by Micol Ostow
“true.”
though she still sounds uncertain, my enthusiasm must have leaked, spilled over past the edges of her body’s boundaries. she hazards a hopeful grin. reaches out, clasps her fingers around my own.
“we can do this,” she offers, more as a question than a statement.
“Henry—He has connections, contacts.
there’s a man He met, sometime back,
a music manager.
someone important.
this guy’s gonna come out, hear us sing, take a listen to Henry’s stuff.
help us get the message out.”
i nod, knowing:
Henry’s reach, His grasp, is far.
His orbit is infinite.
His connections like sticky spider-webbing.
“it’s gonna mean money,” shelly goes on. “for the baby. for our family.”
i blink.
money.
of course,
babies—
people—
families—
cost
money.
we live so well on cast-offs,
on trash.
that i had nearly forgotten about
such real-world things.
things like
money.
i have a moment,
a hiccup,
where the soft spaces of my throat seem to tighten, to close.
where mirror-mel awakens,
wide-eyed,
wondering:
wondering:
what ever happened
to free love?
but mirror-mel
should know better
than to question Henry.
“we can do this,” shelly says again,
and the choking,
closing
sensation
melts away.
i turn to shelly.
my sister.
soon to be a mother.
i nod, utterly convinced.
“of course we can.
we will.
“we’re family.”
uncle
Henry says, there is no before, and He is right.
He knows. everything. sees right through people like they’re cut from glass, His eyes the prism of a psychic kaleidoscope: telepathic, all-knowing.
infinite.
i have no before, no memory of what it was to have a father.
no memory of life before the undertow, before eternity overtook me.
before infinity.
but.
there is one thought,
one mind-image,
one flash of consciousness that can’t be erased,
no matter the cloudy bursts i breathe in,
no matter how my lungs fill of Henry’s medicine,
of magic smoke
that i suck down
into the empty, decaying base of my body:
there is the day that i met my uncle.
jack.
i was small.
i was small, and my father only ever a pencil tracing, a paper cutout, a shadow of a concept that my mother whispered to herself
in those moments that she happened to forget herself.
to forget me.
my father was, near as i could tell, a wisp of an afterthought,
a fleeting prayer, mumbled incoherently.
a suggestion of a sketch, buried deep within the footnotes of my mother’s life plan.
mother wasn’t one for planning. and so. i never had a father.
only uncle jack.
“mel,” mother said, leaning forward. the heavy vapors of her scent clogged and clotted at the back of my throat, choking me off, strangling me.
“this is jack. he’s going to stay with us for a while.”
and the look in his eyes—
a gleam that suggested that he understood the depths of my own transparency—
that was enough, more than enough, to still a girl my age,
then barely five years old.
“you can call me uncle.”
his breath reeked of alcohol and secrets.
of rot and undertow
and promises
unfulfilled.
i knew:
there was something about a girl who hadn’t ever known her father;
there were words for that fractured outline of a person, words hurled at me by playground passersby, people who couldn’t possibly have grasped the strength of the cloying showers of hatred they spewed.
i was small, still. barely five years old.
i was something dirty. undeserving.
something barely of this world.
i understood, even then, what it was to be lacking.
what it was to have a gaping, yawning hole—a chasm where one’s family should be.
it was a
punch line
that for once, i was in on.
even then.
even small.
there was something about a girl who didn’t have a father.
something rotted,
set to
spoil.
uncle jack wasn’t going to change that.
he had his own empty places.
hollow spaces.
and it was clear to me,
even then,
even small,
that he
had
his own plans
to fill
those fault lines
up.
home
when shelly and i return home with the fruits of our foraging, leila is in the kitchen.
lately, leila is often in the kitchen.
and i often like to stay away from leila.
lately.
lately, i stay
away.
lately, she and junior tilt their heads together, exchange glances like their insides are radios tuned to the same frequency.
lately, there are whispers, conversational lilts that ring like hushed, muffled music.
there are revved engines, lately,
and headlights that wash over the charred remains of our campfire hours after we’ve snuffed the flames and headed off to sleep.
it is… unsettling.
so.
lately, i stay away from leila as best i can.
which means staying out of the kitchen.
