One day, when all that had been going on for about four years, a whole lot of everyone turned up at once. Four years since anybody was the littlest bit nice to me. It was the anniversary of my crime, but I didn’t know that on account of not being allowed to mingle with the singles outside of Candle Hole. T-Day, they call it. Isn’t that just something, having a whole holiday named after you? Even if it’s a moping-about kind of holiday rather than a presents kind of holiday. Still counts.
At first I thought they came to properly kill me this time. Then, I thought maybe they came to apologize and acknowledge how right I was all along, but you would really be surprised how rarely people do that.
Instead they melted my house.
Burning a house down is easy and quick, especially in Garbagetown where everything is danger: contents flammable. You just chuck a light at it and this, that, and a lot of claggy smoke, no more house. Melting a house is also reasonably easy, I suppose. It’s not what anyone would call a high-demand skill. But there’s nothing quick about it. They had to hold their torches against my roof and my walls and my door and just … stand there for ages, glaring at me and super-pointedly not saying anything and waiting for the wax to ooze down to nothing. It took hours and hours. I started laughing at one point, and I don’t remember very much after that because someone instructed the back of my head pretty hard—but I couldn’t help it! It was supposed to be such a violation of my personal sovereignty—you could tell they really, really wanted it to be—but it was just so fucking awkward. The air reeked of Autumn Opulence and Radiant Rose Garden and Canadian Pine. No one can get too deep into mourning a loss of personal sovereignty when it smells like cinnamon cookies, and cranberry jelly with the can-ridges imprinted on it, and freshly cut and stacked lumber all over the place.
When I woke up, my pretty little house was a waxy lava-pit of red, yellow, orange, and various other limited-edition Fuckwit colors. Everyone had gone. They’d scratched one last helpful message into the ruins of my front door: DEATHSLUT GET OUT.
Aw. I kind of liked Deathslut. It was a bit pretty, really.
My ear was full of dried, cakey blood, and my head was spinning and my twin brother Maruchan was sitting on something that looked like a melted snowman. But it wasn’t a melted snowman. It was a greasy white hump of votive unscenteds that used to be my kitchen.
“Oh, Maruchan,” I sighed. I tried to get up, but the happiness in my chest was so heavy I had to lie down again. Also the side of my head was bleeding more than the recommended daily allowance.
I didn’t know what to say to him. You can only love and need and miss someone so much for years and years before language just washes its hands of the whole business. We used to be part of each other and now we were nothing, and nobody’s brain knows how to square that. So instead of saying those things I said:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
That’s what we used to ask each other every night before bed instead of singing lullabies, every single night of our shared childhoods, in the shadows of our nursery that became our bedroom that became, most recently, a droopy lump of turquoise blue Caribbean Moods candle-slag with wicks sticking out all over it like beard-stubble.
“An only child,” he spat back.
“Oh,” I said, because there isn’t anything good to say back to something like that, and because justifying my life choices took more blood than I had to spare. Tears backed up in my throat. I’d never cried, not once in all the times they came for me, not once for all the things they wrote on my door. I didn’t want to cry then. But it was happening anyway.
“Thank you, Brother, for my instruction,” I whispered.
Maruchan stared at me for a long time. He stared at me hungrily, as if he were eating up the sight of me now so he could make it through the winter on this meal alone. My brother looked older and thinner and darker than he used to be. He was wearing a dirty gray T-shirt full of holes that said SOMEBODY NEEDS A CARE BEAR STARE on it in bubbly mint-green letters, and white jeans with zebra stripes drawn on them in Sharpie. You find what you find when you go on pants-safari in Clotheschester, and practically every shirt on the heap has some bizarre Fuckwit saying on it. He had a new tattoo on his left forearm. It was still angry and red and puffy, but very well done. Big, bold deep black letters. Devastation Black.
