Mostly Dead Things Read online

  It was the same when Milo and I were kids, running around by the water with our friends as our mother yelled at us to stay out of the cattails; that there were snakes coiled up down there just waiting for us to rush past so they could bite our ankles.

  How were we so old when it felt like only seconds had passed? Milo worn down and always missing, Brynn unreachable. But here was her daughter, her tiny twin. Soon she’d leave too. Everything grew up and flew away.

  Lolee walked to a picnic table half submerged in the overgrowth. The sun was less fierce there, and I sat with my back to the trees and rested my feet on a cypress knee. “You can go,” I told her. A clump of kids had gathered down next to the dock and they waved to get her attention, arms crossing and uncrossing over their heads. She abandoned her towel and her flip-flops and left me sitting there, sniffing in the warm barbeque air. She climbed onto the back of a Sea-Doo, holding tight to a boy’s waist. She yelled as he accelerated, the sound like a blender taking in a root vegetable. When they charged up over the wake, her hair flew out behind her.

  Brynn had loved riding on boats and Jet Skis and motorcycles. She hung on to the sides of Jeeps and stood up in the backs of trucks, shouting at random people in the street. When Milo bought his first truck, Brynn commandeered the back of it. She lounged there on a towel, shorts rucked up into her crotch, unbuttoned and unzipped, working on her tan. He’d take her through the McDonald’s drive-thru and let her order dollar sundaes from the bed, handing back money through the open window. He told her he loved her on one of these rides, yelling it up to her as she banged her hands on the roof of the cab. I stared out the passenger-side window and swallowed down my sadness with another gulp of shitty beer.

  You don’t know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out. Milo told Brynn he loved her and I could see from the look on his face he thought the words were a magical incantation. Say the word love and it’s there for you; say the word love and the other person feels it too.

  What I should have told him that day: love makes you an open wound, susceptible to infection. But he was young then and so was I, and I wanted their happiness more than my own. So I swallowed my pain and let myself pretend love could flourish if I didn’t stand in its way.

  Kids tramped through the underbrush behind me, bodies blundering through the knotted bracken and air potato vines. I turned on the bench, the wood digging into my thigh and threatening splinters. Looked past the hunks of Spanish moss and palm scrub that fanned out like spread fingers.

  Two girls with dark hair were crouched in the dirt.

  They looked to be about ten years old and were in a small patch of scrub, staring down at the body of an egret. One of its wings pointed skyward, extended as if in flight. Using sticks, they prodded at the bird’s underside. The girl with the ponytail pushed hard enough that her stick finally gave way and broke inside the body.

  “Look at this nasty gunk.”

  “Bugs are in the eyes, little black ones. Are we standing in ants?”

  “Probably.”

  The other girl peeked beneath the wing, tangled hair falling over her eyes. “There’s a freaking hole inside it.”

  My boot snapped a fallen branch. They looked up simultaneously, eyes wide. I didn’t recognize either of them. The girl with the ponytail dropped the stick she’d been holding. The other girl clutched hers against her chest where it smeared a mess of black against the fabric. She reminded me of Lolee when she was little, kind of bedraggled and dirty, as if she’d just stumbled in from the playground.

  “We didn’t touch it.” She dragged a hand across the stain, trying to brush it off. “Just looking.”

  “Birds have all kinds of diseases,” I said. “You shouldn’t mess with them.”

  “We know that.” The girl with the ponytail backed away, and the other followed. They were about the same height. Same coloring, dark eyes set in pinched faces. Sisters, maybe cousins.

  “Oh yeah? Then you should know even poking at a dead thing with a stick can let loose bacteria in the air. You’re probably breathing it in right now.”

  Both girls caught their breath at once, as if they might hold it until the danger passed. I stepped back and made room for them to move through the bushes. They did, avoiding my body, rushing forward after they cleared the palm scrub behind me.

