me wait alone, so I have to sit in the living room. I realize someone flipped back up all them portraits. I go round the room, flipping them down again.

I’m having so much fun hiding Jeannie’s face that I don’t hear her come up behind me. “You better stop before I tell my mama.”

I spin round on her, Patty still in my hand. Jeannie is holding her Patty too, the long crack separating her eyes.

I go back to flipping pictures. “Why you come in here, messing with me for?

Mama coming for me soon.”

“My mama said I had to apologize for yelling and you had to apologize back.”

I know I should and I know Mama’s gonna make me but I really don’t want to. “I ain’t sorry!”

“Then I ain’t sorry neither.”

I am fine with that plan till I remember Mama is coming, and Aunt Ashley might have told her something. “I’m sorry, Jeannie.”

Jeannie goes round, flipping the pictures back up. “I’m sorry too.”

I watch her. “Whatchu gonna do with your Patty now? Your daddy gonna fix it?”

“Yeah. He always fixes my toys.”

I look down. Mama don’t know much bout fixing things.

I point to her doll. “You gonna bring your Patty doll to school, Jeannie?”

She stops flipping pictures near the window and shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. Is that your mama on my porch?”

I stand next to Jeannie and stare out the window. Sure is.

Aunt Ashley comes in then, carrying an empty shopping bag. “Laura, your mother’s outside. Jeannie, it’s time for bed. Tell Laura good-bye and — what are

you doing with that doll?”

“Nothing Mama.” Jeannie turns to me, all huffy. “Bye Bug.” She takes Jeannie’s Patty doll and puts it in the shopping bag. I know I won’t beat Aunt Ashley to the porch and I can see her out the window, talking to Mama.

I can’t see rightly from the window cuz it’s so dark, but I figure Mama’s lips have disappeared.

I finish flipping the pictures right side up, real slowly.

“P

ass me the comb, Bug.” I turn to hand Mama the comb and turn back around.

As promised, Mama takes the clips and barrettes out my hair. She washes out the hard gel stuff and lets my hair dry in the air, shrinking to my scalp again.

I been real quiet since we got home and so has Mama. She just frowns real hard. I don’t say nothing, don’t even cry out when she’s combing my hair. I don’t know what Aunt Ashley told her, but Mama ain’t say nothing to me.

When the kettle whistles, Mama lays her comb down on her table and leaves the room. I sit back down at Mama’s table and pick up Mama’s comb, raking it through my hair.

Or I try to.

I hear the comb break before I feel a piece fall down my back. Mama walks in just as I pick up her scissors to try to cut the comb piece out.

“What I tell you bout playing in your hair? And playing with my scissors?”

“You said ‘Don’t play in your hair or play with my scissors, Bug.’” I say.

Mama put her scissors in her table drawer then works the comb piece out my hair. “And I mean it too, Bug. You coulda cut your hand —” “I know. I’m sorry Mama, I promise. I just wanted my hair to be pretty.”

Mama picks me up over her shoulder like a potato sack, carrying me to my own room. She drops me on the bed and kisses my forehead. “You’re my pretty little Lovebug.”

“Can I sleep with you? Next to the window?”

fiction “Ain’t you a little old for that, Bug? Just this morning, you said —” “I said ‘I ain’t a baby no more, Mama.’

I know. But don’t you want company?

Aunt Ashley got Uncle Harold Rose, but you ain’t got no company. Ain’t that funny, Mama?”

Mama’s face twists a little, like she don’t know quite what to say.

Then she pats my cheek and stands up straight. “World is funny that way, huh, Bug? But no, Mama has work, and you need your sleep for school.”

“Why you gotta work tomorrow, Mama? Aunt Ashley spends all day with Jeannie. Don’t you want to spend the day with me?”

“Not if it means you don’t go to school, Bug.” “But Mama, Jeannie said —” Mama cuts me off. “You know, I’m real proud of you for getting along with Jeannie today. ” Mama is smiling down at me like she does when I finish my homework without her asking me to. The longer she smiles down at me, the more the cake in my tummy feels heavy as rocks.

