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Fiction
Charles Colyott
Dust
The breath that hits my face in hot, wet panting gasps smells like nacho cheese-flavored tortilla chips. The hands that tug at my waistband are slick with sweat and quivering. He whispers an ecstatic 'I love you' with snack food undertones and slobbers on my neck some more.
My boredom, my utter lack of interest, never occurs to him at all. He's totally locked in his own thing, his own heaven, his own private Idaho.
In this red dust world, who am I to interfere with that?
My mother named me Tabitha.
Next month, this body will be fifteen years old.
It is of what is now called African-American descent, though whenver people say that I still hear the old words, the poison-filled words my grandmother and her ancestors heard.
Words change; the people who speak them do not.
This boy, Johnathan, he goes to school with me. When I talk, his eyes go dead and waver downward toward my chest. This much, I am used to. He doesn't believe me, but he doesn't call me crazy. He never used the old words, either, and in this town that means something.
He stopped at third base, rolling off me like a fresh corpse, a wet patch on the front of his sweat pants. He didn't talk any more; neither did I. What is there to say?
The headaches still aren't any better. I always hoped they'd get better, but if you really stop and think about it there's no real reason they should. Grandmother used to put her smooth, cool hands on my face and say it was like God was tryin' to fit the ocean into a Dixie cup.
The ocean don't fit in a pail any better that it fit in a Dixie cup.
I don't hide from the pain, though. Some would close themselves up in a dark room, take pills, you name it. Not me. I invite that ache right on in. If it's here then it's real and if it's real then I want to feel it.
Most things are just made up. Most folks live so much up in their heads, it's a wonder they get outta bed at all. I understand that, I guess, but I can abide by it.
We went down to the creek, Johnathan and me, and dipped our toes in the water. It was cold the way you want your drinks cold in the summertime--that sweet burn that smacks you in the face and reminds you that your heart still beats. he took my hand in his and we just sat there for a long time. It felt a bit like a movie, till the veins in my skull started to throb and my brain felt like a wrung-out sponge.
At some point, you'd think I'd just stopped feeling pain, but you'd be wrong. It is keener now, finer maybe, than it was in the face before my own.
Johnathan gets up and walks barefoot to the rope swing. I stay put.
He tells me to watch; like I have a choice.
He sways out over the cree, posing and bellowing like some sort of mad god, and the sun catches him just right and for a moment he's beautiful. And I can feel his sweaty palms slip on the rope and that awful, infinite moment when he realizes he's falling. His eyes meet mine and they're scared, like an animal, and he knows it's true--all the times I told him and he didn't believe, but now he does. Just like grandma and all the others, really. In that last moment, they see. In that last moment, they aren't thinking about the TV schedule or what they had for breakfast or the evening wash.
It's just them and me, and I think I owe it to them to pay attention.
I give him a kind of smile, one I hope says that I'm sorry for the way it all turned out, and then he drops.
The creek isn't deep, but it's awful rocky. When he hits, I know that the sound I hear is his skull cracking open. It's over quick, at least for him. The way the afternoon sun dapples the water, you hardly see the blood coiling out like a squid's ink, but it's there.
I rub my fingers against my temples and catch myself squinting against the sunlight; I force myself to look at it, no matter how much it hurts. It does hurt, but it's real and I want to feel it.
I stand up, brush myself off, and head for home. In two weeks, my mother will hold my fifteenth birthday. I want to tell her not to use hairspray that day, or to forget about the trick candles, but deep down I know it wouldn't matter.
She wants everything to be perfect.
The thought of it all, the planning, makes her so happy.
The world needs more happiness, however small, so how can I interfere with that?