The Melting

by lize Spit

  Just as I’m about to drag my stiff calves up the stairs, I run into Tessie, bent over the keyboard in the hallway. The evening hasn’t fallen yet but the sky is tilting; it’s half dark in the hallway. I feel as caught as she does. But this time, she reacts differently. She doesn’t freeze.

  “I can’t stop,” she says without being asked. She hits the Enter key hard. For a moment, she looks me straight in the eyes.

  “I want to, but I can’t.”

  I sit down on the stairs. For the first time, Tessie finishes what she’s typing while I watch. The buttons on the old keyboard are caked in dirt and resistant to her touch.

  Her hard keystrokes show off the muscles and tendons around her joints—she reminds me of an old cat making a valiant attempt to catch a few mice. New freckles have appeared on her face today. Her eyelids are trembling. When she’s done, she lays her bony fingers on the keyboard. Her hands surrender, the rest of her resists. I want to take her in my arms.

  We all know it—Tessie has made her body the secretary of her mind. The worse she feels, the more overtime she has to work. Even from where I’m sitting, all the way up on the third step, I can smell how hungry she is.

  “Come to bed,” I say.

  “I’m not ready for bed yet.”

  “You can read another one of those Gaston comics.”

  I wait. She types a bit more. I let her count her steps as she walks up the stairs in front of me. From the looks of her, she doesn’t have any aches or cramps at all. Each foot lands on exactly the same lines on the cardboard-covered steps. On the evens, she steps with both feet, and on the odds with only one. I try to copy her movements until she notices. Halfway up the stairs, she stops.

  “No, this isn’t right. We have to go back down.”

  “And what’ll happen if we don’t?” I ask.

  “I can’t tell you because then it’ll happen for sure.”

  With small, backwards steps, we make our way back down the stairs.

  Swallow

  “I HAVE A plan,” said Pim in the tone he always used to announce ideas that would turn out badly. It was exactly ten o’clock, the first summer night of the twenty-first century. The church bells sounded louder in the flimsy tent than they did at home in my bed, even though our house was closer to the church than Laurens’s backyard was.

  “Are they ringing the end of nine o’clock or the beginning of ten o’clock?” I asked.

  “Who cares,” said Pim. “It’s the same thing.”

  The evening officially kicked off at seven o’clock with Pim and Laurens counting their pubic hairs in the back of the yard. When they came back, they lay down on their backs on their air mattress and, with contracted abs, started debating where the scrotum stopped and the ass began in the hope of minimizing each other’s pube count.

  This summer would be significant—we all knew it. July and August marked the end of primary school and the beginning of high school, and everything we knew, including ourselves, was about to change.

  It was the same tent we’d used to convince Laurens’s mom that camping and troublemaking didn’t necessarily go hand in hand. There was as little left of that plan as there was of the tent itself. The outer shell was worn and tattered and the camouflage colors all but completely faded, which actually made it less noticeable in the trees.

  Shortly after midnight, the lights went out in the house. It was finally dark enough.

  Pim’s plan was to poop in Elisa’s Mimi’s mailbox. Really, she didn’t even have a mailbox, just a slot in the front door. But in Pim’s eyes, this just made our plan “even bolder than that of the average mailbox pisser”.

  “What did Mimi ever do to us?” I said, walking as sluggishly as possible in front of the boys, hoping to slow them down. “There are plenty of other people with a mail slot. Why does it have to be Mimi’s?”

  “Elisa shouldn’t have had to move back to Hoogstraten,” Pim said.

  “But if this whole thing is about Elisa, can’t we just look up her dad’s address?”

  “Mimi will make sure he gets the message.” Laurens and Pim tiptoed across her yard to the front door. I stayed at the edge of the street to keep a lookout. Pim held up his flashlight for extra light and stifled a laugh in his T-shirt. Laurens’s giant shadow stretched across the entire front lawn, revealing that the plan wasn’t as easily executed as they’d thought. The mail slot was low, and the flap opened outwards. Laurens had spinach-colored diarrhea—he’d been bragging about it all day—but apparently this wasn’t such an advantage with a mail slot that opened outwards. He picked up a flyer on the porch and used it as a funnel.

