Mostly Dead Things Read online

  Hopping the fence from the neighbor’s yard, I crossed through the clumps of weedy patches, clouds of gnats rising up from the puddles that would never drain during the summer. Mud sucked at my sneakers, which had started as white off-brand Keds but were ending summer the color of dirt, the bumpers black from Brynn writing the names of all the boys she’d loved during the school year. My shoes had said Brian and Rickie and David and then Brian again; Brian who sat in front of me in math, Brian with the floppy dark hair that fell over one eye, Brian who always smelled like lunch meat if he’d been playing basketball.

  Brynn and I used to sit side by side on the gym floor during PE, trading a single wad of gum between us. I chewed a lined pattern one way and she chewed a lined pattern the other until we made a shape like a Triscuit. She wrote Brian’s name and I chewed her gum, concentrating on her fingers, which cupped my ankle while she wrote. The last time she did it, I saw her write an uppercase M and felt my heart stutter. I took the marker from her hand. No more, I told her. Draw on your own shoes.

  The closer I got to the bird, the stranger it looked. Its neck was wrenched next to a tree root. One of its wings was bent nearly backward. When it heard me come around the side of the bench, its neck canted even farther until it was staring at me upside down.

  Kneeling in the wet soil, I reached a careful hand toward it. Definitely a heron; a big one, pure white with a rowdy orange beak that opened wide on its hinge. It let loose a prolonged hiss. The wing that wasn’t bent was braced behind its arrowed body. I noticed one of its yellow feet was turned completely around, likely broken.

  Bring me a towel, I yelled. Hurry.

  When Milo came back, he was carrying one of our good guest towels. They were shell pink with embroidery stitched around the edge; the kind that never dried your hands, just moved the water around.

  You idiot. Mom’s going to flip out.

  He’d brought Brynn with him. She knelt beside me in the dirt, smelling like the raspberry body spray that she’d been dousing herself with all summer; a half-empty bottle she’d found in a drawer at the Y.

  Poor baby. What do we do with it?

  I’m gonna wrap him up, then we’ll take him up to the tree house.

  Then what?

  Nurse him back to health, I said. Fix him up.

  Brynn raised an eyebrow. She’d gotten very good at that. She was also good at smirking from only one corner of her mouth, and tipping her head in a direction that made her ponytail whisper down her shoulder. She made me feel that I had no idea what I was doing with my body, that every part of hers was under control. Milo always watched her, too, with a creepy look in his eyes. When he got that way, I’d pinch him until he looked normal again. She was mine to like, mine to look at. But we were his only friends, really, no other girls around for him to ogle. As long as he kept his comments to himself, he could think whatever he liked.

  Make a distraction, like flap your arms or something. I flipped the towel out in front of me, like a matador. Then I’ll grab him.

  Milo leaned over from the other side and shook his butter jar in the bird’s face. The heron reared back and I brought the towel in, wrapping it around the thin body, picking it up firmly, like I would a wet dog from a bathtub. It struggled a little, but the effort seemed to drain it. The bird went limp almost immediately.

  Our processional led down the dirt track that ran through the heart of the cemetery: me carrying the bird, Brynn clomping along in her platform flip-flops, and Milo, who always came last, no matter where we were or what we were doing.

  I climbed the ladder one-handed, pressing the bird against my chest, swaddled like an infant. The tree house was mostly made from plywood—all four sides and the roof—with planks haphazardly nailed together for the floor. It sat fifteen feet up in the oak, and its porch was a good space to cop a breeze.

  Scoot over, Brynn said, coming up behind me and knocking into the back of my knees. I didn’t really want to go inside. Earlier one of the biggest roaches I’d ever seen had been crawling on the ceiling. Those ones sometimes flew. I wedged myself next to the railing while Milo climbed up last. He still had his jar, shaking it around his head.

  Can you stop? I asked. And where’s mine?

  He pointed down at the graveyard and laughed.