“Mama, you know, Jeannie said — I mean, I didn’t meant to —” I start, but Mama cuts me off.

“I know sometimes Jeannie can say some hurtful things, Bug. But you know what I tell you bout melon patches.”

Her eyebrow rises when I don’t answer.

“Just ‘cause folks steal your fruit, don’t mean you lower yourself to their melon patch. You always gotta remember to be the higher person, you got that, Bug?” I open my mouth to tell Mama what happened. How I pushed Jeannie and broke her doll. How I fell into Jeannie’s ole melon patch.

“I understand, Mama,” I say.

She kisses my nose. “Now off to bed, you got school tomorrow.”

“Good night, Bug.” She switches off my lamp and leaves, pulling the door close softly behind her.

When Mama leaves, I flip over on my back and stare up at my ceiling, wondering what Aunt Ashley told

Mama, wondering what Jeannie told Aunt Ashley, wondering why I can’t tell Mama the truth. I want to ask Mama bout what Jeannie said, want to ask Mama if Daddy would have called my Patty doll pretty.

“But if I ask her that, I have to tell her what I did to Jeannie,” I whisper to no one in the dark.

And the thought of Mama’s frown if I tell her the truth is the only thing that makes me queasier than pushing Jeannie.

“I ain’t even mean to push her,” I grumble into my pillow. “And I said sorry. Besides, Jeannie got tons of toys.

She’ll probably get a new Patty. Uncle Harold Rose always buying her new things, even when she’s being a meanie!”

My stomach feels a little less queasy when I remember that. But only a little.

I turn back over on my stomach and pull my covers tighter. “Besides, why Jeannie have to go and get a Patty doll too?”

I flip over twice more before I kick my covers off to slip out of bed.

I

tip toe real quiet like and peek through Mama’s door. She is on the phone again and I realize she’s talking to Aunt Ashley.

“I’m sure Harold will find another job, Ashley. Y’all will just have to cut back some. … I know it may take some time. … I can see what might be available at the grocery. … No, of course he won’t like that.”

I shrink back against the wall when Mama turns a little, but I see she’s just stretching out the phone cord. I cover my mouth with both hands so I don’t blurt out a question bout Uncle Harold’s job.

Mama nods and starts speaking again.

“Yes, I’m sorry bout Jeannie’s doll. That’s why I tell Bug all the time bout running around the house, I know at some point she’s gonna hurt herself too, I just hope Jeannie is okay …”

Jeannie lied for me?

Suddenly I feel small as a real bug and my stomach feels real queasy again.

I wish I hadn’t pushed Jeannie.

“Well of course you can’t return the doll now, let the child keep it. You’ll just have to find the money some other way. … Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow when I pick up Bug after school. Good night, Ashley. And listen, tell Harold I hope everything works out, you here? Alright now.” Mama hangs up the phone and turns fully, spotting me in the doorway.

“Bug, whatchu doing awake? What’s wrong?”

“I —” I pushed Jeannie, Mama. She ain’t fall. I broke her Patty doll and I’m real sorry.

But nothing comes out.

“Well, I didn’t mean for you to hear that, Bug, that’s grown folks business.”

She picks me up then. “But I guess since you proved how much of an adult you’re becoming today, I’ll explain. Things are gonna be a little rough for Aunt Ashley and Uncle Harold around here.”

“Because he lost his job?”

“Yeah.”

Like Daddy did, when I was three. But I say that in my own private head.

“I’m telling you this not only because your Mama’s big girl now, but because it’s going to be a rough time for Jeannie, and I want you to remember to stay in your melon patch, you hear?”

I curl tighter around Mama, resting my head on her shoulder. “Yes, Mama.”

“Good girl. Now off to bed you go.”

She carries me back to my room and tucks me under the covers again. She’s bout to shut out my light again when she snaps her fingers and leaves the room.

She comes back with my Patty doll.

“Bug, you forgot Patty. You don’t want Patty to keep you company? I’ll put her in your backpack for you so you won’t forget her. Aunt Ashley says Jeannie has a Patty doll now too. Maybe the two of you can play with them at recess tomorrow, she don’t mind the crack so much.”

