Who wrote it?

  Somebody else. Punch out.

  THE DETECTIVE:

  The detective wondered about death bloody with absence. How enough blood makes a dead man.

  He took the back door. Drove a horrible length, parked at a grocery store. The day’s sky was slowly spreading itself. The sun was a dazzling orange in a pool of mucus and it hurt his eyes. He had a few minutes to go before it opened. Jelly rolls. Lunch meat.

  The detective thought of the boy waiting on the bench. How he might like to pick a mother out of a lineup.

  He found a fresh Ziploc and some coins in the console. Anything brown would do.

  THE END:

  So that’s it?

  PLANS

  I kissed a teacher once. It ain’t as bad as you think. It was in Shop. He was showing me how to use the band saw and I was in the crook of his arm and we were pushing a two-by-four together and he had the windows open and there was a breeze and I just turned around and passed my tongue through his lips, easy as pie, his mouth tasted like menthol and something else, something like vinegar, something that wasn’t from food or nothing, something like maybe want. Want is bitter like that is what I mean. Right after I thought of the Cheetos I had in my bag, while he looked at me from behind his dinged-up glasses, while his mouth worked like we was still at it, I just leaned back against the table and thought how I’d eat the Cheetos on the bus home, how I’d suck the orange from my fingers.

  Well, he said, when his mouth finally quit.

  Yep, I said. He pushed up his glasses and I could see the grit under his nails, his knuckles knobbed and leathery.

  I had been planning this for a while. This man, this teacher, he was like something whittled in reverse, moving slowly back to the block. All his edges was dull, if he had any edges left. I thought about putting my hands on his belt and so I reached out and pulled at his buckle. It’s easy as that if you want to know the truth. Just think something up and then do it. That’s all.

  He pushed at his glasses again, both hands this time, and I felt his pants get tight. All right, I told him, but he backed away and turned from me and went into his little office and closed the door.

  That was that. I ain’t one for pushing it. I got my stuff and wandered the halls till the bell rang and it was time to get on the bus. I ate all the Cheetos, even the little bitty ones, and I saved my fingers for last.

  I thought it was funny that here I was finally with my Cheetos but all I could think about was the man’s eyes behind his busted-up glasses, the nicks and scratches making his eyes look smeared and splintered, like something he would have given a low grade to: needs sanding, needs varnish, needs attention.

  Anyway. There was a rough bit on my chin from where his face met mine. If you’d seen it and asked me about it, I’d have told you I fell, told you it just needed a cool cloth and some Noxzema, told you I let a football player. Cause it’d have been none of your business.

  *

  I stole a coral lipstick from the grocery store while my momma was two aisles over with the frozen dinners, her hand to the glass like that’s how she could read the labels. The lipstick was on a can of refried beans, still in its package, I pictured some desperate woman realizing she needed the beans more than she needed the color and placing it there when she saw no one was looking. I picked it up and worked it out of its package, a thin boy in an apron watching me from the end of the aisle, and me watching him back, me taking that lipstick out and sliding it into my jeans pocket and the boy worrying his pimpled chin with his thumb and forefinger, the boy shrugging like I had asked him and me turning to walk the other way, running my finger along the cans and boxes and bags of food cause I figured he’d be watching, but when I looked he was helping an old man reach the powdered milk and I had to touch the lipstick in my pocket to make sure I had ever been seen at all.

  I wore that lipstick one night when we all met up to swim and it was so dark I let a boy take off my bottoms, the lipstick smeared and greasy all around my mouth and its crayon smell all over the boy, and then I put a ribbon on that lipstick and gave it to my momma for Christmas.

  *

  I went over to a boy’s house one night when my momma had the TV on so loud it rung in my teeth, so loud she didn’t look up from her program when I shut the door behind me. I watched her from the window, holding her glass in the palm of her hand, flexing her toes, and if she heard me she didn’t feel like doing nothing about it.

  After all that loud, after all that laughter and applause and ding ding ding and welcome and good night, the quiet of the evening rushed in after it and filled me up with a fizzing, that’s all I can tell you, I was all fizz and crackle and burst.

