by Rick Wayne
“That’s enough,” I said.
I pulled harder and Kell let go. I gathered a few of the sketches and put them in the box. I slid the rest to the side with my marker set and vintage red toolbox full of brushes and half-rolled tubes of paint.
Kell sniffed. “You’re so talented.” She stood and got a tissue.
I thought she might be crying but she sneezed in the bathroom, like really loud—so loud there was an echo.
“What was that?” I asked.
She was laughing from the doorway, wiping snot from her nose. She looked pregnant then. Not her belly, of course. She just seemed full. Fertile. Abundant.
There was a folded paper I didn’t recognize among the sketches near my bare toes.
“Don’t,” she said as I reached for it.
“Excuse you.” I opened it.
It was some kind of overcomplicated star chart with lines and arrows radiating out from the center of a set of concentric circles, like a radar screen. A column of text boxes at the side explained the significance of the various marks. The label at the top had Kell’s birthday and gender. It looked like something you’d get online. For money.
“I can’t believe you fall for this stuff.”
She walked out and snatched the paper. “It’s not astrology. It’s real.”
“It looks like astrology.”
“What-ever. You told me everyone goes to the temple all the time back home and drops money in a box and prays to the spirits of your dead grandparents or whatever and then picks random printed fortunes out of a big bin.”
“Yeah. They do. Just like how in winter, people here bring a dead evergreen into their house and decorate it with pretty baubles to entice the sun to come back. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what you’re supposed to do.”
She helped me to my feet. “What are we gonna do with this?” She nudged the giant clit with her foot, but it didn’t budge. “Damn, girl. That shit’s heavy.”
“Yeah, the frame is old plumbing pipe. I needed something that would survive the fire, like a blackened skeleton.”
“Fire?”
“We were gonna douse it and burn it. A giant clitoral effigy.” I dropped on the couch.
She snorted. “Where? Please tell me on the front lawn of some douche church.”
“How about somewhere where it wouldn’t be considered a hate crime?”
She wiped her nose with the tissue again.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Am I terrible if I keep it?”
Whoa.
It was too early for existential questions. I’m sure I didn’t do a very good job of hiding my reaction.
“I’m not serious,” she said. “I just keep thinking about what it would be like. You know?” She leaned against the door frame. “You could be godmother and the three of us could just go somewhere. Disappear. You could do art, like you were meant to, and I could be a mom and you both could help me be a better person.”
I got up. “Stop it. You’re not a bad person.”
She nodded at the words I didn’t say—about the baby—and stepped away, wiping her nose.
“Anyway, what would we do for money?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’d think of something. Why didn’t he come with you to New York?”
“Who?”
“Duh. Kai.” She sat on the floor with her back against the couch.
I joined her. “Um. Why are we talking about my ex-ex-ex?”
“Because we never talk about you. Because all we ever do is talk about me and how I fuck everything up. Wait, you’ve only had two boyfriends since you’ve been here?”
I think she was still a little upset that I hadn’t opened up about him before.
“That’s not true.”
“Which part? That we’re always talking about me or that I fuck everything up?” She paused. “I’m sick of me,” she said softly. “Why won’t you say what happened? He cheat on you or something?”
I snorted. “No.”
“Then what?”
“Shit, man. We were just kids. We barely knew ourselves, let alone each other. After—you know—what happened, shit just got really weird. What was I supposed to do? Marry a 17-year-old boy? Raise a kid? Give up New York and art school and everything?”
She stared at me for a moment. “I dunno. What do you think you were supposed to do?”
Kell’s preggo stomach came to the rescue. It growled audibly and she checked the time on my Magic 8 Ball watch, which was on the floor.
Time flies.
“Shit.” She hopped up. “Come on,” she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s go out.”
“What? Right now?”
She grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet.
“We haven’t even showered!” I yelled.
It wasn’t like her, but she was pregnant so I rolled with it. I figured it would only get weirder from here on in. I threw on some clothes and we left. Kell stood at the bottom of the stairs in the hall and held the door open like she wanted me to go first—to see if it was safe or something. Then she led us right past the bodega down the street to the big chain superstore by the train station. It had been a long time since she and I had done something mundane together like grocery shopping, and we joked around like we did back in school. I’m sure we annoyed the other shoppers—except the guys checking her out. Not that she even noticed. Guys were always checking her out—like, literally 24/7. We raided the candy aisle and the cheap plastic toys. Kell pulled about four feet of Red Vines from a big barrel and grabbed the World’s Largest Bag of cheese corn. I reminded her that she didn’t even like cheese corn, but she pointed to the bag where it said it was the world’s largest and asked me how could we not get something like that. I got a cart, since we then had more than we could carry, and on our way to the magazines, she stopped the wheel with her shoe. I saw the sign over the aisle: Family Planning. She grabbed a very large box of condoms, the largest they carried, and tossed it in with the rest.
I took it out. It was purple and heavy. The label said 100-count. I held it up.