I turn over, burrow under my covers, and turn my head away, wrapping my arms around my stomach.

“It’s okay, Mama. I don’t think I’ll bring Patty tomorrow.”

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fiction

FUNERAL

THIRD-PLACE FICTION

BY ABIGAIL CARNEY ILLUSTRATIONS BY MADELEINE WITT

C

armen is the one who finds Sarah’s body. It is in the shed beside the dock behind the blackened burnt shell of a house in the field where they like to laugh. Sarah baked a blueberry pie that afternoon and the scent must’ve clung to her because three bees linger over her chest, her neck, her stomach.

Carmen takes a black marker and writes, “majic” on the inside of Sarah’s left wrist.

She wonders why no one has thought to move her.

Al, the pastor who was Sarah’s dealer and will lead her funeral, watches UFC. He considers jacking off, but doesn’t know where the remote is. The last time he got off to men hitting each other it felt like sinning. His hookah is packed with majic. Doug, from two streets down, comes over and wants to buy some.

34 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

The men watch UFC. Al considers his Sunday sermon and decides it will be about Abraham.

Carmen takes a single light bulb from her basement that day. The shed where Sarah died has no power. Carmen leaves the lightbulb on the dirt floor in the curve Sarah’s bent leg makes. Sarah’s brown hair, with its sun-faded blonde streaks, is not tangled. There is a spot of blueberry filling still smeared on her right cheek. One of Sarah’s pies got first place in the county fair last August, and she considered the award an order from the community to bake pies for everyone. Carmen decides to fill the shed with light.

It takes Carmen half an hour to drive to the station for questioning, on her

first day of summer. A country song chronicling a woman killing her lover plays in the waiting room. The brochures about “How to Know if You Are an Alcoholic” are ready on the table for the drunks brought in to sleep a night in jail.

The officer is big bellied and red haired.

He sits across from Carmen at a desk he shares with other people, judging by the collection of assorted family photos.

He says, “Tell me what happened.”

“I was walking over to meet her.

There’s a field between our houses. It’s kind of a forest too at parts I guess. And it’s not right between, it’s my house and then the field and then two more houses and then Sarah’s house.”

He says, “OK. So what happened?”

“I went to meet her. She wasn’t in the field.”

“Why were you meeting?”

fiction “To see each other.”

“What happened?”

“She was on the floor of the shed. She was dead.”

“And you did what?”

“I sat there awhile and then I ran next door and called you.”

He says, “Do you know what killed her?”

“No.” Carmen thinks it was probably majic.

When the officer first called Rae, Sarah’s mother, to tell her, she didn’t believe that Sarah was dead. He said that it could have been the majic, a drug Rae hadn’t heard of before. The officer tells her it’s new, too new to be illegal, a local herb that no one ever thought was fatal. When it’s fresh the leaves are deep purple, but dried, they become almost black. When the leaves are brewed for tea, the water turns crimson. It might have been majic combined with some stronger, unrulier drug. It could have been that her daughter’s body just gave in to its seventeen years. The officer suggests suicide. Rae suggests that he shoot his balls off. If he does so willingly, she might believe that her daughter would die willingly.

The mothers of Sarah’s friends, and women from the church, have all been texting her: “God has another angel now.” “The world has lost a beautiful, kind young woman.” “I am thankful every moment for Sarah’s life.”

Since the afternoon the officer told her, Rae has smashed six plates, burned every dinner she’s tried to cook for her son, and called her ex-husband, who is eight states away and can’t afford to fly in for the funeral, to yell. She hasn’t showered, but took one bath that lasted several hours. She calls the officer every day. When he suggests anything — that Sarah had an aneurysm, that Sarah had an allergic reaction, that Sarah was drugged — Rae is furious that he’s guessing.

Rae’s boyfriend arranges the funeral.

Rae knows she should be grateful, but she’d prefer it if there was no service.

It will not be for Sarah. It will be for

the community to come and pay their respects so that they can feel better and get on with things.

