Something a little different this week: NOT sci-fi! A short story! The fourth week of each month I plan to share a work of short fiction (in varying genres) or possibly an article. I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know what you think in the comments or by message. -Owen.
“Miss Pretty”
by Owen Badenoch, ( 7500 words )
I.
It was only after Cecilia had looked everywhere for Miss Pretty, and couldn’t find her in any of the usual spots, that she dared to ask Daddy during his the-game-is-on time.
A commercial break came on. This was her chance. Daddy muted the TV and sighed like he had finished doing a hard thing. He glanced out the window, over on the right side, not the left. Then he looked back at the TV and rubbed one hand over the prickly stubble of his ouchy-beard that scratched at Cecilia when she hugged him bye in the mornings before she ran to the big yellow bus outside-and-two-doors down on the right-not-left, at the corner. Daddy didn’t shave unless he had a meeting.
“Daddy, do you know where Miss Pretty is?” Cecilia was standing at the threshold to the TV room. It was her second favorite room in the house, after her own room. But not when daddy was there. Then it was his room and his room only, and he filled it to bursting with the TV voices of the sports commentators, loud as a real stadium, so loud that he had to shout at the TV so the commentators could hear how stupid they were over the noise of the crowd. Daddy knew what the call should have been, that the ref was a stupideffingmoronsonovabitch. He made sure they heard him say so.
Now a man in a cowboy outfit strode, muted, across a sandy yard toward a wooden fence. Then the screen was filled with a beautiful dark horse that shook its mane and reared up, kicking at the air with its front hooves. A bottle of beer was pulled out of an ice chest, glistening with bright constellations of water droplets as the cowboy popped the top off with his thumb and lifted the bottle into the sunshine. The horse appeared again, now calm, resting its head on the fence, almost level with the cowboy’s smiling face. He patted the horse lovingly and a silhouette logo of a cowboy riding a rearing horse slid across the screen and declared, “Golden Stallion Beer!”
Cecilia wanted to watch it again when it finished. She liked the horse very much.
“No, Ceely babe,” Daddy said. “I don’t know where your bunny doll is. Did you check the living room?”
This was typical; Daddy would start listing places that she had already looked, or more accurately, places that she knew she didn’t need to look because why would Miss Pretty be in the living room when the Big Rule was no toys in the living room? Probably Daddy was testing to make sure that she hadn’t broken the rule. Cecilia considered her answer carefully to avoid the trap.
“No. She’s not there. I looked just in case Mommy moved her.” That would do. Mommy was forever moving things into the wrong places, according to Daddy. But then Mommy would say, “Well, you shouldn’t have left it there. Put your damn stuff where it belongs.” And Daddy would shove his coat into the closet or kick his shoes back into the foyer or corral whatever the offending item was back into its mysteriously appointed place.
“Well, then I don’t know, honey.” Daddy was looking at the TV again. Getting ready to unmute the TV the second the commercials ended. Cecilia had a flutter of panic knowing that her time was running out. But it was pointless, she knew. Daddy didn’t know. In annoyance, she crossed her ams and muttered, “She’s not a bunny. Bunnies are babies. Miss Pretty is a grown up ballerina.”
Her father nodded sagely, his eyes still on the screen. “Okay, sweetie. I’m sorry, but I don’t know where it is. Hup!” He unmuted the TV to a sharp voice saying, “—crowd here today in the SkyDome is really something, eh Tom? Eager to see the Jays go all the way to the postseason once again this year. Wouldn’t that be something?”
She lingered a moment too long. That was her mistake. She should have left right away.
“Honey, can’t you see the game is on?” Daddy said without looking at her.
Of course she could see it. And hear it, too. It was so loud her father had to raise his voice over he announcer’s voice. Not a yelling voice, but still too loud. It made her flinch. She almost made a second mistake by answering him, by saying something more. But she caught herself. She turned on her heel and spun, almost like a ballerina, pulling her bare toes over the carpet and stopping when she faced the hallway to the kitchen. Mommy was in the kitchen. Cecilia didn’t really want to ask Mommy. Mommy never knew where Miss Pretty was, but would fake an answer. It wasn’t really lying, Cecilia decided. It was like Mommy couldn’t not answer, so she just guessed. The guesses were not very good and were always wrong. But not actually always. So maybe she would ask Mommy, after all. And if Mommy was getting dinner ready, Cecilia could peek at what was for dinner, too. She hoped it was pasta and not casserole. Casserole always turned to a sticky paste when it got cold, if she didn’t eat fast enough, like salty Play-Doh.