  I squatted beside the bird. It was a fairly large specimen, but too far into rigor for me to consider mounting. I grabbed one of the discarded sticks and used it to flip the bird over until it was spread out in the dirt, wings opened wide, breast thrust upward, back curved. Judging by the set of its neck, probably two days had passed. The wound in its side was right below the rib cage. It was circular and dark, a small depression likely caused by a pellet gun.

  Though the bird was already in decomp, the wings were in good shape. Using my pocketknife, I dislodged them at the juncture nearest the torso. As I worked, a palmetto bug crawled from the opening in its body and scurried out into the brush.

  Digging a hole with the heel of my boot, I nudged the remains into the divot and scuffed the leftover pile back over it. I set the wings on the picnic table and waited for Lolee to finish. She was barely visible out on the water, tooling around on the back of the Jet Ski. The driver turned sharply and the force slung her off the back. When she surfaced, she flailed and yowled. He reached down to help her back on and she tugged him down into the water with her, dunking him over and over again.

  She looked so much like Brynn it burned a hole in my chest. I stared up hard into the sun until the world turned blue and spotty. When my eyes met the table again, everything moved, as if I’d looked at a Magic Eye painting too long. Everything dots, squiggles, fuzz. Nothing made sense, no matter how hard I tried to decipher it.

  “Can I have those?” I’d stuffed the egret wings inside a grocery bag and my mother couldn’t stop staring at them.

  “Why?”

  I was going to put the wings in the leftover bin once I finished cleaning them. I’d already pulled out the dish soap next to the sink at the back of the shop.

  “A project.”

  Who knew what that meant. I’d been contemplating what my brother had told me about my mother’s art—how she’d thought it was something she’d do with her life, before she’d married our father and had two kids. I didn’t know much about it. Especially not sculpture. I wasn’t sure what the body parts of animals would have to do with that. If anything, I assumed she’d go take a pottery class. One of those ones where women drank wine and made a coffee mug to take home at the end of the night, something she could do with some of her friends.

  “What kind of project?” I asked.

  “An art project.”

  She didn’t elaborate, just held out her hand. I looped the handles around her fingers and she clenched them, bringing the bag in close to her chest. I imagined the bugs climbing up along the plastic, crawling out onto her blouse, and shivered.

  “You should let me clean them first.”

  “Don’t you have other stuff to do? Aren’t there deer mounts backed up in the freezer?”

  She’d already pulled out plenty of things from the bin and scattered them across the table. There was a bat that I’d gathered a couple of years ago, a hole in one of its webby wings like a punctured kite. She’d also snagged a ratty foxtail, petrified frogs, a busted turtle shell, and a pelt from a black-and-white cat run over by one of our neighbors.

  “Do we have any more of this kind of stuff?”

  “We’re running low,” I said, poking at a hunk of armadillo armor. It leafed open like mica. “This is about it.”

  Roadkill was a great way to keep the bins full, but I’d been lax in my early-morning runs since I’d taken over the shop. I couldn’t be bothered to troll the sides of the highway, scouting for carrion that hadn’t soured in the blistering Florida heat.
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  I considered handing over road duty to Bastien, who’d vacated the premises after I’d caught him directing my mother toward the bin of parts. The image of him scooping up possum guts in the ninety-degree weather brought me a small measure of comfort.

  “I’d just like to know what you’re gonna do with this stuff.” There was a little hole in the side of the plastic bag. Even thinking about mites made my hair itch.

  She rifled through the cabinet next to the sink, scrounging out several jars of glass eyes and pigment paints. There was a nick at the back of her head, which had been shaved again. The cut had dried with a bit of toilet paper stuck to it. It reminded me of the times I’d watched her shave her legs in our bathroom sink when I was little. Shaving cream dripping from an ankle; running endless hot water that steamed up the room and left my skin feeling slick.

  “I’m putting together some stuff for Lucinda Rex,” she said. “Just a small presentation.”