  This boy went with a girlfriend of mine. But sometimes that’s just tough shit.

  I threw pebbles at his window till he came down, told me that was his little brother’s window, told me his little brother ran and told him some queer bitch was standing in the lawn and he better do something about it.

  Show me your truck, I told the boy, and we went for a drive.

  The boy told me after high school he was joining up, told me his favorite food was meat loaf, told me he put the transmission in his truck all by hisself, told me he had a dream about me two nights before where I sang like a canary bird and fed him a pizza.

  And then what, I asked the boy.

  He laughed too hard, covered his mouth with his fist like he could cough. Where we going? he asked, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t give him no destination cause then we’d have gotten there. And then what.

  He turned us down a dirt road, parked us alongside some trees. Well, he said.

  Well, I told him, come here, and the boy did, pulling himself across the bench seat and me under him, the door handle at my neck and that was good, I like to remember it ain’t always ideal, and the boy kissed me, his tongue fluttering in my mouth like it was a wounded butterfly, I realized this was his technique and I was touched at the effort.

  You need to tell me something, tell me anything, the boy said, holding himself up, he was breathing hard, I thought of his girl, how she gave me some gold hoops for my birthday, how they turned my ears green but I never said, how she snorted when she really got going.

  I can’t sing, I told the boy. And I ain’t no bitch like your brother called me. The boy lowered himself back down upon me, that weight and that heat making me feel all exploded, I was like to breathe him all up and in, Yes you are, he said, I could feel his breath on my face, yes you are a bitch, I could see up close how he was freckled, he smelled like grass and dirt, his heart like a mallet, ain’t you, he said, ain’t you?

  YOU AND YOUR CATS

  You got the cat you came to know as Milton the day that Indonesian man phoned up to say he wouldn’t be meeting you at the Sizzle Steak because your new hairdo reminded him of a hive of blood beetles, which was a bad omen, and while he was at it your perfume reminded him of his momma’s deathbed breath, and finally he spluttered how you make him sad, and that was really the thing of it, this put you off so much you didn’t deign to ask him what a blood beetle was, even though that was the best part of the Indonesian man, the exotic facts he could drop into a conversation, like that time he mentioned in passing that he boiled his shoes every week, and was a blood beetle an annoyance similar to the house roach or was it a horror similar to a flying ant, you don’t know and now you never will, you daubed some hand soap on your pulse points so you wouldn’t smell like breath no more and you went to the Pets ’n’ Friends and walked straight to the kitten bucket and pointed, a little boy said, Uhl, that thing got a noface, and you told the boy, Better than too much face, biglips, and you named that cat Milton and you tried not to look directly into its face, cause you remembered the Indonesian man saying how cats can hypnotize you into digging out your own internal organs and offering them up as an afternoon snack.

  Then you got Posy cause Milton had gone, you came home one day and he was nowhere, and he was nowhere the next day, and you didn’t waste much time after that cause you found yourself thinking of the Indonesian man, how his mouth was just a line, how his eyes were the color of moss, how his jacket smelled like an old onion, which you now realize was likely his body odor and not some secret passion for cooking he would reveal after you had taken him into your bed, which you imagine happening after he had fought off a rapist he found in the alley, but you don’t have an alley, and you ain’t got Milton either, and you got tired of standing in the fridge light to sniff an old dried onion from the salad drawer, and so there you was at Pets ’n’ Friends, pointing again, this one you named Posy cause of her little bud nose, and let’s face it cause she had a prominent pink butthole, which she seemed proud of or at least comfortable with, in a way that made you start thinking maybe your hivehead and breathneck weren’t ugly things, they just were, and maybe you was all right in the long run, you had nice fingernails after all, and sometimes when you was tired your eyes didn’t boggle quite so much, and Posy loved life the way you wish you did, you caught her sitting in the sink so she could watch her own face in the mirror, and she was always rubbing her sides on things, like contact with the drywall was a pleasure sweet enough to be repeated daily, you tried it once but there was nothing there for you.

