Inside woods split by lightning, Madelaine with the long name. Madelaine with the rich girl name, the white girl name, the name of the ghost in the trees after she disappeared. Resurrected on ashy, rain-warped posters, round-face stare between the words missing and person. Girl in the gap. Girl turned memory.
Madelaine as multiple choice, the upward lilt of interrogation, ahead of us again. Madelaine, our patron saint of stuck girls who does not age while we fill out, bleed out, rage out, flame out. A few of us get out, air out the broiled stink of this place with its emergency routes and water drops, stench of scorched feathers and tender flowers in gardens wind forgot. Propeller planes tearing air, propeller plane pilots tearing girls still as smokestacks wind screams through on its way somewhere else.
Evacuation, a word longer than Madelaine but just as lost. She’d be 32 now. Hair a shade between honey and sap, thinner or maybe fatter. More than a frame to hang our skin and bones on, splay our failures at her feet. Release them like rabbits while we grow older in the present tense, disappearing slowly inside our flesh.
It’s the season of rain here. A time of fermenting and leaves falling upwards. Pilots splashing rumours along with their seed, a woman named Madelaine just three towns over, ex-husband and kid, bank job every Monday. Pilots heading to their elsewhere homes with the taste of forest dampness from our bladed tongues. ‘That’s not our Madelaine’ is all we say.
Because we want to grow up, 600 words
Because we want to be grown up we play war like adults do. Trevor shoots balloons filled with garbage at our house and I sneak an old boombox in the hedges and blast bubble gum punk after midnight until they bash through the greenery and turn it off. Nate sprays wobbly driveway propaganda over hopscotch squares and pastel unicorns drawn by Andy’s little sister Sad. Short for Sadistic we joke though we don’t know what that means. Because she’s youngest Sad plays the role of the busted baby, disfigured or left for dead which means we park her somewhere quiet and ignore her. ‘How come I’m always the baby,’ she screams but we’re launching ops against Nick’s front window, curtains drawn against his mom who no one has seen past the trash cans for months. When the glass shatters from our rocks her empty face scares us more than fury so we shout and point fingers shuffling backwards until we get home to suck cold cucumbers and candy.
Emily joins in when she feels like it which isn’t often because we make her play the mother or widow, always crying, always screaming, all tears and fists hammering the pavement linking our post-war houses or the plush grass where yellow-headed dandelions aren’t allowed, just another battle waged here.
‘It’s a game’ we say when our parents scold us but at some point the pranks stop making us roll on the ground laughing and we stop meeting up after to plot or talk about anything else, it’s all war and silence and instead of trash balloons Trevor leaves shit on our grass and then in my school locker. Instead of music in hedges I light a small fire in the garage where Trevor’s father spends most of his time and Nate dips a towel in the flame and hurls it toward the house though his aim is bad and it flops in the zucchini bed. We stop bringing Nick over to watch movies in our basement when his dad breaks things, we just call police and watch his father windmill all over the driveway, his mother quiet behind the squawking radio, red and blue streaking our houses and Nick bleeding tiny crescents in his palms.
In class we draw lines for others not to cross and slice open our coke cans when they do, carving jagged welts on each other’s forearms like contour maps. Our parents come to the school and Nate’s dad says sorry but mine blames Trevor’s dad and Nick’s tries to intervene so they both go at him and soon they’re shouting over the teacher and canceling the street barbecue.
Later Nick steals Andy’s lawnmower and someone complains to the city about overgrown grass so the bureaucrats come and Andy’s dad says he’ll call police over the stolen lawnmower and Andy kidnaps Sad and won’t say where he took her even when Trevor and I arrive with baseball bats, not because we care, just to bash his head in. We bust his arm before they stop us and he passes out for some reason and no one finds Sad for two days. She’s mostly fine and not even crying but she doesn’t talk for a while.
Mom scoops me and Emily up to our aunt’s house because ‘this neighbourhood’s bonkers.’ Emily and I and lemonade our aunt makes us tart and cool on our tongues, her warm garden smelling of honeysuckle and sprinklers, no friends or dad but separation is part of war. We feel very grown up, we just like we thought.
Families complicate things, 460 words
Freya snagged her sweater on a doorknob when she was five so little threads poked out, growing longer when she moved. ‘We’re all unravelling’ she said. One day she wrapped the abandoned arm of a snowman in the sweater tight as a tourniquet and placed it in her freezer. Wailed like an ambulance when her mother dragged it out and sent her to me instead. A woman living alone is bound to have more freezer room, she said but in truth she saw my isolation, my leaking grasp of reality and decided I’m as fractured as her daughter.
Her mother rarely asked Freya for explanations like ‘Why is there a snow arm in my freezer?’ I don’t need to ask, it’s a relic of the snowman her father built before driving off. ‘I’ll be back before it melts,’ he said but she’d watched him bend and stretch truth, chew it between glossy teeth until it’s something else. My freezer protects his lie. She never considered that he should protect her.
Over time the arm fuzzed with freezer burn or dripped toward extinction when Freya took it out for inspection. In a blizzard one year later Freya raised it high above her head and smashed it to pieces. We watched icy chunks surrender to the smothering snow with the gravity of mourning. When the blankness of sky matched Freya’s eyes she placed a shell on the ground. So you always have a home, she told his absence and locked her dad out her heart.
She stopped coming by. Sometimes I’d see her by the river, her back to the world. I heard she became a professor of something, philosophy or art.
I saw her once more after time polished its blade against me. My body attacked me from inside and with little life left and I took myself on the tourism of the dying. Soaring halls where cellos stretched so painfully in my stupid flesh I thought I’d shatter. Libraries smelling of history and glue. The structure of reality fell away in me, I lived inside the bones of these places, breathing music, swallowing knowledge I can’t take with me, sipping words at small sunlit tables in the vaulting aisles of a library far from my little home. Sometimes I’d creak down long concrete steps to the burbling fountain and there was Freya. Skin slackening on her bones, hair sheened with the translucence of mid-age. Loose tailored pants and t-shirt, all casual professional, knee-deep in a public fountain with that internal look on her face. Soul coiling where others show skin.
Whispers all around; Is she ok, should we help? Laughing. Shooting video. Freya with her back to the world in this universe of gleaming light. Me beside her again.