When Al learns that Sarah is dead, he prays. It is the first time in weeks. He asks for her back. He then asks why. He asks if it was him and God’s drug that did it. He asks for heaven. He remembers seeing Sarah for the first time at his doorway, her asking for a glass of water because she is on a bike ride and thirsty.

Her arms with a deep farmer’s tan.

“Pastor Al!” she says. “I didn’t know you lived so near the church.”

He sees Sarah taking off her tennis shoes and leaving them by the doormat, her feet young, with pink toenails. He sees her sitting in his living room drinking a glass of water as if it’s been blessed, but the holiness will leave if she doesn’t drink it quickly. He sees her coming back the next week, wearing frayed white shorts and a folded handkerchief around her head. He sees her noticing the majic he’s left on his living room table.

“That doesn’t look like weed,” she says.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

He sees her drinking majic tea with him every week. She is the only adolescent he will sell to. He has morals.

Sarah is not really an adolescent. She is instead like a Belden woman of two short generations ago, those who married and had children young, not by accident or economic necessity, but because by fifteen, they had no growing up left to do. Many of Sarah’s classmates will have children young, but before they understand, like Sarah does, that they are not meant to be happy all the time.

Whenever Al gets pixied alone, it is with tea. This is when he writes his best sermons. It is the only time he believes he can feel the spirit. He lets God pass through him. He works from whatever pages in the Bible he happens to flip to.

For this Sunday’s sermon, he hopes the Bible will reveal what Sarah is telling him from her new home with Jesus. He opens to Judah telling Onan to lay with

his brother’s wife. Onan knows the child won’t be his and so wastes his seed on the ground whenever he goes into his brother’s wife. Then the Lord smites Onan for wasting his seed. Al isn’t sure what to make of this and so he shuffles through the songs on his computer at random. The songs tell him that he will have a child, and go to Montana before he dies. Sarah will find him in Montana.

The funeral is in the white clapboard Methodist Church, which has dirty blue carpet and a board at the front of the room with numbers that change with every service: a count of how many people are in attendance, that week’s offering. The numbers 117 and $1,008 are left over from last Sunday, when there were fewer people in the church. Today Sarah’s admirers pack the sanctuary, lining the walls, sitting in the aisle. Everyone always wants to have been friends with the dead girl. Carmen always wanted to have a friend die, to have license for real sorrow.

In her coffin, Sarah is unfairly beautiful. Carmen looks at Sarah’s left wrist. There’s a layer of makeup covering “majic,” but the word is there. Sarah’s wan skin is lavender-tinted now, and glowing. Her mother has bought her a new dress, white and stiff. Carmen hates it.

Pastor Al leads the service. He talks about how everyone loved Sarah because Sarah loved everyone. A low vibrato whistle sounds twice from the train tracks that run behind the church twice as Pastor Al speaks. Carmen sits beside her parents and flips through a black-bound Bible, crosses out the name “Jesus” and replaces it with “Sarah” whenever she sees it. She wants Sarah to sit up and hit Al. Rae does not cry because once she begins she will do so for hours. Her boyfriend keeps circling a spot on her upper left arm with his fingers. She would like him to stop. Sarah’s brother, Ryan, sits with his friends in the back of the sanctuary. He doesn’t cry either, even when two of his friends do.

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fiction In the church basement, with its cheerful posters of scripture and a pink painted bathroom with two stall doors that don’t shut, members of the congregation serve chili and potato salad from big plastic tubs. A papier-mâché Christ puppet from Sunday school hangs in the corner. He kicks his legs and arms out when you tug the string dangling from his robe. A sign reads: “Jesus Ascending to Heaven! Pull the string and Jesus goes to heaven! Cut the string and Jesus goes to hell!”

A photo board is set up next to the desserts — the kind Rae would have made for Sarah’s graduation party one summer later. Sarah as a baby, a toddler, a first grader, a softball player, a gymnast, a dancer. Sarah on homecoming court, Sarah with boyfriends. A photo of Carmen and Sarah in an above-ground swimming pool, each holding a new kitten. Photos of Carmen and Sarah sitting in the hunting tree stand, in the rusted frame of the pickup truck, on the frozen-over pond between their two houses.

