The Kids on the Block Who Carried Knives in Their Fists
My eyes used to water when the nature channels played on television, when the predators dug sharp teeth and claws into their prey. When I read about the animals shot up with barbiturates in cold concrete kennels. Something changed when the funeral happened.
After the funeral, they misspell your name on the elegy. At the wake, you stare at the paintings of landscapes on the off-white colored walls. A grand piano sits in the room at the front of the house. You question if you can still play. Your fingers splay awkwardly on the black and white keys, everything jarring and out of tune and the opposite of elegant. A book titled How Al-Anon Works for Families & Friends of Alcoholics sits on the side table along with a box of tissues. So it runs in the family, you think. At the foot of the stairs in a small wicker basket lies an orange prescription bottle with a worn label that reads Atorvastatin, used to treat or prevent strokes and heart attacks. In the second story bathroom two mirrors face each other, creating a glass paradox. There's a clear absence of messy crayon drawings tacked to the refrigerator. You throw away the printed funeral invite on your way out.
It’s not like they hadn't ever warned us. Because they did. Every hot, sweating afternoon when we ran out the backdoor, down the gravel path, they shouted after us. And we heard them, even over all the shouting and laughing and the sounds of footfalls. Sometimes I yelled back. It was summer, the season in which nuclear families migrated to expensive lake houses, and the once quiet forests filled with beer and wine and spritzer bottles and Marlboro cigarettes. The big stretch of concrete near our house grew hot. I remember watching his white shirt turn gray with sweat as his shoulders worked, up, down, up down.
A few years ago in the summer, that day on the boardwalk, we found out we had matching scars under our shoulder blades. The nights had become damp and uncomfortable, the chains on our bikes rusted. Me and him, him and I. The two of us on that road. His last night alive.
You always see hit and runs on the morning news, blurry CCTV footage and stone faced reporters. It’s so much different when it happens to you. When you can feel the car speeding by, inches away from you. One moment you're watching the trees blur by- watching your breath cloud into the air, and the next he’s screaming and you can taste exhaust fumes. When your bike wheels are spinning entirely too fast and he’s losing blood at the same rate. You watch his chest expand, up, down, up down. The indisputable fact that you won’t be able to save him.
He laid in the road, legs splayed unnaturally, blood staining his teeth. I felt his hands pull my face closer to his. “I'm sorry,” he said.
And I thought to myself, what could you possibly be sorry for? But I forgave him.
You shoot up with medical grade morphine, to stop the pain in the tendons of your heels, the throb and ache that stretches up your shoulder blades and slopes down to the skin on your wrists. There are dark circles under your eyes, they've been there for years and you hope no one notices even though it’s inevitable. Your parents warn you not to open the door for strangers. You wonder what they mean until you see the men in the newspapers, the men who set fire to high rise buildings, the men who steal fingerprints and faces. The men with steely Cheshire grins. “Bad things happen to kids who run down the street and pick up dirty needles in the woods, don't you know?” You overhear them talking in the next room over, wondering how they're ever gonna tell their little girl that she’s losing her sight. The cross hangs on the wall, the bible in the corner of the room, untouched. The pressure behind your eyes gets worse.
The kids on the block are mixing styrofoam and acetone together. Poor man's Napalm, they say. Detonation, Destruction. They pull lighters from their ripped pants pockets. White lighters. They laugh, the corners of their eyes wrinkle as the fire climbs higher and higher. The sky bursts into a striking orange color and the air makes your throat burn. They pull apart Cola cans and make knives from red metal. Fighting in the cracked cement lot of the old church. Critiquing form with harsh remarks. Bright eyed and yelling. Itching to leave bruises and bloody noses. Heads turned upwards, they laugh and push against each other.
They come to you with color dripping down their necks and knuckles bright red. You stitch them up and they thank you with glistening eyes. You know that the soldiers who patrol the streets teach them violence. How to load a gun, how to dig their fingers into someone's eyes and leave them blinded. The kids imitate their weapons. Collecting bullet shells which they wear around their necks.
You did the same once. You have the scars to prove it. Long lateral ones across your back, on your arms, your legs. One on your face that earns you countless stares. You still know how to throw a punch without hurting yourself, how to scrape gunpowder from the barrel of a gun.
Your parents look at you with disapproving eyes. You wonder if they have the same scars.
You're holding onto the steering wheel, your hands are turning red. The road is an endless plane of gray and your eyes are heavy, your mouth dry. Your passenger is silent. You haven’t spoken since you left the parking lot. It’s better that way and both of you know that. Your brights are on and you squint because that harsh light always hurts your eyes. The both of you hadn't had a fight in years. Not since freshman year of high school when you said something you shouldn’t have and she did the same. Now you could see the anger rising in her throat. Her hands were shaking, her fingers curled into her palms. Later, when people start to talk, they'll be rumors about the fight, about the words exchanged between the two of you.
Tear soaked shirt sleeves, scuffed shoes, and broken glass. The flood of painfully bright lights encompassing your vision, a ringing in your ears.
The world was spinning and blurring and the impact hits you a thousand times over. You never figured out how much time had passed. The reports weren’t clear, there were no times on analogue clocks or neatly printed numerals.
When you open your eyes the world’s flipped the wrong way round and then the right way up. Oscillating between pain and disorientation. The car’s spinning, you're reaching out, someone’s screaming. Your windshield’s cracked, a million different splinters of light refracting across the dashboard. Orange lights, hazard lights. The smell of antifreeze and gasoline leaking through the windows. Something metallic smelling and warm, sickeningly warm, is dripping down your arms. But you look next to you and she’s so so still. Her seatbelt is twisted tightly around her chest and neck. Blood wells from her eyes and her nose and streams into her open mouth. It drips down her sharp white teeth and through the cold air. The gray surface of the dashboard is covered in carmine colors. You listen for the warm, raspy sound of her breath. Ambulance alarms sound in the distance.
At the station a gruff voice asks too many questions. The officer's uniform is too loose, an extra notch carved into his belt. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead and when you close your eyes the outline is burned into the dark space behind your eyelids. So is the red and blue light of the sirens, the headlight of the other car. Her face, the bruises. The man hands you a form when he realizes you can’t choke out the right words. State your relation to the deceased. You think back to the years of friendship, the other years of something else, something with blurry lines and words whispered on rooftops. Running through the neighbors yard hopping fences. Soft hands and her head resting on your shoulder. All the late nights spent with red faces and ribs aching from howling laughter. The party, the fight. And so you move the pen to the paper and it hovers over the box, the one you’ve never checked before. The one that sits between Friend and Family. A choice that didn’t make sense before but now feels right. The one that simply reads ‘Partner’.
by Fallon Willis
