“No, no, no, no.”
It looks like a cherry bomb exploded in my bag. The zipper has been tugged open only a few inches, but it’s enough. My stuff is everywhere. The jerky bags have been ripped through, and some are empty. My bathroom stuff has been left alone, but the food baggies have been tossed everywhere. Oats and curly dried apples mingle in the dirt.
I howl a string of curses at myself and the fox, but mostly myself. How, how could I be so goddamned stupid? Who knew foxes could get into a bag like that?
Well, I should have known. I’d punch myself in the face if I could right now. I deserve it. Stupid fuckup.
I collapse onto the pine needles and drop my head in my hands. Panic rises in my chest, hot and acidic, and my head feels like it’s going to explode. A voice chants inside my head, but it’s not my own.
How could you be so careless, Hector?
My shoulders hunch over the pine needles. I can only make myself so small, but I try, even if there is no uncle pacing back and forth before me. I hunch over further, cringing, shaking my head, but I hear it anyway.
“How could you have lost your job? This house costs money. The food you eat costs money.”
All I want to do is go to my room, lock the door, and pretend I’m dead. That would be a relief compared to this.
My mouth is so dry, but I force the words out anyway. “Maybe we can ask Dad for more money.”
“No. No. He does enough for us already.”
I say nothing. When he gets like this, there is nothing I can say that won’t make him more furious. Even my silence fuels his anger. Though I’m almost the same height as him, he’s twice my weight. He has the same intense eyes as my dad, the same strong nose, but being half brothers, my uncle always passes for white. People who don’t know us always ask if I’m adopted. They look at my uncle like he’s a saint.
When my uncle sees the clothes hanging off my lean frame, he tells me I’d be more of a man if I didn’t have my mother’s piss-yellow blood in me. And then inevitably after his tirade, he’ll apologize. He’ll beg for me to forget all about it. I’ll find him staring at me in that greedy way that makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But he’s not at that point yet. He has more anger to spend before he gets there.
He yells and yells, and eventually, all his complaints empty out. His feet stop pacing and land in the square of rug where I’m staring. His hand rests on my shoulder.
I like it there. I hate it there.
“Look. I’m sorry.” He sighs, but I refuse to look up to see his face. “I lose it sometimes, since money’s a little tight. I don’t want to stress out your dad more than he already is. Take this.” He hands me a few bills. “Go pick us up some TV dinners and two beers. Fill out a few job applications while you’re at it.”
I nod and walk quietly to the truck, while my uncle paces the living room behind me. I take the truck and drive down the street, parking in the lot by the FoodMart. In the cupholder, there’s a crumpled pack of cigarettes with two left. A book of matches has been shoved into the cellophane wrapper.
I love the smell of a freshly lit match like I love the smell of gasoline. I could incinerate the truck, but that wouldn’t get him out of my life. I could have made him angrier and tempted him into pounding me with a golf club. But no, he’d never do that. He’s too clever for such obvious violence. He gets money from the foster agency for keeping me, even though we’re family. He’ll lose that if he hits me.
On the record, everything is my fault. I’m the one who skips school. I’m the one failing English and history. I’m the one who won’t listen to teachers, always on the cusp of throwing a punch. I’m the one who got dragged to the doctor every month for a year, because I was throwing up daily for no reason.
He never takes me to the doctor after the blackouts, though.
Every time I’ve run away, the police have just brought me back. I could go out and pick a fight, but there are quieter ways to contain my fury. So he leaves the cigarettes for me.
It’s the kindest thing he does for me, and he has no idea.
I light a cigarette and take a few deep puffs, letting the smoke curl deep inside my lungs. Maybe it’ll kill me from the inside out. I push up my left sleeve and read the scars there. Ten round burns, each one more healed than the last. Within me, the fury boils and scalds, waiting for release.
I take the cigarette from my lips, aim, and close my eyes.
My eyes snap open.
My whole body is shaking, and it’s not cold out. Inside, a craving turns itself over and over in my stomach, different from the hunger I’d felt before. There are no smoldering cigarette butts out here. It’s just me, but the compulsion to quiet my anger claws incessantly.
My hand falls automatically to the knife at my waist. I unsheathe it and watch the flickering light through the treetops reflect on the blade’s edge. My thumb tests the sharpness, gently touching it all the way to the tip without pushing hard enough to draw blood.
I roll up my left sleeve and rest the blade against the skin just above my last scar when a cry pierces the quiet.
Chapter Six
ANDA
I understand, in a split second, what he’s going to do. I’ve done it a hundred times in my own lifetime, but never with a knife. I don’t need a blade. But it’s like watching the act in a mirror: witnessing the breaking of another human is somehow altogether obscene.
Every day, the push and pull of life around me is a harmony I struggle to curate. Everything—the microbes, the fungi, the bats—everything trying to consume and destroy each other. Relentless. Human death is an inevitable fragment in this cacophony. My sisters surrendered, well before I ever set foot on the Isle, to the simplest part of the cycle, the most giving part—the ending of things. They beckon for me to join them, and in November, they sing most sweetly when I’ve taken a ship.
Father is glad that I wait until November, but it’s November that waits for me. The winds and temperatures and decay, they restore me like no other month of the year. But now, here—I couldn’t have ignored the rift in the lake-tinged scents in the air. I’d followed the coppery tang that came from this warm body, this boy.
I came here to tell him to leave. To say that he didn’t belong. But the sight of the knife on perfect skin—it incites me to emotions I can’t process. I understand what I must do, and not do, and the clash of the two is a massive wall of hot air hitting a cold one, swirling together to make something bigger, more frightening.
No, Anda.
The boy presses the knife harder against his skin, and finally I unstop the word that has lodged in my throat.