Sarah’s friend, Luke, gets a blow job in the parking lot during the reception party. This is what everyone will talk about the next day. In the woods back behind Luke’s car, people drink vodka and beer.

“Hey Carmen. Want a beer?”

“No.” “We were gonna light some candles now, and maybe a bowl.”

Mindy, who is pregnant, shouts “Hey! I still have some majic Sarah sold me!”

“Let’s smoke it!”

“Didn’t she die from that stuff?”

“No, I think she mixed it with something.”

Carmen gets a beer. “She didn’t fucking mix it with anything.”

Rae takes home the flowers, drugstore spring blend bouquets. She places them on the kitchen counter, then the dining table, then the floor of her daughter’s room. She shuts the door.

Ryan is at a friend’s house. Rae knows this should upset her, that perhaps 36 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

she should have made him stay home, should have tried harder to help him feel happier, or sadder. But he’s old enough to understand, on his own, that his sister is dead. She wonders if he thinks Sarah’s death is her fault. She wonders if she’s lost him too.

Rae’s boyfriend comes over. She didn’t ask him to. They have sex. It is the first time after the death, and Rae can’t enjoy it. It reminds her that Sarah will not have children. Her boyfriend is careful about touching her. The sex takes a long time.

After, he holds Rae like she’s crying. She doesn’t, until he leaves. She sits on the back porch, looking at the paint-stripped wood board fence she knows she will never repaint, rattling out long body harrowing sobs.

Carmen comes home from the service. Her mother has cut out a newspaper article about Sarah, and left it at Carmen’s place at the kitchen table. As if she’d need to remember Sarah’s death with the help of the Rural-Urban: Your Free Community Weekly.

The weekly Belden police blotter is on the opposite side of the article about Sarah: 2:36 p.m. — Main Street, report of an “elderly man in his car hunched over.”

Officers located the vehicle and saw the man was scratching off lottery tickets.

7:20 p.m. — State Street, a woman called advising there was “smoke” in her freezer. It wasn’t smoke, but condensation.

12:33 a.m. — Hickory Street, caller advised of a woman dancing in the roadway.

Sarah and Carmen came across majic together two Julys ago. With its mottled leaves and tiny pinkish white flowers, it smelled lovely, a hint of verbena. It stood in the field, surrounded by thickets of tall grass and Queen Anne’s lace. Sarah knew it by its crinkle-edged leaves.

T

he day after the funeral, the sky is hazy and the field is muddy.

Carmen decides she’ll get pixied

without Sarah for the first time, to see if Sarah seems to be less missing that way. Carmen brewed the leaves into tea in her microwave that morning, and now drags long sips of the bitter liquid from a thermos. Majic is a bodyundoing feeling. Carmen gets migraines when she isn’t pixied that are a sort of pain high. Light hurts, sound hurts.

She tries focusing on a single part of her body that doesn’t throb, her inside right ankle. Tries thanking the pain gods for not descending there too. She stops being able to see when it’s bad. Majic is a migraine of liberating goodness.

Carmen once took a shower while pixied and realized joyfully that her skin was melting. Majic is holding a toy kaleidoscope over your eyes and tongue.

The single stoplight in town, the one that flashes yellow all night, bursts into refracting arcs of gold edged with purple.

Water tastes like dandelions mixed with pawpaw fruit with pop rocks. A magnification of how it feels to return to a place you haven’t been to for years. You recognize everything and know what it is called, but in your absence the world has been endowed with some unreal glowing sheen. You take a needle from your sewing kit, black thread it, and draw it through the callus of your heel.

You love your mother.

When Sarah and Carmen were pixied together, everyone else had a hard time being around them. The two would be perfectly content to sit and watch heated rainbows curl out of the black asphalt driveway. They got pixied in an exactly complementary way. When Sarah wanted to go and dance at a metal concert in the high school gymnasium, Carmen wanted to. When Carmen wanted to dip spoons in butter and then brown sugar and lick them, Sarah wanted to. When Carmen started to cry, Sarah would stop her.

