was a problem with his body. “You’re sobbing,” my mother told him. Was the baby sweating? No, he was soaking the girl with his tears.
MY HEAD IS in the lap of Supernatural. Repeat. Situation critical. My head is in the lap of Supernatural.
S.O.S.
Supernatural. O. Supernatural.
He gets up and helps me to my feet. He looks down at me. He is extremely tall. Could there be a taller man? Yes, but not here. Maybe The Heavy. Yes, The Heavy. “You passed out.” I look around. We are alone in the graveyard. I am having trouble summoning language. The bonfire is mostly embers. Everyone has gone home. “Fainted.”
I had pictured this so differently. Now is the moment when I name-drop the lights in the sky, and Supernatural falls in love with me, but instead I say, “I listened to the chants.” And then what I don’t say: I slow danced to the chants. Embarrassed, I lift my hands to my face. No sense of mystery. Visiting cousin. Pinto. Kissless. The rhinestones are still there. Good.
“Are you about to faint again?”
“No.”
“Phew.”
He is moving strangely. “My legs fell asleep,” he mumbles, and then he stands very still.
I see the charred can of butane.
“Did you kill him?”
He shakes his head. “I am so not a murderer.”
The tall boy in the black jeans with the rifle at his side. He has a scar that runs through his top lip. I don’t think I have ever noticed it before. I don’t think I have ever stood this close to Supernatural before. Seen so much of the face under the ball cap under the hood. When did he get the scar? It looks new.
WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, our mothers dragged us here while they tidied the plots.
“You good?”
“You good?”
“You good?”
The women never answered the question; they just traded it between them. When my mother and I walked over the incline and joined the circle, they always commented on her hair design. She had the most elaborate hair designs in the territory. I would sit on the edge of her bathtub and watch her twist and pin her hair. Her gold hoop earrings, her gold eyeshadow. The pale pink workdress, the red ski jacket. All around us, the boys of the territory ran between and climbed the headstones, rolled tires, lit cardboard on fire, chanted, “Fight, fight, fight.”
“Graveyard getting big,” the women said.
“Graveyard getting bigger than the town.”
And the widows would break off in their rubber aprons and dish gloves, their cleaning supplies in their pails, their shorter ponytails like pets at their coat collars, to clear their husbands’ headstones of dirt and snow.
“When did the headstones start getting uneven?”
“Who’s to say this one gets a bigger headstone than that one?”
“This one’s headstone’s bigger than my chest freezer.”
“This one’s bigger than my bungalow.”
And the children pinned their arms to their bodies and rolled down the small decline. Clay, rock, and scrub. The girls played at having their blood drawn. Faking dizzy, “I did my bloodwork today. Get me some citrus.” And the boys, with their fathers’ old tools, built makeshift ladders, hunting platforms. Every stick was a rifle. They had knives in pouches and sharpened wood into spears.
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