it is wrong, i know, to avoid her. to avoid junior.
they are, both of them,
my family.
but.
i am not the only one grappling with uncertainty.
i think back to shelly’s delicate trembling,
her hesitation
back in the pickup
there is a certain amount of
uncertainty.
even here, among Henry’s watersheds, His bottomless caches of love and light.
even here, there are moments of doubt,
of afterthought
and undertow.
it may be wrong, but regardless:
it is fierce.
deep.
inescapable.
teeth
leila bares her teeth.
when shelly and i enter the kitchen, arms bowing under the weight of our bounty, there is a moment—
a slight,
nearly imperceptible,
sliver of a second—
that leila’s teeth are exposed:
white,
the shade of sun-bleached bone.
her face is an expansive mask of hunger.
her angles have been sharpened to precision.
i think of shelly, of her soft vulnerability,
of the extra heartbeat that pulses
through the road maps of her body.
we exchange a glance—
shelly,
my sister,
and i—
a moment of mutual transparency—
an
d come to a tacit agreement.
she shuffles the grocery bags against her hips,
gives no hint of the other cargo
she totes.
the baby is our secret.
it may belong to our family—
to all of us—
but for now, it is still
our secret.
after
leila is dressed in black:
black jeans, black boots, slim black turtleneck pulled over her taut, slender frame.
she is a spring-loaded coil, coated in ink. she is slick, she is thick, she is heavy with sinister expectation.
she is the execution of a plot, a plan.
a threat.
hollow need hangs from her.
want drips from her limbs, caresses her joints, pools within her crevasses, her cracks, her rivulets.
she brims, bursts,
overflows with now.
her half-life is sticky; it rains nuclear showers against all of our twisted, crooked, creaking shoulders.
leila has claws. and fangs.
leila is something fierce.
she is darkness, from the tips of her eyelashes to the jagged, ragged edges of her pinky toenails.
she is a shadow. a cipher. she is the opposite of matter.
she is ready.
leila is chaos.
we are all—
junior
shelly
leila
me—
we are all
we are all driven by the undertow.
leila sits beside junior in the front seat of the car, her head, as ever, tilted toward him, their collective consciousness emitting
on her lap she holds a sack,
once pristine white,
now frayed and filthy.
full.
shelly bounces beside me in the backseat, eyes round and wide, humming, thrumming, vibrating. she is tuned out, tuned in to leila and junior, to the crackling, crashing sounds that call to us from the front of the car.
“it’s time,” junior explains, from behind the steering wheel.
“Henry says: it’s time.”
junior is:
rudderless.
but.
junior is:
driven.
and i am:
carried along.
upswept.
adrift.
alone.
alongside
my family.
clatters and clangs emerge from leila’s bag as our car barrels down the road, away from death valley,
moving steadily along toward the canyons, the fissures, the
of the city of angels.
neophyte
i am hanging laundry to dry on the line when Henry approaches me.
laundry is one of my favorite chores on the ranch; something about the casual baptism of fabrics, of the sensation of suds, filmy and slick, and the clouds of filth that collect in the wash basin.
something about scrubbing,
starting fresh.
each time.
i like to make things clean.
but Henry has another task in mind for me, one i wouldn’t have thought myself ready for. He has handpicked me,
sees something worthy,
deserving.
in me.
“we’ve got ourselves a newbie coming today,” He says. His voice is a crawl, a drawl that reaches for me, snakes around my shoulders and down my throat like honey, or cough syrup, like some type of heavy, heady medicine.
some kind of semitoxic magic.
a newbie. another member of our family. because Henry’s love is overflowing, and there is always room for someone new, for more.
because our family is a chain of paper dolls that stretches past the edge of the
horizon.
“once you finish hanging the wash, why don’t you come on down to the general store? emmett could use some company, anyway, while you wait.”
i ask:
“leila?”
what i mean is:
where is leila?
leila likes to be in charge.
and also:
emmett belongs to leila.
“leila’s taking care of her own stuff today.”
Henry sets a hand on my shoulder so that my edges blur.
i melt, ever so slightly.
“okay,” i say.