Carmen walks into the burnt-down house in the field. The man who lived there had the property up for sale for years, but his asking price was too high for a house with rotting floors and a

fiction shed out back where he kept chickens, for meat, and three dogs chained. Now, inside the house, it is hard for Carmen to tell what was damaged in the fire, what was broken and dirtied before, and what decayed beneath time and a leaking roof.

The house smells like charred tire and the pile of composting eggshells, banana peels, and grass clippings in Carmen’s backyard. She lies down between a blackened coffee table and a stack of telephone books with molding pages.

She feels the places where her body presses into the floor. Her forearm is still scratched from when she sprinted away from Sarah’s body, and fell in the field into weeds with thorns. She looks at the red swollen marks on her skin, touches each one. The house is far back from the road but Carmen can hear motorcycles. She imagines they are gigantic bumblebees bouncing along the asphalt.

Rae calls the officer and he tells her that the autopsy results are finally inconclusive. Rae will never know why her daughter died. She laughs after she drops the phone onto the living room carpet. That morning she saw a news story about the accidental death of a two year old; his 4-year-old brother was playing with the gun kept beneath their Daddy’s pillow. Their Daddy was convicted for manslaughter. Rae wonders if they should blame her. If she was keeping something under her pillow that she shouldn’t have, selfishness.

If nothing physical killed Sarah, then maybe she killed Sarah.

Bible School.

Al opens the door wearing a Cleveland Indians jersey, emblazoned with the bright red face of Chief Wahoo. Wahoo has triangle eyes and broad white teeth set against each other like fence boards.

Al is shoeless. He’s wearing white socks.

“Hello Pastor Al.” “Hello Carmen. Are you all right?”

Carmen smiles. “I know you were her dealer.”

He nods like a child playing a wise man in a Christmas pageant, “Come in.”

They sit in his living room with the television muted on a talk show. A cereal bowl left over from the morning sits on the coffee table in front of them. Al must be bad at pouring the right amount of milk — there’s enough to feed a cat in the bottom of the bowl.

He says, “I sold Sarah majic, but only majic, a God-given remedy. I am convinced of that. I found the herb myself one sparkling day. Then I found God. I grow it as I work to grow this

community’s faith.”

Carmen stares at him.

He says, “You know the Native Americans used to use drugs in religious ceremonies? The peace pipe?”

“You’re a Methodist preacher.”

“And we Methodists are not known for abstinence.”

“Right.”

“Majic did not kill Sarah,” he says.

“I don’t care.” Carmen says, “I came here because I want —” “You’re here seeking guidance. I know, child. Would you like to pray?”

“No. I want to sell.”

C

armen wants to know that if she died, people would think of her as they do Sarah. She walks to the shed holding a light bulb. It’s useless, unlit. One-fourth of the shed is missing.

Carmen thinks of Sarah’s body that afternoon. Tries lying on the dirt floor of the shed just as Sarah had. Stacks her knees one over the other, pulls the

Carmen drives to Al’s house. The entire landscape of the town spreads out before her, except it doesn’t need to be spread out really, because when you are on one road, you are on all the other infinitely repeating roads, the great rolls of hay upright in the fields, the dead raccoons sprawled on the pavement.

Al’s house, the parsonage, is small and yellow, two doors down from the church. There’s a kiddie pool in the side yard, the same one the church uses for parking lot baptisms during Vacation yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

fiction bottom one close to her stomach.

Carmen suspects someone could die from the majic she sells, could choke on the yellow dust that comes from the leaves once you crush them. She sells because she doesn’t mind this possibility.

She doesn’t like the idea that no one but Sarah has ever died from it, that God chose only Sarah.

Rae wants to try majic. It was the last thing her daughter experienced and Rae is desperate to feel something other than numb rage.

Although the walk to Carmen’s is short, Rae considers driving. Walking over, she’ll feel like she’s pretending to be her daughter. Remembering that the car is low on gas, she walks anyway, carrying a hooded sweatshirt of Sarah’s, an excuse: “She would want you to have this.” The sweatshirt is plain grey, paint splatters on the right shoulder and elbow.