X | THAMES | X
I didn’t understand what that meant, then. But it didn’t matter. It was the same Maruchan. Maruchan is a constant in the world. Maruchan cannot change. The sun was easing on down into the Garbagetown heights, over the mounds of cheap plastic lighters on Flintwheel Hill and the shattered gin bottles of Far Boozeaway. Rosy smeary clouds lit up Maruchan’s wild dark hair. His face softened. His frown vanished when the light did. He just couldn’t keep his grim on straight.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” Maruchan said softly. Little pricks of candle flames flickered on all around us in the houses that hadn’t been melted. Fireflies. Sly stars. My brother grabbed me up in his arms like the prize in a Fuckwit claw machine, and that’s just exactly how lucky and joyful I felt, rising up from the ground in his silver claw-arms, winning, won, and he smelled like he’d always smelled and laughed like he’d always laughed and whispered, “What a stupid thing to say. I’m stupid. You’re stupid. No, you’re really stupid. What did you have to go and blow up half of Electric City for? We could have been together all this time. I missed you so fucking much, Tetley, you pure idiot.” He used his Care Bear shirt to carefully clean the blood off my face. “I love you, you mad little firebug,” he said fondly, wiping the tears out of his eyes, then out of mine. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Forgiven,” I whispered, and he kissed my forehead but he didn’t say anything, the way you don’t say anything when a kid says they want to be an astronaut when they grow up. It’s kinder to let them think it’s possible.
* * *
YOU KNOW, IT’S just the funniest thing. It’s been years now since anyone laid hands on me. As long as I stay on my boat, forty meters out to sea, I am more alone and safe and private than I ever was in Candle Hole. No one here but the mackerel and the crabs and the little steel muscly men and my used-tos.
But I miss them. I miss their blazing, furious eyes and the warmth of their fists and the sound of their voices screaming at me. I miss the hateful way they said my name. I miss getting to know people. So many different kinds of people, of all walks of life. I even miss the words on my door. I look for them every morning on the cabin hatch of my pontoon boat. There’s never anything there. No MURDERCUNT, no BRIGHTBITCH, no DEATHSLUT. They were so creative. They used their imaginations on me. I always felt a little honored. Just like, when they brought jumper cables and attached them to my skin, I felt honored that they’d spend precious electricity on little old me. I was worth that, to them. Electricity and imagination. And every morning when I see my clean, blank, untouched door, for a minute, just a minute, I’m disappointed. I wanna be death’s slut again. At least I was somebody’s slut.
Maruchan never did any of that stuff, by the way. Never held me in his arms or called me an idiot like idiot meant darling sister, my twin, my own other self. Never kissed my forehead, not even once. He just held a torch to my house with the others and snarled the part about being an only child and left me there bleeding on the ruin of all those thousands of candles.
Of course, I never said any of that foolishness about being forgiven, either. I don’t care about that. I was right. I don’t need to be forgiven for being right.
But it feels so nice to imagine it all the other way, doesn’t it? And I can make it happen that way in my head, lying out on my boat with my moringa tree and Dorchester the hibiscus and my wedding trousseau, half-naked in the moonlight, surrounded by beautiful junk with no one to tell me it didn’t go down like that. I can reach back in there and unbend and rebend everything like Nordstrom’s wire hangers and make it rehappen the way it always should have. Put Hawaii back. Refreeze the pack ic
e. Bring back jazz. Make my brother love me again.
You got it. Thirty minutes or less or it’s free.
3
THE 8TH BEST DAFFODIL
THERE’S A PLACE not very far from Candle Hole I used to like to go sometimes.
In the years between getting my name and the business with Brighton Pier, when my life was just busy being me and nobody cared whose slut I was because I was my own slut, thank you sir and kindly, I practically lived there. It suited me splendid, since nobody else liked it at all. People tend to huddle up in the useful areas of Garbagetown. It doesn’t pay to live too far from any one of the three Ps of postapocalyptic life: protein, precipitation, and potential. The Great Sorting was thorough and sensible. It made neighborhoods out of a floating crapfill, land out of waste. There’s good work and good junk in Scrapmetal Abbey, Upholsterton, Pill Hill, Bookbury, Rubbering, the Babydales. You could make a sturdy cottage out of television season box-sets on the slopes of Mt. VHS. There’s good soil in the Mountains Organic—Bannockbone, Taxidermia, Seedville, and the Spice Tundra—or at least good components that could be convinced to become soil eventually. And of course on the Lawn, out past the Matchstick Forest, slowly encroaching on the Cardboard Flats. You could build a life out of those places. A trade. A family.