  I kept my distance so I wouldn’t have to smell it. I watched with one eye open, that way I wouldn’t miss the spectacle but could still say later that I wasn’t really there.

  It was the youth priest, of all people, who told Laurens’s mom about it in the butcher shop. He didn’t know who did it, but he said that Mimi now had a note on her door that read “Next time, please use envelope.” Her sense of humor had compelled the priest to write off our exploits as “mischief”.

  “Mischief is for kids who tape episodes of Hey Arnold!,” Pim said when Laurens told us. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  On the last night of the summer, Pim showed up with a gigantic spotlight. The tent had been set up in Laurens’s yard for two months so we wouldn’t have to pack it up again after every use.

  “If my dad finds out I took this, I’m in big trouble,” Pim said with a swat alongside his head.

  “How’s he gonna find out?” Laurens asked.

  “If a cow decides to give birth in the middle of the night, he’ll need it himself. Then we’ll hang.”

  For a while, it wasn’t clear what Pim planned to do with the spotlight. We started the evening by going over the old scores—which girls had gone up a cup size and thus gained an extra point? Then I had to make sketches of different types of breasts, and they wrote the girls’ names in columns under each one. It was all just speculation.

  Just after midnight I went out in the yard to pee, at a safe distance—where I could still see the tent but they couldn’t see me. I squatted down, lifted up my nightshirt and looked at the brightly lit dome with their two perfectly outlined silhouettes inside. They were secretly flipping through my notebook. I never let them look at it. Not just because I wrote down the wrong scores for the prettiest girls, but because their blind trust in me was the only thing I had left, because my own score would never come up.

  I hurried back to the tent. The grass was damp under my bare feet. As soon as I got there, someone unzipped it from the inside. Laurens and Pim crawled out, shining the bright lamp straight in my face. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness again.

  Pim climbed up the swing set behind me. He fastened the spotlight to the top of the monkey bars with the beam pointed towards the vacuum shed. The light was so bright that the crickets in the yard behind it took it for the sunrise and stopped chirping.

  Outside of the spotlight, the night was blacker than before. In that darkness, there was something more dangerous about Pim’s face. His eye sockets became two black saucers.

  I sat down in the damp grass, far enough away from where I had just peed.

  Laurens and Pim climbed up on the swing set and started making shadow puppets with their hands. Two wolves appeared on the wide, flat wall of the vacuum shed and gobbled each other up. Then came butterflies, then two-headed birds.

  For each animal, I gave a little round of applause, until all of a sudden an elephant appeared. I looked at the wall, not at the swing set. As long as I only looked at the shadow, I didn’t owe them anything, I thought. But in the end, I turned around anyway—why, I don’t know. Maybe I was looking for an explanation. And there was Pim with his pajama pants around his ankles. He folded his scrotum around his shaft, forming two ears. Projected on the wall of the shed, it actually looked like a pretty credible elephant.

  Laurens pulled dow
n his pants too and wiggled his limp willy back and forth. His pubic hair was scarcer but thicker; in the giant shadow I could see the flecks of crud stuck in it.

  The possibilities turned out to be more limited than with their hands. After a little elephant war, Pim and Laurens pulled their pants back up.

  I didn’t clap. Pim jumped down and came over beside me. “Your turn, Eva,” he said, “Surprise us.”

  He ducked into the tent and came out with my sleeping bag. Then he spread it out on the grass and sat down on top of it.

  I slowly rose to my feet, climbed up the swing set, next to Laurens. His pants were securely fastened. I made a few animals with my hands but couldn’t do anything that hadn’t been done already. There was no applause.

  After a few minutes, Pim shouted, “Come on, it can’t be that hard to make a clam.”

  “Or a swallow!” Laurens said. “You’ve got the goods to make that too.” He climbed down and sat next to Pim on the sleeping bag.