  Let’s just go in. Brynn poked a finger under the edge of the towel and flipped it up to reveal the heron’s curled neck, ruffled with tiny white feathers. It looked sleepy and sweet, bundled up like it had caught a chill.

  Wait a second, I said. Let me check inside first.

  Jessa’s too freaked out about roaches. Milo pushed his foot into the doorway, halfway on the porch and halfway inside. She’s scared of a bug that’s like a fraction of her size.

  Come on. Brynn grabbed his elbow. Just kill it, Milo.

  There was understanding in Brynn’s eyes when she looked at me. I really was only a girl to her; one who would be scared of a roach, while my brother, who couldn’t even scrape out the insides of a raccoon pelt without turning green, was the one who’d always be turned to for help. Of the two of us, he was the one who was squeamish. I stayed up late with him when he had a nightmare and got scared of imaginary monsters hiding under the clothes hamper. He was the one who cried over sad movies and let our mother comfort him when he hurt himself. I was the strong one, but because I was a girl, that’s all Brynn saw. Milo, scaredy-cat of the highest order, would always be the knight.

  I can do it. I pushed forward but Milo pressed a hand against my shoulder, setting me back on my heels.

  Let me get it, you hate them.

  I’m not scared. I don’t care.

  We struggled as I tried to shove forward and Milo kept pushing me back. Brynn was wedged between us, her hands coming up to bat at both our faces.

  Stop it, she yelled. You’re both stupid.

  There was one last shove from Milo, whose arms were significantly longer than my own. I fell back into the railing and heard it crack, the sound like ice dumped into a glass of warm water. Then the bird and I pitched over the side.

  We landed hard in some fallen oak branches. I lay there kicking up leaves, trying to get back the breath I’d knocked out of myself. I turned my cheek into the dirt and listened to the blood rushing hard in my ears, waiting for the world to right itself again.

  Someone turned me over. Brynn was crying, and then she screamed. Milo pulled the bird from my arms. The towel was stained with dirt and something darker. I had landed on the heron with my full weight. Its head hung slack from the opening at the top; blood and a thick, viscous fluid dripped from its open beak.

  They set my broken arm in a cloth sling. The bone in my shoulder had broken so high they couldn’t put a cast on it. The pain medicine made me too sleepy to walk or talk much. I was glad for it; I didn’t want to think about the bird anymore, the way that it had looked when Milo held it up above my head, bloody as an aborted baby.

  That night in my room I woke from a nightmare, shoulder throbbing, crying for my mother. She held my head in her lap as I sobbed, stroking my sweaty hair away from my face. She cleaned the snot from my nose with the sleeve of her nightgown and covered us both with her long hair, a curtain that smelled of sleep and the yeasty-lemon aroma of her skin.

  Her hands stroked cool on my cheeks and under my eyes. You didn’t mean to kill it. It was already hurting. Sometimes we just can’t make things better.

  And I knew she was right, but a small, black part of me had seen how beautifully the bird’s feathers glistened in the sunshine and wished I could make it stay with me, always. So I cried for that: the fact that I was the kind of person who’d wish death on a creature just so I could make it my own.

  4

  I trained Bastien up front and got him acquainted with the merchandise. It was strange to instruct an employee on things I’d known since before I had braces. I’d grown up playing with cattle skulls and freeze-dried mice, casually digging my hands into bowls of shark teeth because I liked the sharp fee
l of them between my fingers.

  “How much longer?” Bastien swept the concrete, corralling flecks of foam and antler shards from the deer head I’d been mounting for the past hour.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Like maybe forty-five minutes? Fifteen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The form I’d chosen was too large. I was having trouble getting the antlers where I wanted them, and instead of pulling off the pelt and starting over, I’d tried to stretch it with my hands. I’d knocked one of the points against the metal prep table and chipped it very badly. It was a rookie mistake, one I hadn’t made since I was in high school.

  “But do you think soon?”

  “Maybe.”