But not Winditch. Winditch was barren. Winditch was worthless. Winditch was inorganic, impractical, inedible. Winditch creeped out even the creeps.
Winditch was the best.
So that was where I went after I pretty obviously couldn’t stay in Candle Hole anymore. I had a long hard think about my situation while I chipped away the hot pink wax caul that had formed over the tin footlocker where I kept anything I actually cared about. Anything I minded my frequent flyer guests smashing up or stealing on their way out of my world back to Self-Righteous Dickhole-opolis.
My situation was fundamentally broken. I couldn’t stay. But I couldn’t go, either. I’m a very famous person in Garbagetown, and Garbagetown only has a few famous people to choose from. Folks knew what I looked like. They knew my name. They knew what they were allowed to do to me. Fuck. Carrying this face three feet out of Candle Hole was basically taking out a personal ad to hook up with my own death. It’s a delicate kind of thing to express, but you’ll just have to believe me: The kind of violence human beings are willing to dish out indoors with neighbors on either side when they have to walk a fair distance to do it and keep their vinegar up the whole way is nothing next to what they’d have for me if I met them by surprise out in the open with no one to say, Hey, that’s enough, she’s had enough.
Technically, no one’s allowed to kill me. But there’s miles of ground to cover before you get to killing, technical or otherwise.
No neighborhood would take me in. No one would feed me or offer me water from their rain barrel. And even if I wanted to try, there’s not much of a crowd to disappear into in Garbagetown (excepting when a big fuck-off floating pier of lies and fairy lights turns up), and disguises are fairly tough to come by in the afterlife of Planet Earth. All the hair dye diluted itself into the sea a long time ago and I hope the jellyfish enjoyed their time as platinum blondes, I really and honestly do.
I levered my footlocker out of its waxy grave with a thick cracking sound. I sat down next to it and laid my head on the lid. It was getting chilly out. I wondered idly where we were these days. Garbagetown moves with the currents. Gulf stream, jet stream, I don’t know. But you can tell when we float too far north or south because cold suddenly becomes a thing again. I closed my eyes and imagined we were in New England maybe. Somewhere down below the waves slept Rhode Island or Vermont or vast Fuckwitted Boston, with great big sharks passing silently under bridges on their way to Harvard. I saw a picture of Boston in a book once. I never knew so many bricks could even exist.
I opened up my locker and there it was. Just like always. Not even any dust. I ran my fingers over it. Glass and rubber and plastic. Meant to protect you from toxicity. Fetid air. A poisoned life. Just what I was after. For a moment, I could almost smell rich, sweet gasoline. But that was long ago and far away. Memory-petrol. Which is all petroleum ever was, when you think about it. A planet’s memories of when it was young, burned up to keep warm and keep going. And underneath all that, bright, soft fabric. Pale orange, covered in a print of white lilies and trailing green vines.
The gas mask belonged to a boy I used to love called Goodnight Moon. The dress belonged to my mother. I didn’t have any one bit of her heart, but I had her dress. Strappy, thin, coffee stains on the hem. Saved for a wedding or a funeral, whichever came first. I’d never cared much for dresses, myself. It wouldn’t have been much of a disguise if I did.
So I walked out of Candle Hole in a gas mask and a gown, the unconnected hose hanging down past my belly button like a shriveled elephant’s trunk. I could hear my own breath inside the mask. Could see it fog the glass goggles. But I was safe. The only other things in my locker were a dry stump of lipstick Maruchan once gave me, my old backpack with St. Oscar on it, and a mixtape. I shoved the tape in the backpack and left the makeup. Food was going to be a problem, but I didn’t want to think about that just then, so I didn’t. I prayed instead.
St. Oscar, protect and keep me, let not the raccoons of evil fortune remove thy glorious silver lid from over my head. All hail thy grouchy countenance, as green and brown as life. Though I move upon the face of the world, my soul resides forever in thy Great Trashcan with you, beaten and dull on the outside, but within, infinite and abundant. Humans are trash; therefore we are holy. Humans are filth; therefore we are blessed. Amen.