Rae knows she should have grabbed something better, but she didn’t want to

38 | Vol. XLI, No. 6 | Wallace Prize 2014

go into Sarah’s room. She hasn’t opened the door since the day of the funeral.

The sweatshirt had been left slung across a stool at the kitchen counter. There are dozens of uncomfortable objects all over the house: Sarah’s favorite potato chips in the cupboard, her shoes under the couch, pencil graffiti Rae had stopped noticing until this week — the words “Ryan is a HOG BRAIN” above the bathroom mirror. She does not blame Ryan for retreating to friends’ houses.

Carmen answers the door. Rae has never come to her house without Sarah.

Carmen gives her the same quick smile, all in the mouth, that she has given every middle-aged woman who has looked worried about her since Sarah died. Rae does not look worried, but tired. Her coral manicure is chipped and her T-shirt is wrinkled.

“Hello Carmen. I just thought you might want to have — this is Sarah’s sweatshirt.”

Carmen takes it from her, and steps back, a gesture that Rae can come in.

Rae hasn’t entered anyone else’s house since Sarah died.

“Thanks,” Carmen says.

“If you want anything else,” Rae says. “I don’t know what to do with it all.”

Carmen wore Sarah’s clothes a lot when Sarah was alive. Doing so either felt like she was trying a little of Sarah on, or like she and Sarah were the same — like they could flip back and forth between each other’s jeans, laughs, and weariness. They stayed over at each other’s houses often, and when they were

in bed talking, one would always be more tired than the other. But if it was Carmen who was tired first, Carmen would gradually wake as Sarah neared sleep. Then, Sarah would wake and Carmen would feel her eyes closing.

Back and forth until they’d balanced the seesaw and they could sleep.

“Here, do you want to sit down?”

Carmen asks.

Rae follows her into the kitchen with linoleum modeled to look like real tile, and a clock shaped like a fish that makes the sound of a faucet dripping when it ticks. They sit at the table.

“I haven’t seen you much recently,” Rae says. “Not as much as I’m used to.”

“Yeah, I miss you.” Carmen says. She realizes that it’s true.

“I’ve been thinking about trying majic,” Rae says.

“Really?” Carmen has friends whose parents drink and smoke with them. Rae wasn’t strict, but she wasn’t like those mothers. The ones with so little distance between them and their children that they might buy their daughter a bottle of absinthe, might kiss their son’s best friend, might fall into the shower curtain with tiny yellow ducks painted onto it into the bathtub, breaking the shower curtain rod and bruising their sternum, might do all these things in the same night. Rae wasn’t like those mothers.

“I don’t know what it feels like. She was on it when she died,” Rae says.

“Probably.”

“I want to know what it felt like for her.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” “I’ll make you tea,” Carmen says.

“That was Sarah’s favorite way.” Carmen isn’t sure if this is true, but it feels more polite than smoking it.

Carmen walks to her room and retrieves a palm’s worth of leaves from the red case that held her retainer before she lost it. She heats water in the microwave and pours it into a plastic pitcher, over the leaves.

Rae knows that this is an unacceptable way to grieve, trying the drug that

fiction probably killed her daughter with her daughter’s seventeen-year-old friend. But she’s not ashamed of this small failure.

This morning there was a dead deer in the front yard. She sat next to it and wept. She hasn’t yet called anyone to take it away.

Rae could have been a better, kinder mother, made sure Sarah did not do majic, gone to PTA meetings. She might have worked harder to stayed married to Sarah’s father. Sarah never talked much to Rae’s boyfriend; Rae should have left him if Sarah didn’t like him. When Sarah said she didn’t like winter, Rae should have moved the family to Louisiana. Rae should have been home that morning, cooked pancakes with cranberries in them, rubbed lavender lotion onto her daughter’s newly sunburnt shoulders.

The night before, she heard Sarah come in at four in the morning. Instead of yelling at her, she stayed in bed.

“How’s Ryan?” Carmen asks.

“He’s fine. Not home a lot.”

Carmen gives Rae her tea in a mug with a picture of a cat on it.

“You just drink it,” Carmen says.

“I didn’t know this was the majic,” Rae says. “I thought you were just making tea.”