  It was distracting, having another live body in the room with me. I couldn’t concentrate. Bastien liked to talk while he worked. He was twitchy and spastic, moving back and forth across the room to pick up one of the tools I was using, or to fondle a piece of the deer’s pelt. He’d pulled out glass eyes of every color and begun sorting them into piles that I’d have to put away before we left. I’d seen him take the tough linen string I used for sewing and wind it around his palm, making what appeared to be a friendship bracelet. Then he’d given up and thrown the knotted mess onto the floor.

  “Is there anything left to do up front?” I asked.

  “The floor’s so fucking clean you could eat off it.” The broom stopped for a second. “Sorry.”

  “What about the mail that got rained on?”

  He shuffled over to the corner and used the tip of the broom to grab at the dirt pockets that always collected there. The tops of his ears were red and the back of his neck was a little sunburned. I wondered how he spent his time when he wasn’t in the shop working. His friends weren’t any good for him to be around.

  He gouged at the dust and a couple of bristles broke off. “It’s spread out under the front window where the most sun’s coming in.”

  “That’s good. Thanks.”

  “I’d maybe think about moving the goat, Aunt Jessa.” He tipped up the broom and riffed his fingers along the frayed edges, breaking off more pieces that sprinkled onto the concrete.

  “Why? We’ve gotten more foot traffic in the past week than we have in the last month.”

  Dust flicked upward into the air around him, creating a halo. “His fur is fading. It looks powdery or something.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  I set down my stitch remover and flexed my cramped fingers. The deer’s opened face looked up at me, half-dazed from the crooked set of its glass eyes. I’d have to redo the whole thing. “Let’s move it now. Put something else up, maybe.”

  Up front looked just as clean as Bastien said it would. The permanent dust that had built up around the shelving had been Pledged to a waxy sheen. Piles of mail next to the register were sorted into a plastic tray system labeled PAST DUE, CURRENTLY DUE, and PAID—the latter a single sheet of wrinkled paper, which I thought might be a mistake.

  We each grabbed an end of the Bagot, not wanting to tip it over and spill it; it would likely bust its seams and I’d have to stuff and re-stitch everything.

  “Could you pick up Grandma today from the gallery?”

  I nearly tripped over an enormous stack of snakeskin he’d moved into the walkway. “You can’t get her?”

  “I’m not really supposed to be driving.”

  I hadn’t anticipated that I’d need to see my mother’s art, at least not right away. I knew she’d been going over to the gallery most afternoons, but I figured it was just a way to keep her contained while she got whatever weird art jones she had out of her system. That plan didn’t include looking at whatever she’d created. I was positive it wouldn’t be anything I liked.

  Bastien staggered back toward the far wall, where the sun from the front window didn’t hit. “She wants to show you something.”

  “Damn it. Fine.” I dropped the goat a little less gently than I should have. I examined the muzzle. “You’re right, he’s looking beat-up.” The skin had warped in the direct sunlight. Both ears were crusty and the goat’s nostrils had faint crackles running through them. “He’ll need to be moisturized.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I’ll just do it when I get back.” Except I had to run to the grocery and pick up Lolee’s marching band uniform at the dry-cleaning place and stop over at the post office to ship out some mail orders.

  “It just takes some emollients. I’ll be careful.”

  “Emollients?”

  He squatted down in front of the Bagot and examined its hooves, which were also looking a little flaky. “Yeah, petroleum jelly.”

  “You’ve never done this stuff before.”

  Pulling a pad from his back pocket, he jotted some notes. “I’ve seen you do some. Grandpa too, when I was little. There’s also this thing called the internet. You can look up lots of shit there.”

  My father would’ve loved to teach Bastien specialty secrets, if Bastien had ever shown an interest when he was alive: how to perk an ear, the best way to debone small game without ruining the pelts. If he were still alive, it could’ve been the three of us in the shop, instead of just me trying to half-ass everything by myself. I remembered the first time my father showed me how to clean and reset teeth. It took us all day, but when it was done they looked nearly perfect in the deer’s jaw. There was something so satisfying about it: working on a piece until you’d perfected it. I could teach Bastien to create like that, I thought. I could show him some of the things my father had shown me.