Cecilia dragged her fingers across the wallpaper of the short hallway, tracing the wavy curves of a lavender line until it was interrupted by the thick paint of the kitchen doorframe. As she always did, for luck, she placed her first two fingers on the two big scratch marks where the wood showed through the cream paint. Maybe that would help her find Miss Pretty. Luck was a good thing, when you needed it to help find something. But a bad thing if you broke something, like the crack in the wooden banister at the bottom of the stairs. That had been bad luck.
On her way downstairs one day, she’d held the square part under the wobbly loose ball part, so she wouldn’t get yelled at for breaking the ball part. She thought probably Daddy had done that one, but she didn’t know. But coming down to dinner when she was called, already having washed her hands, as she had reached the bottom and swung around it, hand on the solid square part, and letting her weight swing her out and around the last two steps that were wider than the rest, there came a cracking noise. She had let go immediately and fallen on the carpet. Mommy was suddenly there, standing above her, holding a red and white checked dish towel. She looked like she was going to yell but didn’t. Cecilia kept waiting for the yelling to start.
“Ceely! Are you okay?” Mommy had asked. Her voice was worried but her face looked annoyed, like when the neighbor Mr Bellen’s dog Misty had pooped on the driveway.
“Sorry,” Cecilia said quickly and earnestly, “I didn’t mean to.”
When it was clear the Cecilia was not hurt, Mommy looked at the bannister like it was strange thing she had never seen before, like someone had snuck into the house and stuck it here, at the bottom of the carpeted stairs, just to irritate her.
“Can’t you see the railing is old, Ceely? You can’t pull on it like a monkey on the jungle gym.” Mommy let out a long breath. Cecilia liked her long breath-outs, because they didn’t leave any air for yelling. If Mommy had breathed in long, then there would have been real trouble. But this time she was lucky even after being unlucky with the wood-crack of the bannister.
“Stupid old house,” Mommy had said and then wandered off into the living room on the other side of the stairs, still carrying her dish towel and leaving Cecilia still sitting on the carpet.
“Houses don’t heal up like people when they get cracks and scratches,” Daddy had said at dinner that night, with his cross face. “You need to be more careful of the house, okay, Ceely-babe?” Cecilia had nodded and pushed some potatoes around the edge of her plate, away from the smelly pile of fish casserole.
That was two Saturdays ago. Now, before she crossed the metal line where the carpet ended and the linoleum began, into the kitchen where she could hear Mommy on the phone, Cecilia looked back at the bannister, like a dry old tree trunk, but cut perfectly square. She could see the crack in the wood on the side where the railing joined, a thin, ragged gash that ran up the edge, just next to the corner, opening at the top of the square part. No sap came out of it like the trees at the big park across the street behind Mr and Mrs Whitterson’s house.
Entering the kitchen, she moved around the bulk of the big grey fridge that made the kitchen into a squared-off horseshoe shape, with a short counter on the far side, and behind that a big window that showed the back yard and the red roof of the garage. She found Mommy leaning on the counter, holding the phone, with the long curly cord that looped down almost to the floor and back up to the phone box on the wall. Her first impulse was to twist her body into the cord and feel it wrap its cool plastic smooth curls around her body and then around her arms and hands. She did not do this, however. She could feel that Mommy, with her back to Cecilia and looking out the window, was in a serious mood and that playing with the cord would make her angry if Cecilia did it now.
Mommy was talking in a low voice, her private voice, saying, “That’s just it, Katie. He doesn’t seem to care what happens. He won’t come with me, so I just spend the hour on my own complaining. It feels like a waste of money without him there. … Yeah, I guess he isn’t going to try. Well, then what other choice do I have? I mean, I work part time and it’s infuriating. No, you’re right. I guess I just don’t want to believe that we’re there yet. Not yet. I’d rather not force it if— Oh shit! Ceely! How long have you been there, honey? You scared the buh-jeezerz out of me!”
Mommy had turned to the fridge and pushed one of the chunky magnets up, sliding, on the side of the fridge. The ugly white and blue one from Niagara Falls. Several magnets were there, mostly from places that Cecilia didn’t know. But she knew the Niagara Falls one because it was the chunkiest and too heavy and kept sliding it down to where she could reach it and see it, with it’s clay-like texture and its sloppily painted relief of the Falls. They all went there once, but Cecilia was still a baby, so she didn’t remember it. Did people just forget things as they grew up? Every few years forgetting everything and starting over?
