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  Talk

  By: Rachel Zachary

  Chapter One

  A blustery February wind whipped up the dirt along the roadside. The sun was large, blue-white and boiling hot. People hurried along the sidewalk with their shorts tugged up and collars turned down. It seemed like summer, it was so hot I could barely breathe. I couldn’t believe it when the thermometer said it was only eight three degrees. It had rained sometime last night, the wind whipped the runoff coming out of the manholes and storm drains into steam.

  It feels like I’m dreaming. I must be because I can’t believe that I’m here again, driving in this beat up old ford again, heading down this old road again, through the woods where the trees are dying and over bridges. I keep my hand outside the window braced against the door despite the cold. After the first couple of hours or driving I had moved through the woods into flat hills, long stretches of farmland littered with sheep and large red clay hills. I’m nearing the city limits, the road swells to include five other lanes and a roundabout up ahead that had not been there before. Even the trees and thickets we once used as markers have been cut down to make room for new office buildings and little stores.

  I hadn’t thought to bring a map because I had never needed one before and knew I wouldn’t need one now. I circle through the roundabout twice and backs up into a small side street that bleeds into the main street, driving until I find a grocery store. Bubblegum machines, old sushi and trashy tabloid magazines. I go back to the car with two deli sandwiches, a bag of hard candy, and a map. The old road is gone. I plug in the new directions to my phone and let it do the work for me while I eat lunch. The beef is fresh, the feta cheese is still hard and crumbly, and it hasn’t fully melted yet.

  I like the fried tomatoes they used to make better.

  Nothing is the same anymore, I don’t know how to feel about that. I take another bite out of my sandwich, trying to concentrate on all of the new flavors and textures. They put black olives in it now. It tastes fine but I don’t like it, any of it. Why are the sandwiches different? Why have the roads changed? I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe that tie would stop, everything would be suspended in translucent jello, that nothing would change and everything would stay the same. I shouldn’t have left. Maybe if I had stayed I would have stopped them. Or at least saved the trees.

  I want to go home, back to my apartment in the city and never see my mother again unless she was the one who came up for a visit. If I go back I’ll start crying. I bite down on my lip until I can’t taste anything except for copper pennies and a sharp pain running up behind my right eye.

  I’m okay.

  I finish my sandwiches, get out and toss the greasy paper and plastic wrappers out into a trash can, walk back to my truck and back out of the parking lot. I turned around onto a side street that had once been a dirt road and started the slow crawl down the mountain.

  I drove my old blue Ford fast with all of the windows down, but rolled them back up and turned on the seat warmers when I spotted mammoth sized rain clouds on the horizon. Seconds later popcorn sized drops of rain began to splash the roof and the windows. I turned onto the highway and within minutes the clouds quit raining as soon as they started, breaking up into thousands of pieces.

  I drove through the afternoon. The valley was painted in warm yellow sunshine, a flock of birds rose over head before diving to peck at the ditches where the rain had washed up all the worms from the dirt. The road turned east, and at Bear Creek Gorge, I crossed down from where the road joined the highway before turning north up toward the mountains. I eased off the gas and coasted over the newly paved asphalt and rolled down the windows again. An almost arctic breeze smelling like mud and wild mint poured in.

  The truck’s wheels sprayed mud and wet dirt all along the sides of the road, I turned off onto a smaller weed covered road, I turned on the radio and nearly lost control of the wheel as I went over a massive pothole. My elbow hit the armrest. Hard. The truck stalled and started up again after a few harsh words and jiggling the key. I ignored the throbbing that ran up and down my arm and into my teeth all at once.

  Afternoon turns to dusk, the sky was already dark purple and there was no hint of the moon. Within an hour it is pitch black, two pairs of headlights appear in the distance behind me, I keep an eye on them, there was nothing else to do but drive straight and nothing to look at ahead of me except for the beam of the truck’s headlights lighting up the road. It was hotter at night in the valley. I lit a cigarette. My back was stiff and wet with sweat. I hate summer. It always came early it was so hot that I could barely breath, barely think, barely move. Even the rain was hot.

  I looked out the window, as I enter Dogtooth -a quiet little coal mining town the sidewalks and little brick houses tucked behind their little flower filled yards were lit up by the streetlights. I turn right and head into a part of town that’s been gentrified since the last time I was here, freshly built town houses, and brick bungalows with shiny black roofs.

  I was too tired to look for a motel, so I pull into a parking lot and climb up into the truck bed where there was enough room to sleep.

  ***

  I woke up just after dawn, when the clouds were long and thing and the sky had just turned a violent shade of mauve. I climb back into the truck and drive through the winding narrow streets nursing my headache with a cup of instant coffee and cursing under my breath. I stopped in front of a large tired looking bungalow covered in dark green ivy, looked out the window and nearly jump when I see my mother standing thirty feet away from me working in the garden.

  I watched her work, she dug up each bulb with care and planted the new ones tenderly, a large bag of compost had been unceremoniously dumped into a little vegetable garden, while a large black St. Bernard barked and chased the geese across the yard.

  It was so ordinary, so familiar; the way her hands moved, the way she tucked her bangs back behind her ears, how she smiled almost like a small child might, excited with everything when she picked up and buried each bulb.

  She was older now, her hair was cut short in a long bob and streaked with gray, there were deep wrinkles now where there hadn’t been before and thick puffy bags stood prominently from underneath her eyes. But she still looked like the woman that I remembered from when I was growing up, the woman who would play jazz music on the piano on a daily basis and only read the comics in the newspaper and laughed aloud to every joke.

  The dog started barking and she looked back at me, I was terrified. I wanted to hide, I wanted to slam my foot on the gas and drive as fast as I could back home, but then my eyes met hers, she waved at me slowly at first and then faster a and a large enthusiastic smile crossed her face, “Hey baby!” she called out and then all of my worries died.

  Chapter Two

  Dogtooth was an actual town though you’d be hard pressed to find it on any map. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, it has a bus station for the locals and a Greyhound service for the tourists. It was where I had grown up but wasn’t where I was from. I was born in California before we moved out here. Or at least that's what my parents had told me. All I can remember is that we used to live like nomads, moving from one little town to another, never staying long enough for one to make an impression.

  We lived in the upper part of the valley where there was nothing to see but miles of forests, fields and farmland that had slowly been sold off to banks and developers over the years. Our development, Coyote Crossing, had been one of the first ones built in the area, marketed towards new families and first time homebuyers after the coal mines had started to run dry from losing too many of its workers to black lung.

  For the first few years that we lived there, it seemed as if all of the houses had dropped out of the sky at random. There were no neat squares or
fences to divide the property save for the trees that spanned for miles all of the new families like ours moved into identical one to two-story bungalows and bought weed killer for the infestation of dandelions and crabgrass, and lawn ornaments so that we could them apart until the options came in for paint.

  There were three choices: pale yellow, eggshell white, and green. After a few weeks of vigorous debate and arguing we went with the pale yellow and painted the front door a dark red. After a year of mowing, weeding, planting flowers that withered and died (until my mother actually started buying flowers that were native to the region) and chasing away the neighbor’s dogs from under our porch we built a long white picket fence. Soon other fences sprung up and later other bungalows and townhouses, and the dirt roads soon turned into paved ones with sidewalks and street lamps until it looked like a regular neighborhood.

  When I was a twelve our house was one of the first homes to catch fire, no one had left the oven on, or smoked a cigarette and left it, and there was nothing wrong with the wiring, somebody had torched it. Our pretty little yellow house now had large black soot covered holes where the windows had been the wood warped and bubbled around it falling in on itself in some places. The garage had burnt down and we would have to buy sod and topsoil to replace the grass that had caught fire too. Only the brick foundation remained intact, a good scrubbing would get it clean again.

  While we lived out of Dad's old Jeep Wagoneer the police were investigating, I had never seen Dad so angry as when they told him that after a week they didn’t have any idea who might have been the culprit and gave us the address for a good homeless shelter outside of town.

  He was furious, he ripped up the address, he acted as if staying in a shelter was worse than sleeping in the Wagoneer, as though he was going to find and personally deal with whoever set the fire himself. I remember how he stayed up all night howling up at the moon every bad word in the dictionary and a few imaginative curses I had never heard before. Then when he had calmed down he declared that no children of his was going to stay in a shelter. He wasn’t going to wait for the Insurance to come out months from now to do an inspection and for people to start asking about our welfare. He was going to rebuild our house himself.

  ***

  I was fascinated, every time we came up to the house to bring Dad coffee or water, or keep him company as he sawed and chopped, and nailed the boards together from the trees he felled, to see how our bungalow, now a log cabin was coming together.

  The tree trunks were long and laid in pyramids across the yard, the wood was rough and un-sanded, weeds constantly sprung up inside of the house, the walls went up slowly, the bark facing outward untouched. I was excited. It was going to be like living in a treehouse! I could almost ignore the dark marks from where the flames had kissed the floor and we had to wear shoes inside because Mom still hadn’t found all of the glass from broken the windows.

  The fire became an obsession of mine. It was one of the many parts of my childhood I could never really explain or understand. It had been horrible, and luckily we hadn’t been there when it happened but there was something about it that sent my mind and my imagination racing whenever I thought about it.

  I was afraid that whoever had started the fire might come back but after the fury had passed Dad was unnaturally calm. He had spent the days when he wasn’t working on the house searching the woods for hours but he never did find the culprit, he said it was a freak accident and that it wouldn’t happen again. Mom believed him but I still had my doubts about what had happened.

  My sister and I spent our days when we weren’t weeding, seeding and watering the lawn scavenging what we could find. A melted Barbie doll, a charred copy of Aesop’s fables, some spoons. Most of the house was still salvageable, the garage had gotten the worst of it. The furniture was black with soot and smoke but they could be saved. Dad said the wood was still good, the rugs though we tossed along with the paintings on the wall and the little porcelain figures.

  The bedroom that my sister and I shared was almost exactly as we left it, filled with clothes and toys strewn across the floor, the bright blues, reds, purples, and yellows shone in the shadows of the dark burned wood. All of our clothes smelled like wood smoke, black streaks ran up from the hems to the collars; the only ones that had survived the fire untouched were the sweaters folded on the shelf near the ceiling.

  I remember my bed, still unmade, the bright robin eggs blue was charred, and as useful as a piece of coal. I could have died there. If it had happened at night instead of the middle of the day when we were out eating ice cream at the parlor in town. I remembered that bed the house in all of my nightmares in the years that followed. Even when the house had been rebuilt and was better than it had been before the nightmares remained.

  I dreamed of fire. Of burning. I wondered what would have happened if we had been there, if I hadn’t been able to get out of the flames. Or if I had and Mom and Dad hadn’t.

  That bed, that room frightened me. I could never sleep upstairs again. I always slept downstairs beneath a window despite the ants in summer and the cold in the winter. I flushed Dads matchbooks down the toilet. I buried the candles in the backyard. I was haunted by the fire, of the idea of my face staring back at me from a mirror one day black and shiny with blood.

  When our house was struck by lightning a year after the fire –years later I thought it was a sign from God himself- that we would move like we had so many times in the past and I would never have to see the valley again, or live in the house we could have died in, but we didn’t. Dad said that we were putting down roots.

  Chapter Three

  I didn’t have many friends growing up. There weren’t many children in the valley, there were only one other girl who was my age that lived in my neighborhood, and neither of us got along with each other well. We became playmates out of necessity. Her name was Mariah, she was seven years old, and tall for her age small with a thick chestnut mane that only grew darker with age, and a mouth full of metal and rubber bands.

  She and I would meet every day and played at being friends until we both were old enough to drift apart and spend our time doing whatever it was that we wanted without worrying our Mothers that we needed someone our age to be friends with and if we did it didn’t need to be with each other.

  One day when we had been sitting on the porch making flower crowns -dandelions for me and daisies for her- she said, “Your Dad is weird.” I frowned and then bit my lip. I pulled up a fistful of grass and dug around in the earth for worms and tried to pretend like that hadn’t stung.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “My Mom, she said… promise that you won’t get mad at me Susie?” Mariah asked.

  “Promise,” I said.

  “I heard Mom talking to Dad last night, she thinks that your Dad is weird.” Mariah said solemnly.

  I frowned, “But what does weird mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mariah said, “But whenever my Mom says it, it’s about something she doesn’t like.”

  Something flipped in my stomach, and even though Mariah’s mother hadn’t been talking about me I still felt funny, like when your stomach starts to hurt and you feel sick. I could feel my face heat up and I knew that I was violently blushing.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  Mariah shrugged, “I don’t know, I think you’re nice,” she said, “But your Dad is weird.” Her nose wrinkled like she had just smelled something bad.

  I hated her.

  I hated her for making me cry, for getting me in trouble for pushing her off the porch and getting a spanking. Actually, truth be told I was jealous of her. Not just because she had nicer clothes than me, or braces, or that her house hadn’t burned down. I wanted to be her.

  I wanted her chestnut mane, which she could braid or leave down without brushing and easily curl with a twist of a wet finger, not my mousy brown hair with my stupid blunt bangs that Mom cut with a small pair of pru
ning shears despite my pleas to go to a hair salon like she did.

  I wanted her father not mine who was always loud whether he was laughing or singing, it seemed sometimes like he shouted every word. Everyone always stared whenever my Dad was around, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he was so loud, he was a people person always going up to people and shaking their hands or hugging them, or because he was so handsome. I wanted the kind of Dad who wasn’t always around, who didn’t talk with a hug or bark at us, I wanted the Dad who made pancakes and went out to work.

  Mom always said that you have to show compassion for people, that you should never hate or judge anyone, but the night after my spanking I kept hearing Mariah’s words in my ear. The more I thought about the more right they sounded. My father was weird. He was still handsome but he was starting to get a bit of a beer gut, he always wore cowboy boots and dirty work clothes even on his days off.

  He would lock himself in his bedroom for hours sometimes, he was people person he always had something to say to everybody. Unlike the other grownups I had seen while growing up in Dogtooth he always made time to play with any of the kids in the valley who wanted to both big and small, he coached the little league team in the spring. He went to union meetings down at The Prairie Rider, a bar where all the union men would group together to talk, sing, drink beers and smoke cigars. He drank beer at nine o’clock. I thought that this was normal, that this what all Dads who cared did.

  But now I was beginning to notice things.

  ***

  I loved spending time with my mother.

  She seemed frazzled all the time, but she wasn’t concerned with the things most of the other moms were like gossip, shopping, hair and makeup. She liked cooking more than all that, and gardening. Mom was always smiling. I could count on hand how many times I had seen her genuinely upset.

  Growing up I was always worried about my mother. After the fire I was especially concerned. Despite all of her smiles and infectious cheerfulness there was a strange sadness that seemed to hang over her.