  Then one day Milton was back, flopped in the kitchen watching Posy lick her private details, and you had the feeling you had just walked in during the pillow talk portion of procreation, and you was probably right cause Posy birthed a litter a couple months later, had em right underneath your dining table, left a stain the color of the fancy drink you had on your first dinner with the Indonesian man, Pink Sunrise is what it was called, Posy basking in her spill and Milton somewhere else, what did he care really, four kittens lived and one came out balled tight and not breathing, and you buried it in the backyard, and you cried cause you figured someone had to mourn the loss.

  So now you had Milton Posy Pink Sunrise Squints and FluffFluff. And one day you saw the Indonesian man drive by your house in his white four-door, very slow, the sun running a flashing diamond from the hood to the trunk as he passed, you couldn’t see his face but his hair looked big, looked womanish, you did not let that stop you from believing it was him, you needed it to be him, and that night you finally relented and welcomed the two stray cats you had been feeding inside, Posy clawed the one but that seemed to be the end of the matter, now you had eight, and you were nine. You had been watching from the window every day and part of the night. The Indonesian man had driven by, it was a fact that snapped into place with a satisfying click, you pulled it out, no it wasn’t him, you placed it again, click, it was him, you clicked and clicked and clicked.

  Your two strays whelped litters of their own, you noticed how kittens in both had bits of gray the way Milton had bits of gray, you wanted to feel something about it but you couldn’t drum nothing up. Now you had fifteen. You didn’t see the point of naming them. You had the thought maybe they should name you. Wisp, Haunt, Treatfingers.

  You couldn’t keep up with the litter box, and one wasn’t enough, or two or three, so you sprinkled litter over the linoleum in the downstairs bathroom, you sprinkled till there were dunes, and you felt satisfied at the solution. You left the back door open day and night, you put flypaper up and it worked okay, you saw that another stray had come to stay, and then another, but them cans of Fancy Feast weren’t all that much to begin with, so you started buying in bulk. At night you slept faceup in your bed. You could see the fan blades going round and round, you could see the headlights sweeping into your room as a car passed and then sweeping right out again. Something about these cars passing compelled you to do something. Life was out there. Do what? Your stomach was a hot stone. Your heart raced. But you did nothing, what could you do? You had decided if it was the man driving by it was best he didn’t see you watching for him. You watched the fan, the cats moaned, you fell asleep, you woke up. You fell asleep.

  One day the phone rang. The Indonesian man? No. A neighbor. The cats gathered in the yard at night and made a racket, it was too much, did you understand? You placed the phone in its cradle. The gall of your neighbor, not being the Indonesian man. Your cats wove in and out of your legs. You felt braided, your insides most of all, tightly wound and fastened snug. You dumped can after can of Fancy Feast, some of it splat on their heads. You ran a finger through a blob of tuna ’n veggies between a white one’s ears, licked your finger clean. You did that until the white one’s head was blobfree, you opened a new can and picked at it with a fork until you were full.

  And then one day a woman came to your door while you were grooming your forearms. The woman looked official, her pelvis threatened to burst out her khakis, she had a badge of some kind, a man in sunglasses waited for her on the driveway. Is it the Indonesian man? you asked. The woman stared into your house with her mouth open. Your cats wove and wove. The man, you repeated. Has something happened to the man? Your eyes stung, your cats moaned, it sounded like one long No. The man in the driveway jogged over and looked in. They were from Animal Control, you saw that now. You looked down at your feet, where a turd had appeared, curled over your big toe. The Indonesian man had once told you a story about how, fishing as a boy, he’d reeled in a diaper, how his father had made him pose for a picture with his catch. You remembered how the Indonesian man had pushed your hand when you’d reached for his elbow.

  The man in the sunglasses gagged, wondered in a whiny voice why lonely cat ladies were his problem. You wanted to hug him for saying so, for thinking it was loneliness made you what you was. Lonely was normal. Come in but mind the dunes, you told your visitors.