* * *
WINDITCH IS THE opposite direction from the Matchstick Forest and Flintwheel Hill and all the places I went on my way to find my name when I was a child, away from the leeward edge of Garbagetown, away from the sea. I picked through the deflated soccer balls and broken lacrosse sticks and ghostly hanging nets of Sportington Gap, the cairns of ice skates, black pucks, tennis rackets, billiard balls like jawbreaker candy, the baffling novelty devices with AS SEEN ON TV stamped on their handles, and rusting free weights that once kept some drowned Fuckwit thin and strong in the face of their constant fucking smorgasbord of a life.
Dawn was on the move by the time I scrambled down a steep cliff-face of burned-out jumbotron scoreboards. (Home of the Tigers! Go Gators! Yokohama Bay Stars! Fly Emirates!) I hung down by my fingertips and dropped the last few feet onto a patch of wet, moldy gym mats. Winditch is almost a cave. It goes under the Gap for ages, holding it all up, thankless forever.
A thin little rain started to fall as I slipped away under the golf club stalactites and into my cave of wonders. I took off the gas mask and breathed free. I’d be safe here, for a while. It felt so good and giddy to be traveling again!
Thin scraps of sunlight crawled down between raindrops and through the mouth of the scoreboard-cave. Winditch lit up all over gold and silver, but mostly gold. Gold everywhere. Mr. Aladdin, eat your heart out. I walked through the heaps and mounds and pillars of treasure, running my hands over it, stopping to stare. My old friends. Trophies—thousands, millions of them, a thousand million victories. Cups, stars, orbs, numbers, little brass girls and brass boys in flapping brass togas dancing or swimming or flying or standing proud on plastic red and white and blue and green columns. Amazing, so amazing, all of it, always. Oh, secret molten golden heart of Garbagetown, hide me forever!
I used to spend hours reading the plaques on the trophies, feeling the engraved names with my fingertips, sounding them out, imagining all those joyful Fuckwits holding them tight to their chests.
Gregory Ambrose: Spelling Bee Participant
Caihong Chen: Most Improved Effort
Andrej Berenkhov: Better Luck Next Time
Samantha Belfort: Tried Hardest!
Lucy Price-Kowalski: If You Had Fun You Won!
Newport Volleyball Tournament 2029
(Sponsored by Al’s Clam Shack)
Aiden Kleinhauser: Most At-
Bats!
Isabella Jorgensen: 8th Runner Up Miss
Daffodil Pageant Junior Division
Terrence Hardy: Best Smile
Lucy and Samantha and Caihong were all well and good, but I had a favorite. I found it after my father ran off wherever fathers go when they don’t want you anymore. Dadbury. Fatherside. I couldn’t relax and stretch out in my new digs till I found it. Oh, I hadn’t come to Winditch in years, but it would still be here, right where I left it, St. Oscar would do that for me, he’s always liked me special. Farther in, farther up—yes! I pulled it down off the pile. A gold vase full of gold roses. Rotted red ribbons swarming with fungus still clung to the gold handles for dear life. The plaque read:
Gretchen Barnes: World’s Best Wife.
What a girl Gretchen Barnes must have been, to earn her title out of all the Fuckwit billions. I didn’t even know that was something you could be best at. I was in awe of her. The whole world must have known her name. But not like my world knew mine.
I sat down on the damp floor of that golden cave while the dawn piled in with a gas mask in one hand and Gretchen Barnes in the other, surrounded by all those Fuckwit triumphs. Oh, I know they were all the worst kind of death-guzzling monsters, sick and swollen as blood blisters, stupid, hungry, toothful voids in the shape of people, but they must have loved one another so fucking much. Imagine being so alive and conscious of the importance of every single second of constantly winnowing life, every single simplest action and choice and effort and onrushing death, that you would carefully mark out little Lucy having fun and crown her for it like the Queen of Time. Imagine having so much energy to spare after finding food and shelter and clothing and some tiny goddamn scrap of company that you figured you’d make a beautiful silver cup, not because some kid did the best job, but just because she tried the hardest. I try the hardest all the time, and everyone’s just permanently fucking mad at me. Imagine having that much left over that you give one single ghostly shit about the eighth-best daffodil.
The Past Is Red Page 4