Rae knows she is pixied, because her mouth tastes like honeysuckle and rust.

The pustules of poison ivy rash on the ball of her palm look like they’re melting.

She feels that she has been placed back into the physical world for the first time since Sarah’s death. Because the tiny beehive knit of the place mats and the holes at the top of the saltshaker are announcing themselves. Each thing asks her to touch it. She understands that all of these objects have wants and rituals which must be followed. Rae has never broken a bone and would like to. She would like to break each of her bones, compare the ways the cracks feel.

Rae asks, “Did Sarah hate me?”

There is a clear need to hold Rae. Carmen takes Rae’s wrist and says, “No.” “I wish someone had shot her. Or that she’d been in Adam’s car last year. I want to be mad.”

A summer storm starts. Sarah always counted when she saw lightning, up to the sound of thunder, to tell how far away the lightning was.

Rae wants Sarah to be alive. Being pixied has not changed this. It has only made Rae realize that this want will repeat until she is left holding a sculpted wish for what she would have done if Sarah hadn’t died.

“Do you want me to make you dinner?” Rae asks Carmen.

They walk through the storm to Sarah’s house. In the field they see lighting, and can only count to four before the thunder comes. The house is dark when they open the door — a power outage. Rae starts laughing.

“Sarah always loved power outages,” Rae says. “We would all gather in the living room and light all the candles in the house. Play euchre.”

Rae sits down on the floor of the living room.

“What is wrong with everyone?” she asks.

“Wrong?” Carmen asks.

“No one cares about Sarah. Everyone tells me God just wanted to see her sooner! That she is such a beautiful angel, that they can’t wait to see her again soon.

I can’t go to the grocery store because it makes me cry.”

“Would you like us all to stop going to the grocery store?”

“I would like all of you to wake up.”

“Everyone else did already. They decided majic was better.”

Later that night, Carmen walks into Sarah’s room. The flowers from the funeral are still on the floor, blossoms brown and stems smelling of mildew. Carmen feels a need to take something. She opens the top drawer of Sarah’s nightstand. There’s a lighter, a pocketknife, a Bible, a piece of paper.

It’s Sarah’s writing — print sometimes looping into cursive. The lines drop off in the middle — maybe it’s a poem. But Sarah did not write poems unless they were pie recipes, like hold the egg in your palm before you crack it.

Carmen realizes it’s a list she and Sarah made when they were twelve, of all the things they needed to do. “Sleep on the front porch all week” and “Hunt deer (no need to really shoot the deer)” and “Go on the Top Thrill Dragster and do not cry” and “See show at The Grog Shop” and “Love.” Those were meant for that summer. “Sew Dresses” and “Drink” and “Learn the Constellations” and “Horses” and “Drive tractor to each others’ houses.” Maybe Sarah had kept this list near her always. “Go to California” and “Get in a real fight with a bloody nose” and “Make yourself the brightest thing there is.” Sarah wrote that one jokingly but Carmen loved it. It was the one item on the list that could only ever be done by one of them.

Carmen walks to the field and sits in the shed and smokes majic. There are hundreds of light bulbs now, lining the walls like the frame of a lovely actress’s dressing room mirror. There are conventional bulbs. There is a long rectangular light she stole from the elementary school basement. There are lights taken from churches and wastebaskets and the lamps in Lu’s Pizza.

They are all wired by a snake of power cords threaded to the burnt-down house.

She called the electric company earlier that day and had the power turned back on. She plugs the cord into an outlet.

It works. Even from the burnt house, a few hundred feet from the shed, the shed’s light is brilliant. She runs to the shed, and goes inside. The dirt floor on which Sarah died is turning hot as summer asphalt. Maybe the shed is out-shined by Cleveland, seventy miles away. This display is nothing more than a lit-up reindeer pulling a sled on a rich person’s lawn, nothing grander than the fluorescent security lights bouncing over and across the prison yards and the cornfields beyond them each night.

It’s less than a flashing billboard. But Carmen made this light, she made it freckle the field grass. This is the place where Sarah died. Carmen wants it to be visible from space.

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