"Take It Off"

 

"You know, I really kind of want to just take the night off," she said, leaning back in her chair.

To which he replied, "Yeah! Woo! Take it off! Take it all the way off!"

She looked at him.

To which he replied, "I was hoping you had said 'take the nightgown off,' which makes no sense, since you're not actually dressed for bed yet, but, you know," and then sheepishly cast his eyes downward and returned to reading his book.

"The Giant's New Shoes"

 

Piotr the giant sat in the kitchen in his house, which occupied the tops of ten different mountains and was always hidden from below by a disguise of clouds, and removed the shoes from the box his wife had given him. "Oh," he said carefully, "they're very nice. Very lovely." And they were; the soles had a spring to them, which he felt when he pressed into the heel with his enormous thumb, and the leather for the uppers was soft and thoroughly worked. The hides of at least a hundred cows must have gone into each shoe. He tried the left one on.

"I've seen how you rub your feet after you've been trampling the countyside all day," Galena said with a shrug and a smile. "Perhaps these would be kinder on your feet than those two boulders you carved holes into."

"I'm sure they will be," said Piotr, even as he thought about all the little truths still hidden from her after all those years: that there were times when he didn't want to trample the countryside; that it felt right for him to wear large rocks, so sharp and heavy, on his feet; that he often was glad that it didn't take long for him in his boulder-shoes to pillage and ruin an entire town. Sometimes, it was best if the end came quickly. 

"Thank you," Piotr told Galena as he slipped on the other shoe. It was the one kindness at the moment that he could offer her.

"Children Made of Stone"

 

Lars knew as soon as he saw his new neighbor step onto her front porch and close the door behind her that she was coming over to introduce herself, which is to say that she was coming over to complain about his kids. There was a certain stiffness of posture and weakness of smile that preceded questions like Do they run around like that all the time? and Lars had learned to spot it well. What he hadn't learned was how to make someone believe that his children would turn to stone if ever they stopped moving.

"Daddy, I'm hungry!" Bianca called as she and James ran around the ash tree in the corner. Lars shook himself free of his thoughts and reached down to the table for one of the sandwiches he had brought outside for lunch. He thought about telling her to run over and pick it up, but then, even as he was watching their neighbor cross her lawn toward them, he decided otherwise and instead jogged toward the ash tree, sandwich in hand, to join the kids in their game of circles. It was the least he could do for the children he would never be able to hold.

"Keep Me Warm"

 

We sat on the porch under a red, fading sky, with a blanket drawn over our shoulders. I felt the heat spill out from the cracks that split the pavement like open sores.

"It feels so fucking stupid to be cold right now," she whispered. "Keep me warm. Please."

I pulled the edges of the blanket together, over her arms, over the spots where she no longer had skin to cover her.

"Breaking the Rules"

I'll have to go back to get a better picture of this. But this is where a nearby creek continues into the rest of the town's drainage system. The cement walls at the entrance to the tunnel are covered with graffiti.

What makes me nervous isn't the idea that Leese has brought me down here only two days after we met; it isn't even the sound of the cans rattling against each other in her backpack. It's the sight of her littering. Two bags of chips and a package of trail mix have already been emptied into her stomach; the wrappers have fluttered to the ground like dead leaves; and I see them and wonder what kind of person I've cast my dice with. I bend and swing around her, holding on to the trees that line the creekside slope as if I'm looking for support up a mountain instead of picking up trash. When we get close, though, I feel those strange channels open up between us, and I remember why we were pulled toward each other, and what made us decide to try this.

"Aimee. Don't worry about those yet," she says, tapping my shoulder. "You should be eating something. I don't want you to get sick."

"I don't think I can eat." I tilt my head to try to see her watch. It's neon pink plastic, a fine accessory for someone trying to avoid being noticed. Again, I wonder. "How much longer until sunset?"

She brings her wrist close to her face. "Just a few minutes more."

"Stupid rules," I say.

Leese shrugs. "Some rules are better than others. Some are okay to break." I turn my body toward her, and it's like all of a sudden I've made a discovery, because she's kissing me, and it makes complete sense. It's as if I'm a scientist (oh my god did I really just think that how am I getting kissed) and I've just discovered some concept essential to how the world works, like photosynthesis. We're so bright that I imagine everybody on the planet is going to see us. I can't tell how much of this is something I feel because this is the first time I've been kissed.