  All the nights out in the tent had led to this. I had something they didn’t have. If we were stamp collectors, this would have been a huge advantage, but in my case it was anything but.

  I stood there in the spotlight trying to figure out how to get out of it, how to not have to take off my pajamas. I could jump down, land wrong and break something. My ankle, for example—I snapped it once before so maybe it would cooperate again.

  “I don’t know what a swallow looks like,” I say.

  “Long wings. Little head. Should work.” Pim made himself more comfortable. “Come on, nobody can see you.”

  “You guys aren’t nobody,” I said.

  “Well, somebody’s gotta watch. Otherwise it never happened.” It sounded like something I could have said myself. It didn’t really help.

  “Okay, but you guys keep your eyes on the wall.” I positioned myself in front of the light.

  “We promise.”

  I waited for them to turn their heads. Crouching over the lamp I pulled up my nightshirt and lowered my panties. On the wall, right next to the door of the shed, I used my labia to model some kind of creature.

  All I could think about was the inside of Mimi’s hallway. How we’d soiled it at the beginning of the summer. Laurens and Pim couldn’t imagine what it must have looked like. But I could. I knew exactly what was behind the mail slot: a narrow hall with a mat, a stool with a cactus on it, piles of unopened mail, Mimi’s Sunday shoes that she always put on with a shoehorn and polished every month.

  Since I was the only one of us who knew what those shoes looked like, how they were neatly lined up with the heels against the wall, I was the only one who felt guilty about Laurens’s shit.

  The lamp was hot and created a pleasant glow between my legs. I looked at the wall, at the shadow of my fiddling hands. No matter what I did, my labia were too tight and hung too close to my body. I couldn’t make a bird or any other kind of animal with them. The best I could do was a stingray or a flatfish.

  I stopped. In the distance, I could see the tops of the surrounding houses. There were families sleeping under those roofs.

  “What kind of animal is that? Pigeon roadkill?” Pim started giggling loudly. Even Laurens let out a feeble chuckle.

  Of course, they weren’t just looking at the shadow anymore. I immediately dropped my nightshirt and turned to climb down the ladder, but I forgot about the panties still hanging around my ankles. I tripped on the top step and slid down the side of the swing set like a plank with my back bouncing down the round wooden poles. I landed on my feet with my nightshirt rolled up around my neck. All I could feel was the burning of my chafed skin.

  For a split second, I didn’t know where or who I was. It felt like the best possible option: being nobody, being nowhere. Then the pain hit me.

  “Eva, are you okay?” Laurens’s voice sounded far away, as if it was coming from inside a closed bag. But he was still sitting next to Pim in the grass.

  Against the back of the house, in the courtyard, was a leather chair. Laurens’s father liked to plop down in it after a day of cutting steaks. I sat down and discovered a giant splinter in the back of my forearm. It didn’t bleed when I pulled it out.

  Laurens and Pim asked if I was coming back to the tent to sleep. When I didn’t answer, they didn’t ask any more questions. They silently retreated into the tent with the lamp, leaving my sleeping bag out in the grass. I saw their shadows flop down on the air mattress without a lot of gesticulating. Maybe they didn’t know what they’d done wrong. They did leave the spotlight on in case I wanted to find my way back.

  But I didn’t want to go back into that tent. Going home wasn’t an option either. Dad always locked the back door from the inside, and I didn’t want to wake Tessie.

  Suddenly I heard nervous, irritated murmurs coming from the upper floor of the house behind me. Laurens’s parents were still awake. The window in their bedroom looked out over the courtyard, and they had a good view of the vacuum shed from their bed. A light was turned on, its yellow beam cut the backyard in half. Then the window was closed, the curtains were closed, and the light went out again.

  Had they watched me make the shadows on the wall like I had watched Pim and Laurens at Mimi’s—not wanting to look but still wanting to see what would happen? The boys had stood on top of the swing set together. They’d get away with it because it was impossible to say whose elephant was whose. I was the only one with a flatfish.