  I wished for what felt like the millionth time that my family could stay separate from the women in my life. Already I envisioned my mother inviting Lucinda over for dinner. Maybe she’d sit between Milo and me at the dinner table, running a hand up and down both of our thighs. Perhaps she’d move in there and sleep in my old bedroom. I pinched myself, hard, on the tender skin of my inner arm.

  My mother turned back to the cabinet. “Do we have any black dye?”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “You know what I mean, smart-ass.” She’d already thrown open every drawer in the workshop. Bottles and jars littered the countertops, crammed full of buttons and thick stitching thread and the pristine gleam of cutlery: knives and stout ruffers and scrapers and pliers.

  She turned back around and pointed at me with one of the long awls we used to gouge holes in the pelts after tanning. “Well?”

  My mother looked healthy. Her cheeks had filled out a little and her skin was a better color: pinker, less sallow. What could it hurt to let her have this one small thing? If it was going to help her deal with Dad’s suicide, should I begrudge her access to the shop and the things that were already hers to begin with? I didn’t know if that meant letting my mother make her weird sexual art or not. If it were anyone else, I probably would’ve found it funny: badgers fondling rabbits, a pink flamingo ducking its slender neck to fellate a squirrel. Animals meant to look ferocious suddenly turned vulnerable, predator and prey equalized by the set of a jaw or the placement of paws. The work was good. The fact that it was my mother creating it was what turned me off.

  I knelt beside the cupboard below the sink and dug through the boxes of hair dye from the Dollar General. Most of the time we bought whatever was BOGO, so the selection was limited.

  “We don’t have black.”

  “How about off-black or soft black?”

  “We have nutmeg, deep copper, beige brown, and absolute platinum.”

  “I don’t want any of those.” I went to close the cabinet and she put up a hand. “Wait. Let me see nutmeg.”

  She turned the box over in her hands, squinting at the model on the front. “No, this isn’t gonna work. Too brown. I’ll have to pick some up.”

  There was a braided basket on the floor. I’d seen it hundreds of times in my life; it was the one my mother always put her rolls and cornbread muffins in with a folded hand towel. She dumped all the pieces she’d picked up from the bin into the basket. Everything mingled together in the bottom: bits of skin and gristle. I hoped she’d throw the basket out after she was done.

  “Gonna work on this from home.” She scrubbed a hand along her head, dislodging the bit of toilet paper and unsticking the tender scab that had formed. Blood dripped from the wound, a bright lick that streaked down the back of her neck. “Could you drive Bastien home? Milo’s working late again.”

  It would have been easy to pick up a tissue from the box along the sink, but I didn’t. I just let the blood seep down the back of my mother’s skull. Let her walk away, the drip migrating in a zigzag pattern that eventually reached the collar of her shirt. I could hear her out front, talking to a customer. The workstations were a mess—bins and cabinets thrown wide, little snips of hair crowding the sink drain. My father would never have stood for it. But again, my father wasn’t alive. He no longer had a say.

  ARDEA ALBA—GREAT WHITE HERON

  In the time it took me to scale the ladder, Milo had climbed onto the roof of the tree house. He was twelve and I was thirteen, but already his body was the length of someone much older, his limbs pulled out thin and awkward, like melting taffy. Milo was tall, but he wasn’t big, and he wasn’t coordinated. No sports and no friends, other than me. We spent nearly all our time together. The two of us and Brynn, my brother and me trailing after her like a couple of lovesick puppies.

  Could you just wait?

  I could, he said. But I won’t.

  We’d found the tree house in the backyard of the foreclosed home, three down from ours and directly next to the graveyard. When we looked through the cutouts in the wooden walls, we could see a sliver of water out in the distance. I called it lakefront property, even though the actual view was mostly worn-down headstones that popped up like jagged teeth.

  I’m not going up there, I said. I’ll never get back down.

  I don’t give a shit what you do. Just gimme my stuff.