“Mommy, do you know where Miss Pretty is?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. She just had to check with Mommy, because if she didn’t check with both Mommy and Daddy then she couldn’t really say she had tried, then Miss Pretty might stay missing.
“Honey, can’t you see I’m on the phone?” Mommy turned back to the window and Cecilia watched enviously as Mommy took a length of curly cord and wrapped it around one wrist and hand. She imagined grabbing the cord with both hands and yanking it away from her mother and running upstairs with it. But of course, she didn’t. And it looked like dinner wasn’t started yet. She drifted out the other side of the horseshoe kitchen, into the dining room and looped around through the living room and back to the stairs, where she quickly climbed on all fours up the soft carpet steps, like a cat, or better yet, a nimble black squirrel with a bushy, twitchy tail. She darted up the last few steps then into her room.
II.
“Oh there you are. Did you fall down?” Cecilia reached into the open space under the bottom of the brown bookshelf that was for her books-only-not-toys and dragged out the rabbit doll, thick clumps of furry grey dust, like tiny dry rain clouds, sticking to her ballerina dress and ears.
“You have dust bunnies, silly!” She giggled and tried to brush them off with her hand, with only partial success. They clung to the scratchy white translucent part of the dress which had little silver sequins sewed onto it here and there so that if Cecilia held Miss Pretty up with two hands over her head and into the sun beams that came in her window at just about four thirty, they twinkled just the way she liked. Some days she held Miss Pretty up like that until her arms grew too tired to hold it up any more and then she would flop onto the bed and try not to move her arms at all until Mommy called to her to wash her hands for dinner.
Today there was still some sunshine making a big window-shape of light on the green-like-grass circular rug, and so maybe it wasn’t even past five o’clock yet, but she tried not to look at the clock because she didn’t want it to be almost dinner time. Dinner time was boring. She would sit at the table and try to remember all the rules while also listening in case Mommy or Daddy asked her a question. “How was your day today?” But she never knew quite how to answer that, so she would say fine but Daddy would say, “That’s not an answer.” So she’d say something about school. Second grade was alright. Better than first. Mrs Denkins had been her first grade teacher and she’d been awful. She smelled like leftover cabbage and she would yell at them whenever she was angry. She was always angry. But Mommy told her, “Don’t speak badly about your teacher.” But then what was Cecilia supposed to say? Second grade was easier, though. She had more nice things to say.
Mr Turnside, her second grade teacher had been nice for the two months that he taught them. He had a nice sounding voice and she liked when he read to the class during circle time in the afternoon, after spelling was done. But he got arrested for something called “environmental activism.” Mr Turnside had chained himself to a big tree in a really old forest and he didn’t come to school anymore, so now they had Mrs Hadford, who was like a permanent substitute. She was young and had brown hair that was two different shades of brown and she liked to wear a pink and blue shawl when she was sitting at her desk but not when she went outside, which Cecilia thought was weird because weren’t scarves and shawls supposed to be to keep your neck warm so you don’t die of cold when you go outside? Cecilia could forgive Mrs Hadford her weird habits, though, because she could sing and play guitar a little, and if they all got their spelling done and Gerard, the special kid who sometimes couldn’t stop himself from shouting, was calm enough, Mrs Hadford would sing with them. Cecilia liked it best when Mrs Hadford sang by herself, though, before getting the kids to join her. Her voice was like a mountain stream in spring, racing and hopping between smooth stones and melting snow banks.
Cecilia hummed to herself while she picked the last of the dust bunnies off the rabbit ballerina. She frowned at Miss Pretty.
“You’re losing your eyes, dear,” she whispered and poked softly at the glossy bead of Miss Pretty’s left eye which was coming loose and showing the white thread underneath. Maybe she could ask Mommy to fix it. Now she noticed the grey-brown patch on the white fur of Miss Pretty’s leg. She had a sense of something passing, Miss Pretty was hers and hers forever. But now there was also a feeling of oldness, of being worn out. An ending that was coming over the horizon toward her that she couldn’t define yet, but was an ending all the same.
She remembered when Misty, the neighbor’s dog had died. Misty was Mr Bellen’s dog. He always said, “Please, call me Todd.” She felt weird calling a grownup by a boy’s name. She’d told Daddy this and he had laughed and said, “Yeah, Todd’s not much of a grownup, eh?” Cecilia didn’t know what he meant. Todd, as she tried to think of him, was younger than Daddy, but he had a full beard that even had two stripes of grey in it, one on each side of his mouth, that wiggled when he smiled, which he did a lot.
