![]() There were signs that other people used the spot: a collection of crumpled beer cans and cigarette butts, charred wood and ashes where someone had built a fire. I came out from behind the tree and walked towards the clearing where they stood. I thought about running away, but I wanted to see what they’d been giggling about. “Did you get tired of crying in the car?” She sighed, loud enough that I could hear. The giggling quieted, and I ducked behind a beech tree, standing as straight and narrow as I could. A flock of crows took off from the spindly branches of a pine, startling me with the noise of their wings and cawing. The woods muffled the voices of my uncles and the radio, though the clang of horseshoes ringing against the spike still carried, clear and high like a warning bell. I took the long way through the brush so they wouldn’t see me coming. I picked my way down to the woods, practicing moving quietly in case I wanted to be a spy when I was older – it seemed like a good choice for a job. Sierra seemed to think that having a chest – “getting a nice rack” as my father put it – made her the first and greatest authority like an underwire bra might as well be a crown. Our dad had commented on it when we saw them over Christmas, which made Mom’s face go pinched and angry. ![]() ![]() She already had boobs, and wore shirts that showed off the straps of her bra. Sierra was older than Jenn, prettier, meaner. Jenn rarely laughed rarely cried, either, now that I think about it. The giggling sounded like it belonged to Sierra and, oddly, Jenn. Our ages lined up like a ladder: I was ten that summer, Lanie eleven, Jenn was twelve and a half, and Sierra had just turned fourteen. Lanie and Sierra, Aunt Shauna’s daughters, liked to play in the woods on their property. I was most of the way up the drive when I heard giggles coming from the woods off to my left. They’d pay attention to me long enough to tell me to go outside, enjoy the last days of summer before school started up again. My mother and aunts would occupy nearly every room in the house, carrying wine coolers in their hands and babies on their hips, sneaking out into the backyard to take drags off their husbands’ cigarettes. If I hiked up there, I’d see them gathered in clumps around Aunt Shauna’s big backyard, busy with their beers and games of horseshoes, busy telling Uncle Eddie how he should work the grill. My uncles’ raucous laughter drifted down from the top of the hill. Outside, I could hear snatches of a radio playing the classic rock station, and the metallic tink tink tink of someone hammering a length of pipe into the ground, setting up a pit for horseshoes. I abandoned the car at the bottom of the long dirt driveway. It was Labor Day weekend, and it got too hot in the car with the doors closed and the windows rolled up. Cautionary tales, but I took the wrong lesson from it. I saw it happen all the time girls and women being erased, or erasing themselves. I could disappear run away, fall into a river or a stranger’s car, and the world wouldn’t stop itself for me. I always felt like I was on the verge of disappearing when I was a child-like I could sink into the dirt and never re-emerge. I locked all the doors and lay down on the backseat, pretending that I was dead, pretending they were dead, pretending the car was moving all on its own, pretending I was alone and everyone else in the world had disappeared. I yanked my arm back.Īll three of them ignored me as I crossed my arms and cried in the backseat, and when we got to Aunt Shauna’s house, they didn’t bother to wait and see if I got out of with them. I kept my arm dangling out the window, cutting through the trees and hills until Dad started to raise the window from the driver’s console. ![]() “Quit it, both of you,” Mom said sharply from the front seat.ĭad added, “Quiet down, or I’ll stick the two of you in the trunk for the rest of the ride. ![]() I ignored her and let the wind fill my ears until she pinched me. But sometimes, the wind forced my hand lower, and I’d apologize under my breath to the motorcyclist or hitchhiker I’d beheaded. I tried to control the sword by changing the angle of my hand, so I could hop over other cars without slicing their passengers in half. Lower and I scythed through farmhouse attics and distant silos. The wind pushed the sword up, and I chopped through the tops of trees and telephone poles. This was a game I always played on long car rides, holding my hand flat and my fingers rigid. I held my arm out the window of the car and pretended it was a long sword slicing through the landscape. Do not try this at home, in the woods, or anywhere else.” My older cousins did, in fact, teach me how to induce a fainting spell, and I did, in fact, have some kind of seizure. “This story is partially autobiographical. ![]()
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