Snatches

The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The clouds seemed to disperse like the swirls of sugar floss that spun into nothing, as the motor whirled round and round, and the children’s laughter, her laughter, echoed so far away. The tilt-a-whirl, the shrieks of fright, the rush of blood the emotion that spilled out over the edge, painted with carnival colors and smelled of kettle corn. She hadn’t been to a carnival in years. Only vaguely could she recall the sour bite of the lemon candies, long tubes of acidy sugar, stuck in the heart of a lemon, sucking the citric bite into puckered lips, and mommy. She was there holding her hand, there were no temper tantrums, no pulled hair, no horrible barrettes scraping her scalp, as she was chided for the rat's nest she carried on her head. The rain stopped then, and they all ran back out across the fields, swinging on the jungle gym, the geodesic hemi-dome glistened in the spring sun, a tenuous sun that whispered its rays more than shouted, like the rain glistened on her silver Civic.

She smiled painfully, lips cracking, licking the blood hungrily from them, savored the salt snatch of color, light, years past, the taste of blood in her mouth, like a lioness fresh from the kill, she licked at her wrists, cleaned the gash from the palm of her hand. She bent down, to restore the pink of her skin with saliva, robbed by the white of the scraping asphalt, fallen from her bike. It lay in a pile of sullen grass, not quite ready for winter to be over. There were no honeysuckles yet, none hanging their little belled heads, beckoning to her, begging to be ripped from the scratchy bush, their stamen pulled gently, the little green nub, a perfect handle, inched out slowly, with a perfect drop of golden sunshine, sweet dew, to an awaiting tongue. And then, she would take the flower between her lips and suck again, until all that was left was the taste of air blowing in and out, and she would trumpet the sound, for no one but herself, pleased by her own foolishness, dissecting the yellow flesh between her fingers, rolling it back and forth until its cellulose was broken down and it bled rivulets of water.

The sleek silver glistened as she rounded the corner. There were no helmeted children conquering the suburban sprawl. They were all still in school, she thought, and smiled again, letting the weight of the smile rest on her brow, sinking in, until the smile wasn’t a smile but a contorted memory of itself reflected in the mirage of heat that settled in through the windshield. She reached up instinctively, hit the button that opened the gate, rounded the corner, flexed her foot on the brakes, listening for the comforting wet roar of rubber on freshly rained upon cement. It was flat now, perfect for riding their bikes back and forth, Eileen had always had the perfect driveway, she had always had the perfect mother, home after school to meet them with milk and cookies. They had the perfect dog, the perfect driveway, the perfect life. It didn’t matter, the driveway had been redone last year. There were no children to ride their bikes back and forth on it. She glanced over her shoulder at all the houses, tan images of her own, replicated like a virus as far as the eye could see. She hit the neighboring button and watched as the garage door slowly made its ascent, grumbling against the weight of its own swollen wood. She pulled in next to the algae colored Forester, she had always hated that car, it was dry, not a single drop of rain. He was not home, she knew, she had left him at the airport that very morning, and was only now coming home. Daddy always used to be there, always used to come home from the trips with his arms thrown wide and his laughter, his scratchy beard against her soft skin, “what did you bring me? What did you bring me?” and he would smile and pull a silver packet of peanuts from his lapel, and she would feel like the world had just been handed to her in a jar, and there was nothing she wanted more than to roll each salty nut around her tongue, one by one, and only after she had sucked all the salt from it would she push it to the side of her mouth and bite down, with gentle pressure and split it open, she would feel the smooth halves, with deep grooves run back over her tongue before crushing the entire perfect woody morsel between her grateful teeth. She would smile then, with bits of nut between them, and they would laugh.

George Washington Carver was going to save the world with the peanut, he came up with hundreds of ways to use it, it was going to liberate the oppressed people, descendants of slaves. Only, what was left for her to do, if there was nothing left to liberate, but the souls of all these poor, empty houses, lined up in a row, with nothing inside, and nothing outside to tell them apart, but the flower beds, neatly tended, or the deck that the neighbor’s husband made when he wasn’t off chasing rabbits with the dog. She heard the garage door close behind her with a dull crunch, the room was dark and her eyes adjusted to the blackness, she turned up the radio, it was playing Mozart’s Requiem mass and the waves rose in around her, gently, closing her eyes, letting the sound inundate her dreams of nothing, of carnivals and lemonade and springtime and blades of grass between her teeth, and she felt the surge of the motor under her hand as it rested gently on the gearshift, she listened as the sound swelled around her and carried her away to far off places where sunshine warmed instead of chilled, where every bone in her body did not ache, where every drop of rain did not dig deeper into the hole that had been carved out of her center and she slowly drifted off to sleep.