“okay.”
chemistry
emmett is asleep.
when i arrive at the mouth of the ranch, at the general store, my fingers wrinkled, puckered, smelling of soap, emmett is pitched backward in his rocker on the porch, straw hat lowered over his eyes, mouth slack. a slight snore escapes from his chest at irregular beats.
Henry winks at me like we are co-conspirators.
“he’ll never even miss her.”
leila, He means.
emmett will never even know that leila was gone.
“perfect timing for your promotion.”
promotion.
there is a swell, a tidal wave that begins in my toes and quickly gathers force.
promotion.
i want to swoon.
Henry glances at His watch. “she’ll be here soon enough.”
the newbie, that is.
He looks at me.
“time enough for a smoke.
what do you think?”
a smoke.
magic. tidal waves that swell,
that swoon.
i think:
i think:
a smoke is the one thing, the only thing,
that could possibly make this moment sharper, clearer. more crystallized.
a smoke is the one thing that could make me burn brighter,
make me pop
like a bottle rocket
or a supernova
lighting up the atmosphere,
throwing sparks.
that chemical undertow is the only sensation that could ever begin to approach the high that i feel here, on the ranch, swathed in ersatz-everything,
singled out by Henry as the one.
as chosen.
even if it is only temporary,
fleeting,
ephemeral—
even if it is only for today.
today,
i am chosen.
i nod, as He knew i would, and watch as He disappears two fingers into His back jeans pocket, a magician coming to the end of a trick, fishes out a wad of tissue-thin papers and a plastic baggie filled with fairy dust.
He pinches the fairy dust into a thick, plush line, rolls the paper tightly. twists the ends together, seals them between His lips.
lights the stick.
passes it to me.
i breathe.
in.
and out.
in.
and out.
i breathe.
in.
and out.
and float
away.
angel
the new girl is an angel.
this is what i first think, when i scan her driver’s license:
angel.
my head is, by now, saturated, smoky; a nest of cotton batting, a pleasantly dull anti-atmosphere of negatively charged ions.
i watch as the girl, the newbie, lopes in slow, leggy strides toward the front steps of the general store, streaks of sunlight bouncing off of her shoulders as they shift in oiled ellipses.
i think:
angel.
i don’t realize that i’ve said the word aloud until she corrects me,
coughs, hides her rosebud lips behind a graceful fist.
“angel-a. rhodes.”
oh
.
i flush.
of course.
still. it was an honest
mistake.
angel-a rhodes has piles of sun-colored ringlets
arranged in a halo
that twists around the crown of her head.
her eyes shimmer. her skirt is diaphanous, white and gauzy
like the inside of my head.
it brushes the tips of her sandals
like a choirgirl’s robe.
it was an honest
mistake.
“angel-a rhodes.” i enunciate, clip my words sharply now. her driver’s license says that she is nineteen, and that she has come to us from the far east—new hampshire.
which only goes to show how expansive Henry’s orbit, His half-life—
how vast it truly is.
“i, uh—”
my mouth is suddenly filled with sand,
my head cloudier yet with
white noise,
interference. it is a play,
a performance,
and i have somehow forgotten
my lines.
i think back desperately to my own
arrival,
to leila and her lockbox.
to her angles and edges.
no.
even with a promotion, even having been chosen,
that could never be me.
i am not leila.
i have no angles, no edges.
no teeth.
i am only hollowed-out spaces.
i am only the opposite of matter.
i may be chosen—
today, i may be Henry’s.
chosen.
but i am not,
will never be
leila.
rescue
shelly comes to my rescue.
Henry must have told her, must have tipped her off,
warned her that i might need a hand here, flailing, that i might need some backup. support.
and who better to offer that than my shadow-self?
my sister?
she rushes up behind me, arms outstretched. skirts past me. squeezes angela so tightly that my own frame constricts in sympathy.
with a jolt, i recall when shelly first embraced me that way. can still trace the outline of her lungs against my own.
the memory, the image, is just the jump start that i need. it cuts through the cotton wool of Henry’s chemical undertow.
my sister, shelly, always knows just what it is that i need.
i stand up straighter, roll my shoulders back until my sight line is square with the supposition that radiates from angela’s steady, knowing gaze. i hold a hand out for the rest of her personal effects.
i imagine that i am leila:
