Kids

Our original short story this month features three characters caught in a love-triangle, engaged in a violent struggle. The story unfurls in one sentence, the form of “Kids” perfectly mirroring the breathless desperation of its characters.

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What is there, in that piece of moon and cellphone light that takes up the narrow space between Kid and Darrell, Kid and Darrell now in the oddly lover-like embrace of hand-to-hand combat, Darrell having come upon Kid in the near-lightless lakeside night as unexpected and insistent as a brightly cold gust, pressing and pushing and pulling Kid as though seeking answers in Kid’s closely guarded form—Kid’s form: the chest flattened by pilfered duct tape, the scalp scraped bare, the thin limbs afloat in dark nondescript clothing intended for bodies ten times Kid’s own, the lower center of Kid packed with a sock stuffed with another sock and another—as though seeking merger with what Darrell has told Mara is what is keeping him and Mara from happiness, from simple domesticity, from a four-room house on the good street with filled-in ditches and trees with leaves that green every spring; “this,” Darrell tells Mara, “this thing is the thing keeping us where we are,”—and Darrell says “thing” as though Kid is so intolerable as to be unnamable, unspecifiable, and as though being unnamable, unspecifiable, is to be less than the sum of everything else on earth—and Darrell thinks, this thing is the thing keeping Mara sleeping on any-man-with-an-empty-couch’s couch, sleeping with any man who looks like he has just enough for her to steal and not enough to make him fight her for it, this thing is the thing making him keep Lil' D away from her, keeping him living with his mama and his mama ignoring her calls and not letting Lil' D call her and locking the door when she comes by with all her sob stories on his mama’s porch, crying for her baby, this thing is the thing keeping Darrell where he is now, trying to push this thing down into the lake and getting all muddy himself in the lakeside mush, and feeling deep in him, past all the meanness he needs to keep pushing, sad for him and Mara and even the thing, for all of them being so far from a simple, good life—does Mara believe it, that life with Kid or rather life knowing Kid is what has brought her here, to leading Kid down all the backroads that lead to this nothing inlet of a nothing lake, with Darrell waiting, leading Kid here by Mara’s meanness, by lie—by promise of a night on a casino boat trading dollars Mara has stolen from the man on whose couch she sleeps and with whom she has slept, and dollars Kid has stolen from the gas station cash register Kid pretends to tend, for chips that look like gold-foil-wrapped chocolate, chips traded for the possibility of unearned fortune: a few thousand that could be used as a few months’ rent on the shared apartment that Mara had also once promised Kid she would share, or a down payment on a camper that Mara had, at another time, promised Kid they would one day go half on and set up by a corner of the lake, on one of the ripped-up edges of land that Kid had pointed out to Mara on a map kept under glass at the gas station, where Lil' D, Kid had ensured Mara, could live with them both (and to this Mara had assented as though excited even though the thought of Lil' D living with Kid and Mara, or just living with Mara, inspired in Mara only unease, Mara knowing or at least believing that Lil' D was better off with his grandmamma, and if Mara were honest—which she was not, not with herself or anyone—she would admit that she did not understand what she felt for Lil' D, would admit that somewhere in her was something that could sometimes pass as love, a necessary chemical byproduct of carrying and birthing Lil' D, but that she also regarded him as a convenience above all, an absorber of all blame due unto her, motherhood excusing her every fault, permitting her at every instance of accusation or criticism to say that everything she did she did only for Lil' D, that she always and only did any and everything necessary to ensure that she could provide for him every and anything he needed, because this rebuttal silenced all critics, who preferred to instead let their judgment of Mara continue on in their thoughts, the judgment being this: that selfishness did not emerge from the birth canal, was not a postpartum hormone, that women like Mara loved their children in some simple undeniable way akin to what any animal, even those who ate their own, would feel, but that love of this kind did not distract women like Mara, did not distract Mara herself, from what had plagued her long before pregnancy, what had ailed her since her own birth: resentment of her station in life, of her destined place, and her irrepressible desire to be elsewhere, and her conviction—as resolute as night, day—in her entitlement to something more than what had been delivered, and what, ironically, Mara had maybe been somewhere near, or at least closer to reaching than she had ever been before, when the night began with her and Kid driving off to the casino boat to get away from what they had or rather did not have, with hopes of getting something and someplace else, more, and what Mara was now, in this moment, nowhere near, and never would again be)—Kid led, lured by Mara to this, the dullness of near-death, at the end a life of such strangeness and change and cruelty: Kid, 18, with the foal-like limbs of a preteen in the protean throes of puberty; a girl once, or called such at birth; fugitive now of assignations of gender and familiar and other, all; avoidant of speech, having not yet figured out how to sustain a deeply pitched voice for longer than a few syllables at a time and thus unable to risk speaking; laughter-prone, for Kid does not often listen, not for what is being said, but rather waits for, hears mostly only the silences between things said, spaces Kid knows have opened for Kid to fill with Kid’s own speech, and into which Kid eagerly inserts laughter, Kid having found laughter to be a kind of hiding that no one tries to drive Kid out from under; dense with thought and want long unexpressed because not speaking has created in Kid a dam behind which thoughts that cannot be expressed build and build, as does the desire to speak, as does all desires that could normally be said and acted on (and what does Kid think now, in this moment, pressed to Darrell, pressing Kid down into the lakeside mush, what flits through Kid at this moment but the