To Have a Body by Alice Martin
The air tasted sticky, like mold and honey on the backs of our mouths, the day of the neighborhood yard sale. I was seven, or maybe eight, and lonely in the humid Southern summer. We’d hoped a collective yard sale would draw more of a crowd, but no one seemed particularly interested in what we’d all pulled out of our closets.
My family’s house sat at the back of a cul-de-sac. To the left lived a couple cut from a Southern Living magazine who had a greasy-haired agoraphobic son living in their basement. To the right lived a leather-faced grandfather who always wore red plaid and smelled like peppermint. We learned years later he had a stash of child pornography in his attic. Our neighborhood rested in an overlooked, hickish suburb outside of a post-industrial tobacco city. The only shopping center within walking distance included a Southern Family Restaurant, a deserted bingo parlor, and a shooting range. I was the youngest resident by at least ten years.
The traffic was slow, a trickle of gruff men in pick-ups and lumpish women with perms and loud toddlers. While my mom negotiated with them over Pokémon cards and guttural push-mowers, I tucked myself away in the rose bush. It smelled soft and sweet there, and the tiny press of thorns against my arms reminded me that even in this languid air, I had a body.
Then came a boy, gangly like a puppy. I watched him between the petals as he tried to bounce one of the semi-deflated basketballs we were selling. He was an exotic animal: a kid my age. And he was attractive in that 90s-boy-band kind of way, with his long blonde hair falling in blades across his forehead.
“We have better ones,” I said from the bush. “Better balls, I mean.”
He didn’t see me at first and then laughed when he did.
“I have loads of better ones,” he said. “I’ve even got a plastic gun that shoots nerf pellets.”
I was not interested in that, but I was still interested in him.
“Do you want to see it?” he probed.
“Sure.”
“I live just down the street. Or, my grandmother does. I’m visiting her while my parents divorce.”
I crawled out from under the cool bush and started to walk toward my mom, to tell her where I was going.
“What are you doing that for?” he asked.
I didn’t live near other kids. It never would have occurred to me that I could go anywhere without my mom taking me there. I blushed and shrugged, then followed him down the driveway.
I’d passed his grandmother’s house a hundred times without knowing it. Inside, the living room was decorated with couches upholstered in bright florals, cheery and—even to my untrained eye—kitsch. The boy skittered away to some unseen room and returned with the promised plastic gun. He aimed it at my chest and pulled the trigger.
“Bang, bang!” he shouted. The nerf pellet deflated off my arm and to the floor. “I’ve got loads of stuff,” he crowed. “I’ll show you.”
I followed him deeper into the house, to a sunroom in the back so bright it hurt my eyes. It was tossed with his things: discarded pajamas and Legos, food crumbs and soccer cleats. He dropped himself beside a Hot Wheels set and began charging up a little car, rolling it backwards until its motorized growl signaled it was ready to fly. Then, he set it off around the room. Each car he released inevitably smacked into the leg of a piece of wicker furniture or the wall.
I watched him play with his cars. I’d never been so close to a boy before. He smelled like milk and grass. His pale orange T-shirt hung too large off his skinny shoulders. His eyelashes were so blonde they looked translucent against his pale skin. At this angle, I could see through the light blue jelly of his eye. The hair on his thin arms was so fine, I could almost feel the brush of it. As another zooming car smacked and died against hard wood, we both flinched, as if it were our bodies that had been moving too fast, that were about to shatter.
“Are all these toys from your grandmother?” I asked.
“No,” he said. His voice was hard, like he was angry I’d asked. “It’s all from my parents. Now that I don’t see them so much, they send me all this stuff.” The car in his hand buzzed angrily as he wound it up with five quick flicks of his wrist.
“I’ve never seen cars that go like that,” I said with no feeling, trying to make amends for whatever it was I sensed I’d done.
He looked up at me with a wide-open smile, his face quivering with excitement like the yoke of an egg. I had the sudden feeling that if I touched him, he might break.
“Come on,” he said suddenly, bounding to his feet. “I have something else to show you.”
I followed him into another room where he did not turn on the lights. Before I could make out what kind of room it was, he slammed the door shut behind us. There were no windows here, only darkness. My whole body tightened in a way I was unfamiliar with.
“Wait,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Do you feel this?” he asked.
Something cold and heavy slid into my right hand. At first, I flinched but then relaxed. The firm familiarity of the shape in my palm comforted me. I was in a bathroom, I realized. I still couldn’t make out anything in the darkness, but I could tell from his voice, from the pulsing heat of him, that he was only a few inches to my right.
“Yes,” I said.
“Guess what it is!”
“A soap dish,” I said.
He whooped. Then, “Okay, okay, I have a better one.”
This time there was a hiss and a cold blast of air hit my palm. It left a wet, sticky residue that made my skin crawl with something like fear or anticipation. A sharp, chemical cloud descended over us, settling into my pores.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said with tight lips, not wanting to open my mouth too much in case the cloud swept in.
He shot my hand with cold, wet air again. “Come on!” he urged.
A scream built in my chest. My whole body was a mousetrap ready to snap. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I repeated.
“Fine,” he said, and I heard the clink as he set the object down. “One more,” he said.
He fumbled for a minute and then something else lay in my hand, something warm and soft and fleshy. I moved my fingers around it, and it reacted to my touch like a live thing.
For a moment, I thought it was just his hand. That tiny, delicate hand I’d watched racing cars a second before. But as I let my palm feel its weight, I realized it couldn’t be his hand. It was too tense, too heavy. The muscles in my arms tightened, my skin curled. The heat filling my body wasn’t like the heat outside: this heat was light as air, explosive, terrifying, thrilling.
I let go without thinking, found the doorknob and threw it open. The world beyond the room was a cacophony of light. Before I could take a breath, I was running.
“Wait,” he called from somewhere behind me. “We don’t have to play that game anymore!”
But I was already sprinting out of his house and into the summer air. My body seemed heavy in the humidity, but I ran against the weight of myself back home to our yard sale. There, standing amongst the collection of my family’s unwanted things, I caught my breath.
Already, the world seemed slow again and I was alone. My mom’d never even realized I was gone. My body drooped like a flower in the heat, suddenly lazy and ineffectual, and I missed the tension I’d learned my limbs could hold just minutes before.
Sometimes, still, I think of him. Alone in the bathroom after I ran out, radiantly pale amidst the shadows, not quite sure how he’d ended up alone again. How long did he stand there in that darkness, I wonder, waiting for someone to find him?
Alice Martin is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate in English Literature at Rutgers University. Her writing has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Flash Fiction Magazine, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut novel is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.
9 May 2024
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