  The scrapes on my back didn’t burn as much as the shame.

  I sat there for hours. I saw the night sky disappear layer by layer, as if it were slowly being erased. The church tower stood in the background. The hands moved around the clock. But I couldn’t say exactly when the sun came up.

  Somehow, I found it comforting. Another eighteen hours and it would be night again, and the blackness would return the same way it left, layer by layer. This moment would gradually fade into the past, under countless layers of darkness, until Laurens’s mom had forgotten what she had seen.

  The first light of dawn made everything in the garden visible: the rustling leaves, the dandelions and poppies sprouting up in the grass, the first bees. Of course, there were just as many bees as the day before, but now everything seemed like too much.

  My damp nightshirt clung to my skin. There were no tears, no raindrops. I was sitting so still, so stiff with shame and regret, that the morning took me for a plant and sprinkled me with dew along with the rest of the garden.

  A little after six, I heard the first sounds in the house. Laurens’s parents always got up early to get the shop ready. The bedroom window opened. Two minutes later the shutters on the back of the building were rolled up.

  Laurens’s mom appeared: first her sandals, then her shorts, her swollen knees, her neck. The more of her that became visible, the more I shrunk. Looking at her knees didn’t help this time. I was weaker and uglier than she was. I looked away before we could make eye contact. I was going to lose her special smile.

  She came out and stood beside the chair, without laying a hand on my shoulder. “Why are you up so early?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

  “That can happen,” she replied. She glanced at the half-camouflaged dome in the back of the yard, turned around, walked back inside and slammed the window screen shut.

  For a second, I thought: she didn’t see us last night, she closed the window from her bed, she didn’t see the shadows on the wall.

  The rest of the morning she putzed around the house. She didn’t come outside. She kept her lips pursed, didn’t bring out any of the usual breakfast stuff—no bowls, no spoons, no milk, no cereal, no plate of sandwiches under a basket against the flies. With every item she didn’t bring, I became more certain that she had, in fact, seen my shadow performance.

  When I heard the sound of forks clinking on plates from inside the house, I knew that Laurens’s parents had started having their own breakfast. I couldn’t help but think about what Laurens’s mom had said whe
n she heard the story on the news about the speed demon who caused a deadly accident, fled the scene of the crime and then crashed his own car into a tree: “God either punishes immediately or within fourteen days.”

  The remark played over and over again in my mind. I walked back out into the yard, shuffling my bare feet through the wet grass. Laurens and Pim were still asleep. All was quiet in the tent. Inside, it was hot and smelled of sweat and bad breath. The spotlight had left a dark burn mark in the fabric. Pim was lying diagonally across my air mattress. I grabbed my clothes and put them on in the middle of the garden, over my pajamas. Laurens’s mother was standing at the window on the first floor, looking down at me.

  I decided to stay away for at least fourteen days, to disappear from her sight. I wouldn’t come back until the scratches on my back had healed. Two weeks, that should have been doable.

  1:45 p.m.

  IT’S STOPPED SNOWING. From the doorway, the backyard looks quiet—not just quiet, silenced. As if the trees were just talking about things that can’t be discussed in my presence.

  Before I go, I make a quick stop in the workshop. I lift the latch and push open the door, giving myself a few seconds to take it all in. The space looks small. On the right is the ladder and a giant rack laden with jars of screws and washers.

  These last few years, I’ve caught myself wondering about my parents more often. When I think about Dad, there’s only one question that comes to mind: is that noose still hanging there? Though to be fair, he too deserves a more complex kind of concern.

  I want to look up into the rafters for the answer to my question, but I scan the ground instead, then the gardening tools.

  The only one that’s not in its usual spot is the American shovel—Dad probably used it to bury the dog the other day.

  I walk down the garden path, taking giant steps in an effort to make as few footprints in the snow as possible. I notice the low-hanging branches of the cherry tree too late; the snow ends up in the collar of my jacket. It melts the second it touches my skin.