Misty was yappy and jumpy and made almost completely of white shaggy fur with a little black face. Late last summer, almost before school was starting, Cecilia had heard a screech and the sharp yelp from her bedroom, which faced the street. She had leapt up to the window to see a big blue car with a wide front bumper stopped in the street and Todd running down the lawn toward Misty, now silent on grass. Todd yelling, “Oh no oh no oh no, Misty!”
And the driver had backed his enormous blue car up, putting one back wheel up on the curb, then got out, a tall thin man, and said, “Oh shit, man. I’m so sorry. He just ran out. I tried to stop. Oh shit, is he bleeding?” It was weird that the man couldn’t see Misty was a girl dog, but then again, he probably hadn’t got a good look. Misty was bleeding. Red was matting her white fur as Todd held her in his lap sitting on the lawn crying.
“Man, we gotta get him to a vet,” said the tall driver of the blue car. He was standing in front of Todd, hooked over him and Misty like a question mark, trying to see down into Todd’s arms. “Come on, I’ll drive you. Least I can do, man. Oh shit, man. I’m so sorry.”
Todd carried Misty into the back seat. Red now smeared all over his brown cargo shorts and yellow T-shirt, and even on his grey-striped beard. The driver opened and closed it like a chauffeur. Then he ran around the front and got in the driver’s seat and peeled away like a movie car chase, the back bumper made a crunch on the curb as he pulled away.
“What happened?” Mommy’s voice came from below Cecilia’s window, from the front porch.
“Goddamn idiot left the gate open, again,” Daddy replied before closing the screen door with a metallic bang-click-chink. Cecilia hadn’t known they were down there until they spoke. She didn’t know that Daddy had seen it happen from the TV room window. She wondered, but not deeply, why Daddy or Mommy hadn’t gone out to help.
Misty didn’t come home with Todd and the next day Cecilia watched from her window as two black squirrels ran back and forth along the tall fence between their houses and felt a strangeness that there wasn’t any yappy barking from under the fence. A sound that she had always known, always heard, was absent, like there was an invisible hole in the air over Todd’s house and Misty had just fallen out of existence.
She hugged Miss Pretty and wondered again about dinner. Maybe she smelled pasta, but it might be something else. She would wait until called. If she went down too early, Daddy would make her set the table and she hated trying to remember which side the fork was on and which way the knife should go. She risked a glance at the clock. Short hand past four o’clock and the long hand on the ten. So she still had lots of time before dinner, at six o’clock. She twirled Miss Pretty in her hands, flipping her by the arms over and back, over and back.
Some things were rules and some things were luck. She knew that.
She had thought it was bad luck that Misty was hit by the big blue car. But maybe, she thought but she wasn’t sure of it yet, maybe it was actually because of a mistake. This idea, that bad luck could actually be caused from a mistake, created a kind of tight feeling in her stomach which she did not like. Why were there so many mistakes you had to watch out for? What if you couldn’t see them for what they were until after?
III.
The voices came into the room through the open window like lost birds, fluttering and confused. Cecilia went to the window. When she saw that it was Rene and another boy she stepped back quickly, so as not to be seen.
Rene was in her class. The desks were arranged in groups that faced into each other like meeting tables at the office Daddy sometimes rented. Four groups of six and one group of four by the window side, but only had two kids who each needed special help when they did desk work. Rene sat at the next six-desk group over from Cecilia’s, but closer to the door.
When Mrs Hadford was teaching, Cecilia could face away from Rene to look at the blackboard or the map, but when they did desk work she had to turn in to face the desk, and then she always had an awareness of Rene, a couple meters to her right, on the far side of his own desk group, so that if she looked just a little bit sideways, she could see the profile of his face, bent over his spelling book, tongue partly stuck out of his mouth in concentration, holding his pencil awkwardly, not like the way you were supposed to hold it but instead like the way she imagined a raccoon would hold a pencil, all claw and no grip. She found it hard not to look over at him often. One time, Mrs Hadford had surprised her by suddenly being next to her and tapping Cecilia’s spelling book and saying softly, “Let’s finish this page up, Cecilia. Okay?”