thought of something beneath another lake a county or so over, dredged up two or three or more years ago: a missing car, the lake floor dragged for it, and there at the lake’s bottom the pickled bones of Kid’s father; no car though)—Kid led here, to an edge of the lakeside that grazes a thatch of forest as dark and moist as a thicket of hair close to the body, the lake smooth as syrup, creak of bug and frog in the air, the air as still and warm and living as breath, to Darrell’s grip, which clutches around Kid’s arms, neck, while Kid brooks and wrenches, fighting as though winning is likely, though all present—Kid, Darrell, Mara, indifferent lake creatures—imagine easily the sight of Kid’s body being tossed into the lake like a lifesaver to someone already drowned, fighting despite all likelihood of losing, until (losing reversing the night’s early fortune, when losing could only happen at the casino, and even then, only to plastic chips, and thus would feel like the loss of nothing, would feel like one chip closer to winning, and winning everything; and Kid and Mara, driving through the night to the boat, had talked about winning everything, as they always did, where everything just meant enough: enough money to stay in one place long enough to pay rent, enough money to pay the rent, enough money for rent and lights and water, and for treats food stamps won’t cover, and for beds with sheets and pillowcases with pillows inside, and for Lil' D to visit, and visiting being enough; and driving through the night with Mara, talking without hesitation or strain and Mara listening and talking back, had felt to Kid like winning—Mara on a good day always felt like winning, had felt that way from the moment Mara walked for the first time into the gas station on Kid’s shift and asked for a single cigarette; and when Kid told her, in a grunt, that cigarettes didn’t come in singles, Mara had looked up and laughed and said, “you don’t look old enough to be selling no cigarettes,” and in Mara’s brief attention, the flash of her falsely feathery-gray eyes and her tooth lined in gold, Kid had felt as though the dingy gas station had been peeled away, and the sun poured in, lining everything else in gold; and when Kid slipped a cigarette out of a carton and carried it out the surveillance cameras’ sight to Mara waiting outside, Kid had slipped into a world with Mara in it, and when Mara walked into the gas station the next day, shouting “hey kid” even though Mara herself was only a year older, Kid had slipped into a world where Kid existed, named, found; where, on a good day, Kid would drink shoplifted 40s with Mara on the curb and watch the sky turn from pink to blue to black, and ride the bus with Mara for the air conditioning, looping the city again and again for hours, and sleep beside Mara in the backroom of the gas station, on the cot Kid paid the gas station owner two hours of pay to sleep on, and wake sometimes to the sound of Mara sleeping, and listen so closely that Kid would hear Mara’s breaths before, in place of, Kid’s own; where Mara knew and didn’t care about what Kid was or wasn’t, would say, “you like my little sister or my brother but you not, you my little something,” and “thing” she would say as though it meant the sum of her love for everyone she had ever loved; but where, on a bad day, “thing” to Mara meant nothing, and Kid meant nothing, and everything Kid said or thought or felt with Mara was a one-way current, a sea reaching for the shore, with nothing but itself coming back—and driving through the night with Kid, Mara had felt split in two, the car pulling half of her to Kid on the casino boat, the other half to Darrell hiding at the lakeside, had wanted to be able to be split in two, to live one life with Darrell and marriage and a room for her and him and Lil' D in the add-on to his mama’s house and Kid gone, and another life with Kid where Mara could be a kid too, running the streets without having to run away from anything; and Mara had looked out into the night for a road sign or something else to guide her, and had seen in the near distance a white glow beside the road, and had told Kid to drive to it, the white glow becoming as they neared a woman’s long white gown, stained through with wetness and clinging to her round stomach, the car lights bringing her, and a white man, streaked with mud and a metal cage hoisted on his shoulders, into relief against the night; and Mara had opened the door to this sign, leaving the night’s direction up to it, until the woman and the white man, once inside, began to speak, the white man telling Mara and Kid that he and the woman were on a date, and the woman telling Mara and Kid something other than that, it seemed, from how quickly she spoke, but in a language they could not understand, and the man talking over her to tell Mara and Kid about the crawfish boil they had been headed to, until their truck got stuck in the mud coming up from the rice fields, and holding up his cage, where inside a dark mass of dozens of crawfish, tangled together, crawled and clattered and reeked, and the woman, sitting behind Mara, no longer talking but weeping, softly, as though alone; and Mara had looked again for another sign, and finding only the turnoff, told the man and the woman to get out (and what did Mara think, when the car was quiet once again and moving inexorably toward the lake as though the road itself were a river, but of how, as a child long ago at the lake, she had taught herself to swim by jumping in, accepting that she would either swim or drown, and then a memory, of her telling Kid about how she had come to the lake while pregnant with Lil' D, and had jumped in with the same acceptance, “like I’ll swim or drown, like it wasn’t up to me.”)) there moves between Kid and Darrell something which startles them both away from one another; Darrell, spooked by threat of intervention divine and otherwise, fumbles for his phone to find it, what is now moving across his feet: something crawling along the lakeside mush, grey in the available light, bearing an impossible number of moving ends and the clatter and sheen of shells—what it is: a train of crawfish trailing from the open car door footsteps away, escapees from the man’s stolen cage, moving now across and between Kid and Darrell, startling them away from one another, Darrell finding them in the moon-cellphone light and moving to stomp them, as Kid now moves to him, unsure of what now to do, of how now to be, searching in the lakeside dark for what the moon does not illuminate: Mara, looking away.