"You really think there's a rule against us kissing?" I ask when we break away. "Or was that just your bad pick-up line?"

Leese smiles. "It's that I'm sure there's some rule against kissing next to a drainage pipe." She winks at me and reaches up for a nearby branch, which she grasps as if she's swinging from monkey bars as she begins to walk toward the tunnel. "Sunset," she says over her shoulder. "Start picking up the wrappers."

I stare at her. "Wait, all of that, and now you're going to leave me on garbage detail?"

"You're the decoy. If anyone comes looking. You're the concerned teenager doing her part for the environment." Leese has made it to the mouth of the runoff pipe and is pressing herself against the cement walls of its exterior, making sure she's hard to see from the road above, not that anyone has turned this way in a while. "Beats what I have to do," she says, taking a can of spray paint out of her bag.

It's a lazy Sunday evening, and most of the people who live in this subdivision are at home, preparing for dinner and contemplating the week ahead, except that I'm here, collecting junk from the undergrowth near the creek, and Leese is a few feet away, doing some graffiti work on an entrance to the town's sewer system. I try not to look at her, try to pretend she's not there, but it's hard. I keep catching sight of her twirling the cans, and I imagine her in the Old West with a pair of revolvers she keeps holstered on her hips.

"How's it going?" I ask after I pick up the last wrapper I see.

Two short blasts of air, and then I hear her laugh. "It's good," she says. "Quick."

I stuff the wrappers in my pocket and run to her across the low part of the slope, over twigs and shallow water. I arrive at her side and see adorning the cement the symbol we've spent the past two days studying. I take her hand.

"You ready?" Leese asks.

I give her hand a squeeze. "Probably not," I say, grabbing hold of a tree.

We recite the words we learned, the language scratching our throats as it climbs its way out of us. We each place a palm on the wet paint. A light appears in the drainage pipe as if from a door that just opened. Faster than anything, all the rules to explain the world that I thought I learned when Leese kissed me suddenly break and give way, just like the branches to which we've been clinging.

"The Crown Prince of Flowers and His Children"

 

As they grew, the young blooms turned away from the Crown Prince, preferring instead to face the window, as if they had eyes to behold the world, and what they saw with those eyes was a painting created specially for them. "Why do you want to bother with anything out there?" the Prince of Flowers scoffed from where he sat, high on a bookcase. "Our kingdom has everything we need." The kingdom encompassed the bookcase and the table below where the children were kept and included in its service a steward quite unlike the flowers who nevertheless knew when to bring them food and water. It was a fine place.

Yet the morning came when, before the Prince had opened his sleepy petals, the steward carried the Prince's offshoots outside, bringing them to a spot just on the other side of the window. It was so the young plants could grow up tall and straight, he heard the steward say. The Prince, being a proud plant, accepted this counsel with calm and stoic silence, even though it dismayed him. He thought of bees taming their hunger with the help of the young plants' pollen and ants climbing into the young plants' pots to make their tunnels among the roots. The Crown Prince of Flowers only wished to protect his children from the world outside, even if--and this he knew was true--that world was better with them as part of it.

"Bright Little Blossoms"

 

I think I noticed Dorelle and Keith at the reunion the same moment they noticed each other. Ten years after the last time we'd all been together in that gym, and there they were, looking at each other with new eyes and offering each other smiles that neither one would have had the chance to see the other wear before, given how things had gone in junior high.

It was like this: some trees start out in spring with a show of bright little blossoms, the kind with petals that curl under perfectly, the kind that make everyone who sees them feel lighter and happier. That was Dorelle. Then there are the trees that, instead of flowers, present buds at the tips of their branches, dull, difficult things all covered with scales. That was Keith, and he'd had terrible acne. Yet none of that mattered, not ten years later, when they both had had time to grow and flourish. You doing okay? I saw Dorelle mouth to Keith. I am, I really am. You? Keith said to her. And suddenly it felt like the end of summer, when no sounds were greater than the whispers between tree leaves, and everything was about to happen.

"Hot Booties"

I love the "As Seen on TV" display rack.

"Oh, no," he said with a laugh. "No, you don't. How much chili did you have tonight? And you think you're sitting anywhere near me? No. No!" 

He leaped from the couch and dashed around the coffee table while she chased him, wailing, "But you said your feet are always cold! I love you!" on what truly was to be another steamy Saturday night.