Cecilia knew she’d made a mistake again and jerked her head to look up at Mrs Hadford, and reflexively mumbled, “Sorry, ma’am!” then quickly down at her spelling book page where rhyming words like “mother” and “another” or “bright” and “knight” were patiently waiting to waiting to be unscrambled and reunited with each other. But there had been the hint of a smile on Mrs Hadford’s face, Cecilia saw briefly. A small, warm smile like a happy secret, neither mocking nor sarcastic. So maybe this wasn’t a mistake, after all. Cecilia set herself unscrambling the rest of the words as Mrs Hadford drifted away between the desk groups.
Outside her window, down on the sidewalk right in front of her house, Rene was talking to another boy, their voices rising and falling as they kicked at pebbles on the sidewalk and pushed each other back and forth. Boys were so dumb. They were barely moving forward along the sidewalk. Every time Rene would walk, his friend, a black-haired boy she had seen on the playground at school but whose name she didn’t know, grabbed at Rene’s green T-shirt and pull him backward, laughing. Then Rene did it to his friend, pulling on the boy’s sweatshirt sleeve. Idiots.
Unsure why, she slid out her room door sliding her hand along the railing over the stairway, and then, without making any thumping noises on the stairs just like she had been told not to, she was downstairs across the vestibule and out the front door, careful not to let the screen slam behind her, and standing on the top concrete step in the bright sunshine. Rene and the other boy noticed her, even though they were at the far corner of the yard by now, having made at least a little progress toward wherever they were going. Rene waved.
“Where are you going?” she called out and began making her way barefoot across the grass, sharp and cool and damp on the soles of her feet.
“Just to the corner store,” Rene said and he seemed suddenly very grown up.
The other boy looked her up and down as she got closer like she was a dog off the leash or some wild forest animal. He took a step back and said, “Come on, let’s go.” Cecilia hated him immediately.
She said to Rene, “Are you ready for the quiz tomorrow?”
Rene looked startled and scratched at his elbow. “Oh it’s Friday tomorrow. I forgot.”
“Don’t worry. It’s only chapter two words, so...”
The friend, bored and mean-faced, taunted, “Uh-oh, you got a girlfriend!”
“Shut up, Alex!” Rene said, but he laughed when he said it. Alex laughed, too. Cecilia’s face felt hot now, despite the shade. The sun was tumbling slowly down and almost whole the street and sidewalk were in the shadows of the other-side houses and the big trees, one in front of each yard, between the sidewalk and the road.
She stuck her tongue out at Alex, but he kept laughing.
“You want to stay and play with girls?” Alex danced backward along the sidewalk.
Rene, embarrassed, turned on Cecilia, “Can’t you see we don’t want to play with you? Go home.” He stomped off after Alex, leaving Cecilia on the shady sidewalk, betrayed and alone.
Cecilia wanted to shout her head off at Rene and stupid Alex but her throat closed then and she ran back to her house. She heard Alex laughing far behind her, but not Rene. She felt bad for Rene. He wasn’t particularly smart and would probably fail the quiz. Boys were like that: dumb boys who couldn’t spell, couldn’t hold pencils properly, and couldn’t sit still to listen.
Even though her eyes felt bee-stung, they stayed dry, and she was grateful. Crying would be more trouble. She wasn’t really supposed to go out the front, on her own.
She pinched the screen door’s handle to unlatch it and then carefully let it close before un-pinching it. This avoided the big metal click-chunk noise. She wanted to see Mommy. She went around through the living room so she wouldn’t pass the TV room in case Daddy asked why she had been outside by herself.
The curly phone cord hung in a big U shape across the doorway to the kitchen and Mommy was talking down like she was speaking to the countertop.
“Well either way I’m going to have to go back to working full time…”
Cecilia didn’t wait. This was a mistake, she realized, but somehow couldn’t stop herself, like a wagon rolling down a hill. She lifted the curly phone cord and scooted under as she said “Mommy, why are boys so dumb? We have a quiz tomorrow and —”
“Ceely! Can’t you see I’m on the phone? Go play in your room until dinner.” Mommy turned away again, and said into the phone, “Sorry, say again? What does she charge for a retainer? I don’t know if I could.”
Cecilia felt her whole body tighten and shake, ready to burst like a corn kernel in a popcorn pan. She rubbed her hands on her thighs to stop from popping. Cecilia could run out into the street and get hit by a big blue car and Mommy probably wouldn’t help. Maybe Daddy wouldn’t either. Maybe only Todd would notice. She saw herself, red-smeared and limp, in Todd’s arms as he sat on the lawn crying and holding her.