“Seriously?”
I was going to put it back but she grabbed it from my hands.
“When was the last time you got laid?” she asked.
An older woman and I made eye contact as she passed us in the aisle.
“So, now you want me to make up for lost time or something?”
“Exactly.” She walked away with the box in her hands, making sure I couldn’t put it back.
I pushed the cart forward like I was going to run into her out of anger and she hopped on the front and I pushed her—laughing—to the magazines.
“What about Darren?” I asked out of the blue.
She made a face. “What about him?”
“He’s nice.”
“So are toaster ovens.”
She walked down the aisle and snagged one of each of the softcore porn mags, pulling them one at a time from behind the plastic tabs that hid their covers. We went to the register and she produced a very large wad of cash from her soft, lavender purse. She paid the cashier without a word. I took the plastic bags and followed her out. She had put a plastic Optimus Prime mask in the cart, and now she wore it on top of her hair like a WWI helmet. She bit the curl of licorice dangling from her lips.
“Are you really suggesting I go out with Darren Freebooty?”
That was her name for him. At those odd times she dropped her phone in the toilet, or came up just a little bit short on grocery money, she’d give Darren a call. Which, you know, that’s his choice, I guess. I just hope he got something out of it.
“Dude’s in love with you or something.”
“God knows why,” she said pitifully.
I froze on the sidewalk. “Please stop. You’re preggers and hormonal.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“No. But maybe you should refrain from making any life-altering decisions for a few days.”
“If I do that, then I
’ll just go back to how things have been. I won’t end up changing anything. You made your statement. It’s my turn.”
“Statement?” I asked innocently. “What statement?”
She smiled at me knowingly. “It was on the news, bitch. I know your art when I see it.”
We started walking again.
“Are you mad?” I asked. That I’d done it without her, I meant.
That was two times I’d hurt her feelings in less than twenty-four hours.
She shrugged. “It was really cool.”
We walked back toward my flat, but she took a wrong turn about halfway.
“Where are you going?” I called.
“You’ll see!”
I sighed loudly and trudged after her, groceries in hand.
She stopped in front of a dour stone building that had once been a church, and an old one at that, but now it was a bank. On the side, in place of stained glass, there were tall ads featuring tastefully dressed men and women smiling earnestly over a company logo: two letters, TW, joined in a distinct script—some dead white dude’s initials, I figured, that the corporation’s marketing team had reduced to a pair of valueless capitals with the word National at the end, which gave the whole thing a vaguely patriotic feel.
“I’m going to open a bank account,” she said resolutely.
“I thought you had one.”
“That was my parents’.”
“Wow. This is a big deal, then. Your own account.” I reached for her arm. “Do you need me to come with?”
“Shut up.” She pulled away. “It is a big deal! Feels like surrender.”
“Oh, whatever. It’s just a checking account. How do you not already have one?”
“How do you not carry a purse?”
I scowled. “Dude. Those two things are not even remotely the same.”
“This is the gateway,” she said, looking at the spire over the door. “This is how it starts. Right here.”
“Retail banking?”
She nodded. “You do it for a while and it doesn’t seem so bad, right? Shit, maybe it even starts to feel good. So you do little more. Then you figure what the heck, you’ll go ahead and finance that luxury SUV, for practical reasons, because you're not a kid anymore and you can handle it. Next thing you know, you wake up strung out on the heavy shit. You’re balancing your portfolio in the mornings before work and complaining to your friends about the marginal tax rate.”
I stepped up the stairs and held out a hand. “Come on. We’ll do it together.”
“No,” she said and pulled me back down to the sidewalk. “I need to do it myself.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded without taking her eyes from the gray stone facade.
“Well, hurry up. I didn’t charge my phone last night.”
She nodded resolutely and started up the steps. “Wish me luck.”
“Kell?”
She stopped.
“Maybe you should take Optimus off your head first.”
She pulled the mask free and tossed it to me like a Frisbee. It arced to the side and I had to chase after it before it hit the road.
“Just for that,” I called, “I’m eating some of your Red Vines.”
I put the mask on my head and sat on the steps with the groceries while she took care of business. I used the last of my phone’s battery on a Go Fish–style pattern matching game. Cheerful chimes announced I had passed another level.
As they faded, I heard a mass chirping of birds. It seemed there was a flock nearby. After a moment, the sound got unusually loud. And close. And I heard the flapping of wings. But not the tiny flaps of sparrows and starlings. These were heavier. And there were lots of them.
I mean, lots.
I passed my eyes over the four- and five-story buildings around me. I looked up and down the street. But I couldn’t see where the sound was coming from. It wasn’t until I turned completely around that I saw what had settled on the roof and spires of the bank.
Crows. Tons of them. Smaller than ravens, and somehow less mischievous, too. More menacing. Like winged hyenas. Despite their number, they were almost silent. Most of the noise came from the smaller birds, who hung around the crows like giggling groupies. The crows peered about in silence, as if they expected a carrion feast to appear at any moment. A few of them hopped here or there for a better view or to escape a feverishly scratching neighbor. But mostly they just waited on the slant roof as the sparrows and starlings flitted between the roof and the handful of thin trees that lined the street.