  “Okay. We’ll see how it goes.” I grabbed the keys to my truck from behind the counter.

  “Right.” He rubbed at the back of his neck and stared down at his notes. “I’ll just start with some of the small stuff and you can check my work after.”

  When I left, he was sitting on the floor in front of the goat, measuring the neck and face with his hands. He looked ready to speak and so did the animal, as if they were already communicating.

  There were groceries to pick up and Lolee’s uniform, but what I wanted more than anything was a beer. I drove past the tiny air-conditioning repair shop with the words HEATING & COOLING stenciled in black script across the windows, the barbershop where Milo and I had gotten our first haircuts, and pulled into the parking lot of the only bar my father and I ever drank at. There were no cars out front and I took that as a good sign.

  A couple was wedged into the same side of a corner booth, but aside from them and the bartender I was alone. I sat on one of the red vinyl barstools and the bartender dropped a beer in front of me. Jimmy was around my father’s age. They’d gone to high school together, the same one Milo and I’d attended. He wore the kind of shirt my dad always hated to see on Florida guys: a pink floral thing with palm trees in a Hawaiian style, unbuttoned enough to show a grizzled patch of chest hair. A gold chain necklace lay tangled in the nest of it.

  I liked being there. It felt cool without the dampness, lacked light in a way that made my eyes comfortable. Outside, juicy green pressed in on you from all sides and sunshine bled so aggressively that you were guaranteed cataracts by age sixty-five, but in the bar you could pretend the world outside didn’t exist anymore.

  Classic rock played and the bartender hummed along. I drank my beer in long, slow pulls and asked for another. My father and I had come to this place for years, usually on Thursday or Friday nights after we’d closed the shop. We’d each have a couple and sit quietly, no need to talk about anything specific. My mother waiting at home for my father, nobody waiting for me. He never asked about my dating life. Never once questioned why I was always alone; why I’d never brought anyone to dinner or to meet the family.

  Anything having to do with sex made him extremely uncomfortable. He didn’t like off-color jokes; he threw out my mother’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs because he found the pictures offensive. This is trash, he said when he walked into the living room and found Milo and me watching a
comedy in which two people were awkwardly having sex. Milo had protested that it was supposed to be funny, but our father had simply turned off the television and told us sex wasn’t anything to laugh about.

  Our family wasn’t religious. Neither of my parents ever talked about the moral rightness of anything. We just didn’t discuss each other’s business. Mostly we retold the same old stories, nostalgia over things we’d rehashed a thousand times before, varnishing the memories so they shone and hiding all the bad parts. I often wondered why we couldn’t talk about the present, why the past held all the promise while the future sat before us like stagnant water.

  My father and I had come in for beers the week before he killed himself. He sat beside me on his barstool and made a dumb dad joke about polar bears. I laughed, not knowing I’d find him in a puddle of his own brain matter less than three days later. I drained my second beer quickly and didn’t enjoy it as much as the first.

  In her work apron, my mother resembled an elementary-school art teacher. It was a small black thing with overlarge pockets, and she’d pulled it over a T-shirt from when she’d repainted the house. I didn’t recognize the jeans she had on, but that might have been because she never wore them. My whole life she’d said they made her ass feel constricted.

  “Mmph.” She squatted and the jeans pulled tight enough across her butt to turn three shades lighter. “Mmmph.”

  A pencil jutted from her clenched teeth. It seesawed up and down while she considered the pile of parts in front of her. She squatted lower, leaning over so far I was certain her pants would rip in half. I tugged at my own jeans, which were creeping steadily up my crotch, and tried not to say anything mean about the monstrosity my mother was compiling.

  There were myriad cans of liquid latex, hair dye, and glittery puffy paints that we’d used on T-shirts back in middle school. She’d dissected most of the animals taken from the parts bin, freeing the wings from the bat, carving off the face of a small squirrel. It lay awkwardly apart from the rest, staring raptly at the work she was piecing together with an industrial hot glue gun.