Cecilia bumped her shoulder on the fridge as she turned to leave the kitchen. For a hot, thrilling moment she imagined flinging open the fridge door and hearing the bottles of sauces in the door rattle and clink, then slamming it shut again with all her strength, slam it like thunder so that Mommy might fall over from the wind gust of the swinging door and make Daddy yell from the TV room, slam it so hard that the bottles inside might all shatter and sauce pour out of the fridge like blood from a wound.
She did not violate the fridge, though. That would be a big mistake. Face still burning and eyes stinging, she slinked out in sliding steps that moved her feet smoothly over hallway carpet, and up the stairs to her room, quick and quiet, and a little hop onto the bed like a squirrel into its tree-hole home, safe and alone.
IV.
Cecilia kicked the bottom bedpost, where she could hang her zip-up sweater in winter but was now a bare, blonde wooden bulb like an upside-down onion. She was careful not to kick hard, because that would make a thumping noise and get her in trouble. But she wanted to thump it really hard. She settled for throwing her pillow to the bottom end of the bed and kicking at that instead. She found Miss Pretty next to where the pillow had been and pulled the rabbit to her face, feeling the soft fur and scratchy fabric of the dress on her cheek. She scratched at Miss Pretty’s dress, feeling the fabric buzz under her finger nails, and said, “Shall we do the whirly twirly dance?”
As she picked up Miss Pretty to spin her like a ballerina, Cecilia saw the loose left eye flop. Her fingers tightened on the glossy black bead and she pulled, feeling the string tense in her hand, pulling from somewhere inside Miss Pretty’s soft head. Then a snap and the string came hissing out and the bead and part of the string were in Cecilia’s hand. One stubby piece of white string still hung out of Miss Pretty’s head, marking the spot the eye had been. Cecilia pushed her fingers in around the remaining eye-bead and clenched it between her first and second fingers at the knuckle and started to pull. This eye was tighter, not already loosened like the first one. She felt a bright spot of heat in her fingers where the string was and she pulled harder. The glossy black eye popped off and fell onto the bed spread. She grabbed at it so it didn’t fall away and get lost on the floor. This one was stringless. The length of the pale string was still attached to Miss Pretty’s head, longer than then the left one. It hung down like a misplaced bug antenna.
“Oh dear. Now you can’t see, silly! Maybe Mommy can fix you later.” But she knew she wouldn’t ask Mommy to fix Miss Pretty. She knew that Miss Pretty would remain with two uneven lengths of white string dangling out of her head where her eyes should be.
“You should rest now and get some sleep.” She pulled the pillow back up to the top of the bed and gently laid Miss Pretty on top of it. She looked at the door to her room, wedged open with a black rubber triangle so the wind from the open window would not slam it and make everyone in the house jump and shout, startled. She took Miss Pretty off the top of the pillow and pushed her under it.
She heard Rene and Alex outside again. This time she recognized the up and down wave of their high voices. She sidled up next to the window, keeping her body away from it to the side, looking down at the sidewalk. The boys were coming the other way now, back from the corner store. She watched them turn to the street, look both ways and then dart across to the other side. They moved toward the path that led away from the street, heading to the big park behind Mr and Mrs Whitterson’s house. The perpendicular path went between their house and a big grey house, then across a bridge over the open subway tracks and on into the big park where there were two playgrounds, one for little kids and one for bigger kids, and two sets of tennis courts next to a row of big shady maple trees that turned bright red in the fall and had lots of squirrels running up and down their trunks so that Cecilia thought the trees must be always tickled by the little scratchy paws. This park was where Mr Bellen used to take Misty every morning at about the same time the school bus came. It was a no-leash park and Misty could chase and yap at the squirrels all she wanted, but she couldn’t climb the trees like they could.
Cecilia put the two black glossy eye-beads on the desk, just next to the pencil holder made of a soup can wrapped in yellow glittery wrapping paper that she had made in craft class. She pulled Miss Pretty out from under the pillow and then she padded softly out of her room and down the stairs again. She slipped past the TV room and quietly out the front door, leaving the screen door just a little open so it wouldn’t make the bang-click-chink sound. She didn’t want to waste time trying to pinch the handle. But she did scoop up her sneakers in the vestibule.
