Issue 17, April 1998
Jody Solis - Story

I hear it.

So, I don't want to go out there yet.

The lamp above the kitchen table swings slowly to the rhythm of thirteen shovels scraping against iced pavement. Everything appears black and white, except for the food that had been dumped across the table. Lamplight gazes over mounds of styrofoam-like cereal shaped in miniature ping-pong balls and frosted Life Savers. Yellow cupcakes with grainy, pink icing sit in the shadows of powder and cinnamon tires stacked by the half-dozen. Sheer chips of ice glimmer around the cool-smoking balls of fudge ripple and mocha chip.

I take eating breakfast in the morning very seriously.

An off-white sky glows through the rectangular window to the right of me. Its light hovers over the yellow, yarny heads of my Cabbage Patch Kids, Goldie and Dan. (Why did I choose blonde?) Permanent smiles on their faces. Deaf to the on-and-off buzzing of my next-door neighbor's snowblower.

They are still out there.

I'll never be one of them. I wasn't one of them when my hair used to be long and black. When the ends touched my heels. When I didn't understand that my wavy locks were dying every time they got caught in the chains of swings, or when my father pulled them so hard that I could hear the roots squeaking in my head, like iron bars bending and twisting.

I wasn't one of them when I used to climb onto my bathroom sink to stare into the mirror and push at the corner of my eyes to make them go round. Mirror, mirror, give me big, round eyes so that I don't have to see me through boys-and-men-and-girls-and-women who stretch their eyes to their ears, then, jiggle them up and down.

I wasn't one of them when my body resembled the most taunting stick figure. My head and neck resembled a noose. When I painted my nails with yellow marker and danced around in an orange wig, hoping to one day be like Cyndi Lauper.

Nor when I was proud to tease my hair and wear blue eyeliner and only hear about my ex-friends smoking in ravines, up in trees, and in restaurant bathrooms far from their parents and wanna-be's like me.

My neighbor's snowblower chokes.

I am not one of them now.

My neighbor motions me to come outside. When I fall to the ground I don't hear a quick crack nor a heavy thud, nor do I feel my occipital lobe swelling against a two-and-a-half inch shield of ice over pavement. As thirteen shovels drop and as twelve faces and a ski mask gather over me, I wish for a silver sink. I wish for my upper body to jerk forward, for my mouth to widen to its fullest, for my tongue to turn concave. I wish to see rainbow-colored mushes of Trix and gobs of Yoo-Hoo brown distract these faces from seeing me, from smelling me (it's because she's Chinese, their whole house smells), and from picking at the bleached wisps of hair glowing through my bonnet.