This is a segment that I've been working on for the last week or so, a piece from what I hope will be my first novel. As you can imagine I'm pretty protective of it and have high hopes for its reception. In any case, here it is, one of the few writings I present in first person from the view of Jack Bronson, a young boy whose father and twin sister were brutally murdered in their home about a week prior to the day in which this takes place. His mother is off dealing with things much larger than Jack can grasp at the tender age of seven. As of right now he is living with his mother's best friend, Violet Larousche.
Mother left, and I can't figure out why.
It's not for lack of trying. My head hums sometimes like an idling motor or a bee trapped under a jar. Pure energy, frustration, carving crop circles in the curving dome walls of my skull, like in those movies I'm not really supposed to watch. I feel like the main character in one of those movies now, because I can't figure out what's making people change, making people leave or die, and meanwhile my corn field is trampled and wrecked.
I'm splayed on this unfamiliar bed, arms and legs thrown like I've fallen onto the comforter from space; pretty accurate, considering the spangly design on the sheets. I wish I'd kept going, falling, through the mattress and the floor and through the every other level of Aunt Vi's apartment building, right through the soil and grass and rock and crust until I was on fire embedded in lava like a bug trapped in a pearl of amber. Encased. Safe. Dead. Nothing but an unmoving corpse and DNA perfectly preserved to be analyzed or maybe sold for a ton of money to an old lady with wrinkled-elephant's neck skin. I imagine a woman with a high nose and those tiny glasses on her nose glancing around a packed flea market. With a haughty glance she looks at her tiny husband. He nods, sweating, and stops; he picks up a heavy slab of this dark black rock with a boy's face, mine, trapped in the perfectly smooth rock. The tiny-glasses woman lifts her eyebrows. Her husband makes a face and carries my stone-solid body to the register as she continues to gaze at him with a mean look in her eye. As he reaches for his wallet his eyes lock into my frozen face. He shudders, but still I know he sees it. That aching sorrow behind my orange eyes. That I deserved my capture in this rock.
Rapping knuckles come on my door, and the flea-market scene disappears. "Jack?" Aunt Vi calls. She wants to feed me again. I can almost hear her voice bouncing off the plate in her hand. Pizza, rice, a hog's head. I don't want it. I'm not hungry.
"Jack?"
"Come in," I say, because I almost feel sorry for her. She's trying. She doesn't know what to do. I feel like a brat for not helping her.
This time the plate holds a burger and a trio of carrots. They fan out like a dinosaur's foot.
She sits on the edge of the bed. My bed, I correct myself. I'm supposed to feel like Aunt Vi's apartment is my own. It's hard. I look up at her, and her face, pale as candles, visibly softens. She can't stop watching my eyes.
My eyes. They're freaky. That's why she can't stop looking. The color itself isn't what's freaky, though; I'd been seeing pumpkin-colored eyes my whole life, sunk like jeweled stepping stones in my mother's face. Aunt Vi had too. But then they belonged to my my mother, those eyes, that color. I was born with blue eyes, just like my father. Bluer than his, he'd say, like a color could be more of a color just because it was richer or brighter. I wondered how black felt, and white. Was a cranberry redder than an apple, by this logic? Could you measure color just like you could measure milk or flour?
"Do they hurt?" Aunt Vi asks hesitantly as if she were in fear of sounding stupid.
I shake my head. It's not a dumb question, but she's asked me that already. She's worried because she doesn't know what to tell me, because she doesn't have the answers either. She's trying to figure it out. That's all she's done all day, sitting in her big green (but not very green) chair, a bottomless cup of coffee in one hand and a thick hospital book in the other. She won't take me to a doctor, because science couldn't explain me away. I heard her muttering under her breath once when I went out to sneak some fruit snacks from the cupboard. She'd said, "Genetics don't switch sides. Not in the womb, not after seven years. I know that. Orange eyes don't override seven years of blue, I don't care who you are." I don't know what genetics are, exactly, but she was right. It didn't make sense. More importantly, it didn't make sense to Aunt Vi, and Aunt Vi is the smartest person I know. Her and Miss Goss, my history teacher. Anything they didn't know wasn't worth knowing, I'd always thought.
Aunt Vi squints at me. I try to see behind her own tired pink eyes. She is afraid, too. Whatever it is, it's bigger than science. What is unknown is scary.
Then her soft, cool lips touch my head. "Let's go outside tomorrow, okay, Jack?"
I nod. Alright. Outside. I can do that. I close my lids over my strange eyes. Tomorrow, yes, outside, but for now I, fake sleep.
Aunt Vi leaves the plate of food beside my bed on a little table shaped like a white elephant, just like she does every time she comes in to check on me. I never ate it before, but tonight hunger claws at my stomach. When the door clicks closed, I roll over. I pick up the burger, taste it. It's perfect. The cheese rolls over my tongue, the burger meat pools juicily through my teeth. It's lukewarm, too, the way I like it. I devour it. I eat the carrot sticks too, mashing them into a bright orange paste between my jaws before I swallow. Then I actually lick the plate, tasting cold white plate-stone. My stomach burbles. Aunt Vi is a great cook, but I feel guilty for eating. After... everything, Mother didn't eat anything for a week, living only off coffee flavored with tears. Aunt Vi doesn't eat much to begin with, but she'd cut back now, enough for me to notice. It was like their bodies fed off of their own sadness, not needing food or water like normal. I knew Aunt Vi only cooked for me. She bought canned peaches and frozen chicken and iceberg lettuce for me.