She walked like a sneaky dinosaur, her bare feet only half into the pink and white sneakers that were almost too tight but not yet old looking. They were still clean, so Mommy would not be angry, but she knew she should put her heels down into them before she got as far as the street so Mommy wouldn’t yell, “Stop breaking your new sneakers!” even though they weren’t really new. But Mommy was still in the kitchen on the phone, so she couldn’t see Cecilia scuff-clomp down the cement steps before stopping on the bottom step, cold from the dark shade of the big oak tree on Mr Bellen’s front yard that Daddy was always saying, “Todd, you gotta cut those branches back before they fall off and crush a car or something!” And Mr Bellen, pulling his grey-black beard and smiling, nodding, saying nothing. No Mr Bellen outside today, though. Not in a while.
She popped her heels in and wiggled her toes, delighting in the cool, free feeling of no socks. Then she remembered Rene and Alex and ran down the walkway. At the bottom of the wide green lawn and across the sidewalk to the curb, she checked both ways carefully, then darted across the street to hop onto the other curb and the strip of lawn there. Safe! Sometimes from her room window she watched the fluffy-tailed black squirrels run out into the street, stop, turn, run partway back, turn again and run all the way across and up the crabapple tree in Mr and Mrs Whitterson’s front yard, now just starting to drop its pinkish white flower petals on the yard below. Squirrels were cute but kind of stupid. Mommy said they sometimes got into the attic of Todd’s house. Daddy rolled his eyes and growled, “They couldn’t do that if he’d cut those goddamn branches back.”
Cecilia imagined a little doll house set of furniture in Todd’s attic where the squirrel family slept in beds and ate acorns sitting around an oval brown dining table, a miniature version of the one at which she and her parents ate every night, and that she must not put her elbows on. Did squirrels have to mind their manners and not put their elbows on tables, too?
Crossing the bridge over the huge trench of the open cut subway tracks that ran behind the row of houses, she closed her eyes almost all the way closed, but open just enough to see the far end of the bridge through the blur of her eye lashes. She did this every time, ever since she was in kindergarten. It was bad luck to get caught on the bridge, she thought. The subway trains underneath made an awful screechy screaming sound as they curved out of the tunnel and along the open cut under the bridge and toward the next station, which was a far walk away. It wasn’t so loud up in her own room, but Cecilia thought Mr and Mrs Whitterson must go crazy from the loud screeching noise every few minutes right behind their backyard. A train was coming. She could hear it in the tunnel and she hurried down the middle of the bridge away from either of the fenced sides. On her left, just about in the middle of the bridge, there was a gate in the fence, and behind the gate hung a short metal ladder with loops around it for maintenance workers to use. The gate, usually closed and locked, was now swinging open slightly. That was curious, but looking through the gap it left into wide open space, with no fence or railing, made her stomach tight and she quickly ran the rest of the way, almost forgetting to half-close her eyes again. The screeching of the train came howling up from below just as she reached the dirt pathway of the park on the other side.
Rene and Alex were already on the jungle gym for the big kids, climbing up to the wooden box at the top that looked like the crow’s nest of a pirate ship but with a small house roof instead of a flagpole. She scampered to the line of maple trees next to the tennis courts. An older couple were the only people playing there now. The bright yellow balls made popping sounds each time they were hit.
Cecilia watched the boys from behind the big trunk of the maple tree, her left hand on the rough chunky bark and her right hand holding Miss Pretty by the arm down at her side.
She imagined running super fast up the ramp on the side of the jungle gym and pushing Rene off the platform at the top, seeing his face as he fell away but also seeing it from where she was now, at a distance. But she didn’t like the feeling. She replaced Rene with Alex and saw him fly off the platform, arms pinwheeling in the open air and his body making a crunch sound on the gravel below. It was a little more satisfying, but it still gave her a queer feeling like seeing the open gate on the bridge, a dangerous thing which she wanted to be away from.
She slid her hands up and down the bark of the tree and listened to the pop-pop of the tennis balls.
“Can’t you see you’re being silly?” she said to Miss Pretty. “We should go home to dinner before we get in real trouble.” The strings of Miss Pretty’s absent eyes gave no response and Cecilia wondered if Miss Pretty was going to become an old thing and get thrown away. She didn’t want that, she decided. She would be brave and ask Mommy to sew Miss Pretty’s eyes back on. Yes. She would ask her after dinner, if Mommy was in a good mood and could be asked things.
She watched the boys a moment longer. When they went to the far side of the jungle gym and she thought she would not be seen, she fast-walked back to the park entrance and the dirt path to the bridge. At the edge of the park she dared to glance back at the jungle gym but she could not see the boys at all now. Maybe they had left the park on the other side already.