  Our mother had enrolled us in summer camp, which was actually just afternoons down at the Y making crafts with other kids who definitely didn’t want to be there. We were too old for daycare and too young to stay home by ourselves. Kids with money went to sleepaway camps or Bible ministry youth retreats, but not us. Our father had given us time off from working at the shop. He’d said that was vacation enough, or would we rather come by and scoop remnants from the mounts he was fleshing?

  I handed Milo his jar, stretching up on tiptoe to reach his dangling hand. At the Y that day, we’d learned how to make butter from a girl only three years older than me. She’d had her long red hair in a side ponytail with one of those looped elastic bands with clear blue bobbles on the ends. Milo said they looked like balls, that she’d had blue balls in her hair, and Brynn couldn’t stop laughing. Suddenly she thought Milo was hilarious and wanted him with us all the time. It made me hate my brother, who lapped up the attention and only became more annoying because of it.

  I’m not giving you this bread, I told him, shoving the bag down between my feet. There’s not enough.

  I’m not gonna eat butter without bread. That’s gross.

  We shook our jars. It would take at least thirty minutes to get the lump going in the buttermilk. We’d filled up all our ingredients in the sweltering kitchen and then taken them with us, leaving our mother to hammer out the fleshy pink breasts for the night’s chicken Parmesan.

  We spent late afternoons at the tree house once the people living in the foreclosed home moved out. They’d been there for under a year. The man was younger than our father, thin in the arms and waist and wide in the hips. He’d built the tree house with a couple of friends in a single day—all of them shirtless and sweaty, drinking beer in the afternoon heat. Milo and I spied on them from the cemetery, crouched behind the plots of Davidsons and Meekins. Our knees bore witness, collecting deep grooves as we crouched for hours in the unforgiving earth. He’d called for beer and more beer so many times that Milo and I joked it must be his wife’s name. We weren’t sure why they’d built the tree house. They didn’t have any kids.

  This is taking too long. Milo’s jar was fuzzy with bubbles from all the shaking, but I couldn’t see any butter forming yet. Mine didn’t look much different.

  Don’t be a little bitch. Keep going.

  Brynn was coming over soon. She had to watch her baby brother for an hour while her mother ran errands. Gideon wasn’t what I’d call cute. He was pale with buggy, vacant blue eyes. Brynn always talked about wanting babies, but I didn’t think they were anything great. Don’t you ever think about getting married? she asked me, draping the end of a b
edsheet over her head to look like a veil. Your brother will probably be a good husband. He’s kind of getting cuter. To get her to stop talking about Milo, I gave her the end of my blue raspberry Ring Pop. I never thought about getting married, but I did sometimes wish Brynn and I could just live together when we got older.

  Hey lookit. Milo slapped the wall next to my face.

  What? I was getting closer to done; I could feel it. Something hard was lumping against the glass with every flick of my wrist, a kind of thump that made me think of the gel-capped vitamin E pills my mother took for her hair and nails.

  There’s something poking up behind the memorial bench.

  Leaning forward over the wooden railing, I felt it give a little under my weight and quickly settled back. There was something waving beneath the bench.

  It’s a bird.

  It’s a plane, said Milo, shaking his jar.

  Don’t be a dumbass. It’s an egret. Maybe an anhinga?

  Can’t be, too far from the water. Looks like a piece of trash.

  I’m gonna throw it some bread.

  His long arm swung down, snatching at the plastic bag that held the tail end of a loaf. No, don’t! We don’t have that much left.

  Calm down. I opened the bag and balled up a white hunk from the heel. I’ll just use a little.

  My aim was pretty good. It curved down in the hot gust of breeze, flipping, and landed five feet from the bench. The bread lay hidden in the straggling weeds, unnoticed by the bird.

  Gimme some. I handed up a hunk, larger than mine. His aim wasn’t great. The bread ball landed next to some overgrown headstones where we couldn’t even read the etchings; something like Adler or Addison. It didn’t matter that he’d missed, though. The bird had flopped its body behind the bench until I could see only the tip of its pale wing poking through the slats.

  Instead of wasting more bread, I dropped the bag and gave my jar to Milo. Keep shaking.