of this smell.
“The spilled drop, not the saved one.”
–Eudora Welty
I STARE AT THE RICKETY HOUSE ACROSS THE street. The girl’s bedroom is in the front: The window on the second floor with the black curtains. Usually she peeks out and stares at me with her round green eyes. She’s been watching me for days, but rarely acknowledges my presence. Today she’s refused to even make an appearance. Maybe she’s angry at me for stealing the oranges.
I sit alone in the dining room and wait for her curtains to part. It’s late afternoon. Slivers of sunlight filter into the room and gild the bookshelves surrounding the table. One beam falls on the bone china plate that holds the two oranges. An hour ago, I shimmied up the tree near the front door of the girl’s house and plucked the only two ripe pieces of fruit.
A noise upstairs jars me out of my vigil. The sound of my mother’s drunken footsteps rustling across the floorboards. It’s been days since I’ve seen her. She circulates through the house like a ghost, bumping into furniture. We’ve been living here on the edge of the woods for 116 days, according to the secret tally I’ve been keeping on the back flap of the peeling rose wallpaper in the bathroom. Or maybe it’s been longer. The tiny scrawls have almost merged into a single desperate slash. This is typical of our cycle. I’ve spent years moving from orphanage to orphanage. Every so often, my mother reappears to reclaim me. This time I’m eleven years old.
The curtains across the street flutter. I hold my breath waiting for the girl’s pale face to emerge, but nothing happens. I’m so distracted that I don’t notice the sounds in the house have grown louder. Then I realize my mother has appeared in the doorway. Something tells me to hide the oranges, but it’s too late and I’m too hungry.
Her blouse is wrinkled and there’s a stain on her pants. She clutches a crossword book in one hand and a glass of wholesale gin in the other. The alcohol threatens to slosh over the rim. She looks like she’s been blacked out for days. “There you are,” she says, as if I’m the one who’s been missing. She runs her fingers lightly along my back. Her touch feels like it burns.
She sits across from me and opens the crossword book, wetting the pencil lead with the tip of her tongue while scanning the horizontals and verticals. She’s been working on these puzzles forever but almost nothing has been filled in. The book is mostly white spaces and empty boxes. My mother silently eyes the oranges on the plate. It’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking. She doesn’t realize I haven’t had a real meal in days.
I start to peel one of the oranges with my fingers, digging my nails into the rind to create a seam that I can tear. My mother slaps my hand.
“Damn it, Jeff,” she says. “I can’t believe you don’t know how to peel a fucking orange.” She stands up and strides into the kitchen. While she’s gone, I nervously pick the lint off my green sweater. The house across the street remains motionless.
My mother reappears with a squat silver knife with a curved crescent blade. She holds out her palm and I hand her one of my oranges. She cuts away ribbons of rind, then chops the remaining white off the fruit at sharp, elegant angles. There are no clinging flecks of rind, no skin left at all, it’s shaved down to the juice, completely exposed. She places the glistening nude thing back on the plate. I’ve never seen anything so orange.
“Don’t worry about keeping it exactly round,” she says. “It’ll find its own shape.”
She slides the knife across the table.
“Your turn.”
As I begin to sheer the skin from the second orange, the curtains across the street flutter again. The girl’s hand pulls back the fabric and one green eye peers out. Then she vanishes.
“Don’t be so delicate,” my mother scolds. I’ve been carving the orange like a soap sculpture. I change tactics and hack off pieces with quick blunt strokes. It’s pretty easy, actually. I place the peeled orange on the china plate. I brace myself for one of my mother’s explosive rages, but she gives the fruit a cursory inspection and nods. Her highest form of praise.
She cuts both oranges into fat slices and takes a bite. I stuff an entire wedge in my mouth and slurp it down. It’s tart but juicy.
“Not bad,” she says. “Where’d you get them?”
“They gave them to me across the street.”
“Enjoy them,” she says. “You’re never going over there again.”
“Why not?”
My mother narrows her pupils and my blood chills. It’s clear that she’s contemplating throwing her glass of gin in my face. She raises her hand, but only takes another slice of orange.
“Because the man who lives there is a big fucking asshole,” my mother says. Her slate gray eyes keep me in their grip. “He’s a sex pervert. He just got out of prison and he’ll probably be arrested again soon.”
My mind races with this new information. All I can say is “okay.” I try to figure out whether the girl is the man’s daughter, or his niece, or something else entirely. I can’t decide if her expression held any clues. Before I only imagined her life in that window, but now a whole frame crashes into place around it. Maybe the girl wants to escape and doesn’t know how. As I take another bite, the fruit tastes different.
My mother turns back to her book of puzzles and hovers over a clue. I retrain my gaze on the girl’s window. We both reach for slices of orange and absently consume them, bite by bite. Neither of us speaks a word. There’s only the measured sound of our breathing. My mother tries out several letters, then sighs and erases them. The sun sinks low and I have to squint to see anything through the glare. It doesn’t matter because the black curtains remain closed. Soon the china plate is empty. A sweet and acid odor lingers. I ball the loose orange rinds into a roughly round shape. Something lodges itself under my nails and I carefully study those last flecks of iridescent pulp.
The house across the street is empty. The moon spills a faint light across its front lawn. The night before the man left town, I saw the girl sprinting across this stretch of grass. She was wearing a pale nightgown with a dark stain. She ran swiftly and silently past the orange trees and toward the woods. Then she seemed to vanish. I can’t stop thinking about her.
I lie in my darkened bedroom and stare out the window, fine-tuning my own plans to run away. This helps to keep my mind off the pain. It hurts every time I move. I’m lying on my stomach and can’t see how serious the injury is, but I can feel the blistered skin. Somewhere between my shoulder blades there’s a burn the shape of a clothing iron.
My mother enters the room with a jar of salve. She sits on the mattress and applies some to my bare back. It stings, so I grit my teeth and bury my face in the pillow. The wobbly swirl of her fingertips is a pretty good indication that she’s still shit-faced.
“Sometimes I think you ruin my things on purpose,” she says. “You have to learn how to do things for yourself. What are you going to do when I’m not around?”
There’s no point in answering, so I don’t.
She unrolls some gauze and lays it over the wound. She keeps adding layers, seemingly unsure how many are required. Her fingers poke and prod the sore while trying to fix tape to the edges. Once the bandage is secure, she turns on the bedside