She stepped from the grass to the dirt path and there, she tucked Miss Pretty into the front of her dress and bent down at the path’s edge, where the dirt was more like sand and pushed her hands into the earth, squeezing the cool grainy stuff between her fingers.
“Ceely?” came her mother’s calling voice from far away on the other side of the bridge, not visible to her yet. Cecilia froze with her hands in the dirty sandy soil. This had been a big mistake.
V.
Mommy appeared at the far side of the bridge, arms like triangles, fists on the hips of her high-waisted jeans.
“Ceely! What on God’s green earth are you doing all the way over here!”
Cecilia felt her face go hot again and she stood straight up. There would be yelling, she knew. It was too late to stop that now. Dinner would be awful, even if it was pasta and not lumpy casserole. The long dark shadows of the trees and the houses reached out across the bridge from Mommy to her, the world darkening even as she stood there, unable to move her legs.
“Cecilia Amber Milton, you march your butt over here right now, missy!” Mommy’s voice sharpened from worried to stabby yelling. She did not wait for Cecilia to come to her. Mommy moved between the poles that kept bicycles from zooming into the park and crashing into people and came toward her. Cecilia wished she could run back into the park and up one of the big safe maple trees. But she couldn’t. There was nothing to be done now except be yelled at. If she stood still Mommy would grab her and pull her, and that would hurt and she might actually cry. So her legs began to move jerkily and she moved onto the bridge. She half-closed her eyes again.
“I was worried sick when I saw the door open! What were you thinking?” Mommy said, coming closer now, in an angry marching walk on the bridge. Another subway train came like a giant worm out of the tunnel up the tracks.
Cecilia began to half-run toward the blurry shape of her mother that she could make out through her squinty closed eyes. Her mother stopped in the middle of the bridge. Her face changed from a scowl into something like a smile and she bent down slightly and held out her arms as if to catch Cecilia in a big hug and swing her around like she used to do when Cecilia was little and Mommy had come back home from being out somewhere.
When she was just a meter away from her mother, Cecilia swung both her arms up and opened her hands, releasing all the sandy dirt that she had been holding in both fists up into Mommy’s face. The subway train coming under the bridge sounded its horn as it approached, which mixed with the metallic screeching of the train cars coming around the curve of the tracks.
Her mother reared back, like the beautiful dark horse from the TV commercial for beer, way up and back on its hind legs. Her mother grasped at her face with both hands as she moved backward and upward and her head and hair blinked in and out of the winking tree shadows. Sand had got in her eyes and in her mouth. As her mother stepped back, her heel caught on the bottom of the open gate’s frame and she tilted there, one leg bending forward, the other kicking up in a strange and poorly executed dance move. Her hands flew away from her face and she clawed at the empty air in front of her and her head fell backward to look up at the blue late afternoon sky directly above. She banged her hip on the side of the open gate and the impact turned her torso and shoulders, taking the top half of her over the edge, her now airborne feet following after. The empty space visible behind the open gate made Cecilia feel the tightness in her stomach again. Cecilia slammed her eyes shut and ran the rest of the way across the bridge. The train horn and metallic screeching noises so totally filled the air that no other sound stood a chance to be heard over them.
Cecilia, eyes still closed, pulled Miss Pretty out of the top of her dress and whispered sternly to her, “Can’t you see that’s dangerous? We’d better go wash our hands for dinner. Right, Miss Pretty? Don’t doddle now, silly girl.”
At the spot where the path met the sidewalk she opened her eyes and looked up at the big crabapple tree in Mr and Mrs Whitterson’s yard. She watched as one pinkish blossom fell softly through the air and came to rest on the concrete sidewalk. Then she looked both right and left before she skipped across the street and back up the lawn, slid off her sneakers and closed the screen door carefully and quietly behind her and squeezed her eyes shut as she scampered back up the stairs.
Thank you so much for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts / reactions in the comments. And please share with someone you think might enjoy it! -Owen.
The narrative arc you’ve built is a masterclass in childhood sensory detail and the quiet, pervasive dread of an unstable domestic environment.
Great to have your voice on Substack. I have subscribed and look forward to reading more. I would love you to do the same, if my writing resonates.
Your writing from the child's perspective was chilling. It seems so authentic. The story itself is disturbing on many different levels which to me is a sign that the writing is impactful. Well done.