  RV PEOPLE

  We’re in the RV. Someone coughs like a baby’s rattle. One of us left the last time we stopped for gas. We were in the aisles of the convenience store looking for sausages, air fresheners, some kind of prophylactic. We are the type to look for things. Then one of us was gone, we saw him walking slowly toward the highway, and some of us watched while he turned against the flow of traffic, and some of us watched when he got into another car, and some of us watched the glint on the windows of that car, light flashing on the windows like some kind of magic trick, and we turned back to our aisles, we turned back to the rest of us, and we paid for the gas and lifted some candies and passed them around us when we were back in the RV. A few of us looked around and asked after the one that left, for them it was like poof, he was gone, did he have ash blond hair, did he prefer to drive in the afternoons? No one answered and we were back on the road anyway.

  Later one of us mentions the heat, we’re in the desert now, we don’t remember how or why we headed in that direction, we breathe the dry heat in and try to remember to let it back out. A few of us work tying knots in a rope, tying a cat’s paw, then a clove hitch, then a half blood. Tying, untying. Someone ties a noose and we look away for a while, we can feel her eyes on us but we don’t look, she needs to learn. We hit a bump and stop, back up, hit the bump again. Someone in the front says, Had to make sure it was dead, and we sit while some of us are out there cutting it up, discarding what we don’t want, making neat cuts we can all agree on. When we get going again the meat is stowed in the cooler, we are running low on ice and we worry about the keep, some of us worrying the blood on our fingers, using our mouths before it can dry, but it’s hard to get under the nails just right.

  We drive all the night, keeping each other company. We say things about the abundance of stars, so much light, but we don’t really care for stars, there are other things to notice, like woodgrain, like a sheet on the line, like the tender parts of the naked among us, like the smell of anything after it’s cut into. Some of us shuffle cards, deal them out, we make piles of cards, they are worn like dollars now, a two of clubs gives out, crumbles in our laps, we push the bits onto the floor, some of us collect the bits later on.

  At an all-night diner we pick up more of us, some of us are convincing enough to get a waitress to leave her pad and apron behind, some of us are lonely enough to take a woman and her baby. The woman cries all night long, even when we make soothing noises, even when we hand her our treasures: two river stones, silver foil, a braid of hair. We take her baby from her, we pass it forward, we rock it in our arms.

  Close to dawn we drive off the road, into the desert. We park and arrange ourselves to sleep. Some of us are on the dining bench. Some of us lie on the floor, stomach to back, half to half, so there is enough room. Some of us take the bed in the back, touch each other in the agreed-upon way. Some of us cry out and are ashamed. We close our eyes. We open them hours later. Two have left, we see their footprints in the sand outside, heading farther into the desert. We follow the footprints for a time. We turn when we are in danger of losing sight of the RV. We think it was two men, we count ourselves, we think it was a man and his boy, they have left their bar of soap, they took a few cuts of meat, there are drippings down the narrow walkway and down the steps. Some of us get behind the RV and push it back to the road, digging our toes in, most of us are barefoot, some of us are prideful of the thick soles of our feet, but that pride is frowned upon.

  We drive. Some of us are sick into the bucket. Some of us check for ingredients, flavorings, there are none. There is only the cooler. The waitress passes white packets of sugar from her pocket, some of us feed from the new woman’s breast, but it is work. We barter for clothing, for secrets, for touch. We wear what we find. We claim what we can. We say sss sss sss into our ears. We say hush, hush. Some of us lean into each other and touch. We are bored. We don’t say this but it is what we are. Some of us put mouths to mouths, use our teeth, some of us try not to mind.

  In the evening there is a red sky. We notice how it bleeds into the horizon instead of out. A few of us pass the drippings cup, but soon there’s none left.

  In the morning one of us kills another of us. We are not sure how, there is no blood. There is torn clothing, a broken cup. Some of us try to mourn, some of us sing over the body, we lay the rope in a thief’s knot over the heart. We think how sad that what made your life something woulda happened whether you existed or didn’t. We forget who of us did the killing, it don’t matter.

 

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