And suddenly I think of Jaye. Tears spring to my eyes and my throat fills with thickness. Jaye. I press my fist to my chest, our secret message to one another. We did it all the time when we knew we were thinking the same thing. I miss you, I thought. And I saw her then, her bright eyes shining like the sun on face underwater, her hair tousled and high-spiked with her energy. Her face was serious; her first firm against her sternum. I miss you too, her voice said like an echo in my head. Then she smiled, her cheeks splintering with laughter. She disappeared.
My stomach full, I cried myself to sleep.
***
Aunt Vi glows in the sun.
Her skin is made of this smooth stone, soft like soap, covered with little flecks of worn-edged glass. Sometimes it hurts my eyes, but now I'm thinking of these albino frogs I first saw at the zoo. If I looked really hard into their red-lit cages, if I squinted, I could see the frog's veins shifting blood, their eyes darting pink beneath their paper-thin eyelids.
When we'd come home from our field trip to the zoo that day, Jaye and I had two questions for our parents: Could we get some frogs, and was Aunt Violet albino?
Jaye and I had asked and waited with bated breath, our hands folded together in feverish child's prayer. My father was the first to answer, in a way; he started laughing, almost spraying lasagna across the dinner table. "Yes," he said, still chuckling, "and no.
"There's a pet store on Woodbridge street, we can go there after supper. Maybe they've got albino frogs there." He forked another spear of asparagus. Then he looked at my mom. His eyes twinkled.
Mom sighs. She's not as amused as Dad. She almost never is.
She sets down her fork. She wipes her mouth. She folds her napkin. She sighs again.
"You're stalling," Dad says. Laughter still sparkles in his eyes. "The kids asked you a question."
Jaye and I exchange a glance, then we fix our attention back on Mom.
Finally she says, "Violet's not albino," and then goes back to digging at her oversized lasagna noodle.
Mom ends up saying no more on the subject, and Jaye and I don't notice because we're excitedly discussing names and foods for our future pets. But now when I think about it, here in the park where I'm feeling weird and exposed, I see my dad shake his head and quietly go back to his dinner, occasionally chuckling at our name suggestions and giving his opinion on where we should put the tank.
The frogs, Scissors, Paper, and Rock, all died two weeks ago on the same day. Silent tears dripping down our cheeks, Jaye and I buried them under our favorite crabapple tree in the back of the orchard. The sun shone extra hard that day, just as it did today.
Aunt Vi and I are in the park, far from the orchard and my dead frogs. I squint. I miss the cool fortress of the guest bedroom. Out here, the air is warm and smells like the city, where anything can happen. I shiver. Too much possibility out here. It's unsafe. I feel unsafe. I stick my thumb in my mouth.
A frisbee lodged in its teeth, a big, blond retriever trots past. Its owner (and in my head I think, his owner; like Jaye, I always assumed dogs as male and cats as female until I learned otherwise) gushed her praise at his fetching skills. He wags his tail happily. He doesn't know death, I think.
Aunt Vi sees me watching him. "You like dogs?" she asks. She's sitting beside me on the bench, her legs crossed at the ankle, her thin too-white skirt fluttering in the breeze. I nod. I do. I like dogs, which is why I asked for the frogs. Mom would never have gone for a dog, but Dad would guilt her into settling for a smaller pet. The frogs were mine before the words even left my mouth that night.
Aunt Vi seems to sense this. I can tell. She's really smart. She follows up her question with another: "Your mom's not a big dog fan, huh?"
I nod again.
"Do you like cats?"
I nod again.
"Do you want one?"
Before I can really answer, I think a thought that slams into me headon like a bus into a tree. I'll just kill it, I think, just like everything else. And the rest of it hits me, each with the force of a softball zooming into the unsuspecting catcher's helmet: I'd killed Rock and Paper and Scissors, and I'd killed my father and I'd killed Jaye. I'd killed my mom. I'm still alive, because I don't, can't stop myself. Because in order to stop myself, I have to kill the killer. Me.
Logic, a concept I'd only learned about a month ago, is behind me. I have taken off, a bullet pushed by fear and hate from a smoking gun, leaving all sense behind. My head spins.
Aunt Violet nudges me. "You in there?"
I'd killed them. That's why Mother left. Why else would she leave her last blood link and take herself away? She fled from me. She knows.
If she knows, she didn't tell Aunt Vi. Of course Aunt Vi doesn't know, or she wouldn't have agreed to keep me. Who would house a murderer? Buy food for, bathe, take to the park, kiss goodnight a killer? An unsuspecting fool, that's who. I wouldn't kill Aunt Vi. I would stop myself first.
I jump off the bench and I run.