It was the strangest thing.
People on both sides of the road had stopped to watch the odd chirping congress. Some were taking pictures to post online. I got up and reached for my phone as the crows started cawing over each other, as if called to cue by an invisible conductor.
Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw.
Their calls overlapped, like the chatter of an audience before a show, and it drowned out every other sound. It seemed to me like they were all telling each other the same thing, and that they were each surprised to hear it.
Caw! Caw? Caw. Caw.
Caw?
Caw! Caw! Caw!
Kell came through the front doors with some of the bank employees. They all stopped on the walk in front of the old stone church and stared up at the gathering on the roof while the sparrows and starlings flitted about. The smaller birds dipped low enough I could almost reach up and touch them.
Kell had a paper folder in her hand with a smiling couple on the front over the bank logo.
“Are you done?” I asked over the noise.
She nodded, head craned to the spires on either side of the roof. In the air, birds circled like storm clouds.
Caw. Caw! Caw. Caw.
A white blob hit the sidewalk near my foot, like a warning shot.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said in mock fear, like a B-movie scream queen.
Kell grabbed my hand and we started running and then skipping down the sidewalk together like little girls. It felt silly. And fun. And we laughed. We ate a late lunch in the park with a bunch of people in business suits. Then we hopped a train and headed south. Turns out the condoms weren’t for me at all. We walked through the doors of the Sunrise Valley Active Senior Community, which was holding its annual Summer Social that night. Kell left the open box in the common room. Near the reception desk, there was a stack of brochures with a little plastic sign that said “Please Take One.” She swiped it and set it on the table next to the open condom box. A pair of old ladies chatting in the corner by the window saw us and giggled. They were so cute.
The cheese corn and porno wasn’t for us either. We headed for Coney Island but stopped in Gravesend. Somehow Kell had found an encampment of homeless under a disused train trellis. She said she had gone there once with Bastien. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Blue tarps flapped in the breeze. She set the stash on the ground and led me behind a remaindered concrete barricade to watch from cover.
“What are we doing?” I asked in a whisper.
“You’ll see.”
After a few moments of quiet, a head appeared from between the flaps of a makeshift tent. We were far enough away that I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed like he sniffed the wind, which blew in our direction. When the rest of him emerged, I tilted my head in surprise. He wasn’t any bigger than me, and maybe shorter. He was dark-skinned. His hair was so sparse that at first I thought he was very old, but then his skin was also very taut, so taut that it seemed to pull up his nostrils and press his nose to his face. Bits of him seemed out of proportion, which I guess happens with little people. His ears, hands, and feet, for example, were large for his frame. As he approached Kell’s stash, others appeared, all just as strange but in completely different ways. One was unusually tall and lanky, so much so that he walked with a pronounced stoop. Another had a kind of humped back.
“Oh wow . . .”
I covered my mouth. I felt horrible for gawking. Clearly
these people had medical conditions of some kind, which I assumed was why they were homeless. They seemed to have found each other on the street and banded together—for protection, maybe—and here we were treating them like a pack of wild animals. But that’s how they behaved. They approached our stash like lions to a kill—cautiously at first, then ravenously. They sniffed the popcorn bag and patted it as if testing the seal. But instead of tearing the top, one of them popped the bag by squeezing it hard. Cheese corn went everywhere, like an edible firework, which elicited cheers of delight. A fourth member of the troupe appeared then carrying an aluminum pot, which he filled with yellow popcorn before waddling away like a pigeon with a stolen french fry.
“Who are they?” I whispered.
Kell hushed me, but it was too late. They had all stopped and turned and we had to duck down. I had no idea how they heard me from that far, especially over the breeze.
We stayed like that for several minutes, waiting for some sign that things had returned to normal. Eventually we heard sporadic laughter. We lifted our heads cautiously and saw the dark-skinned fellow sitting alone, munching corn from a pile between his legs, and looking at one of the porn mags upside down. He was laughing hysterically. His mirth brought the others from hiding, and before long, they were all doing the same. Nothing about the magazines seemed to illicit a sexual response. It was like we’d given them the funniest copies of MAD or National Lampoon ever produced. The waddler took one look at a centerfold and started rolling on the ground kicking his legs. I thought he might die from lack of breath.
Kell smiled then. Seeing that made her feel good, I think. She liked that she was able to give them that little moment of happiness. She excelled at it. Happy grenades, we called them at school. I even made a set in sculpture class and surprised her—a dozen grenade-shaped ceramic castings in various neon colors, each painted with a different kind of hysterical emoji, like that was what was inside. We took them to parties where gradually they all disappeared. Later that semester I did another set painted like they were boxes of popular medications—Prozac, Percocet, Botox, Viagra—and got dinged for plagiarizing myself.
