Her mother handed her coffee, juice, plates heaped with food, but the girl refused. She stood, the poems standing with her, and walked away. “You’re just jealous,” she said.
“As if,” her mother grunted.
In the doorway, the poems crinkled their edges in disgust.
Time passed, and at last the girl ate. Her mother wept in relief.
The next day, she bought a red dress. The notebook pages fluttered sadly to the ground. The girl skipped to the door as a horn blasted outside. The girl’s mother, watching from the window, heard a car shudder and spurt before rumbling into view on the street. The pages tumbled toward her, assembled themselves into a stack, and peered over the sill.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the mother said, giving the pages a sympathetic pat. “Nothing lasts forever.”
The next day, the girl bought new shoes. The poems were heartbroken. They swirled into the basement to sulk.
Days passed.
A whole week.
“You should do something about that boy,” the mother finally said one morning at breakfast.
“What are you talking about?” the girl said, shoveling eggs and sausage into her mouth. Sinking her teeth into bread and butter and sugared fruit. “He’s wonderful.”
“Not that boy,” the mother said, impatiently. She jerked her head toward the doorway. “That one.” A thousand bits of torn paper—each one bearing a tiny love poem, so smudged as to be illegible—gathered themselves into the silhouette of the dead boy, wavering hopefully in the shadows. A paper cowlick draped over a handwritten, hopeful eye.
“Oh. Him.” The girl shrugged. “He’ll take the hint eventually.” She gulped her juice. “Right?”
But he didn’t. He made himself into cardboard shoes with haiku on the toes. He unraveled the spiral spines of his notebooks into fingers, and at night he etched his name on the insides of her arms, the soles of her feet, and even the pulsing curve of her throat.
“Knock it off,” the girl said firmly one night, hurling her pillow into his papery middle. He scattered and sobbed. Tear-soaked couplets landed on her bed. Sonnets drenched in misery and snot hurled themselves in wads onto the ground.
That morning when she showered, he fingered words through the steam. “Ode to Things Unfair,” read the bathroom mirror as she slipped her nakedness from stall to mat. “The Beautiful and the Cruel” proclaimed the sink with toothpaste letters. She wiped the wetness from her face, threw her towel on the ground, and ran her fingers through her long hair.
Paper hands curled around the edge of the door. Paper eyes peeked in. They ogled.
“That’s it,” she said. And she meant it.
She invited her girlfriends to a bonfire. They drank sticky-sweet wine coolers in clear bottles and vodka-spiked cranberry juice, filled high and sloshing over the rims of their plastic cups, spilling onto their hands. They drank to sisterhood. They traded stories of past lovers, painstakingly detailing each excruciating inadequacy. The girls were brutal, and specific. In the box next to the fire, the poems winced.
The girls promised to never date poets again. They pinkie swore. They sat close together, bare shoulders touching bare shoulders; they cocked their glossy heads and sighed as, one by one, they tossed the poems into the fire. Their young skin glowed in the firelight; their pearl teeth glinted through the smoke.
Inside the flames, the poet composed in their honor. His words were now a burning thing, as his life burned and his soul burned and the whole world burned and burned. He sang of the shiver on the neck at the touch of a lover’s mouth, the taste of breath in the ear, the agony of a finger’s brush against a lonely hand. He sang of breasts and skin and throats and thighs and mouths in mouths on mouths.
He sang of a girl, mostly true.
He sang of a boy, his smudged, smoky scream, his life cut short: a poem flung out, pinned onto the cruel, dawning sky.
1. Fran
It was easy enough to lose a child by accident. To do so on purpose turned out to be nearly impossible.
The child slid his grubby, slick fingers into her hand. Hung on for dear life. He rubbed his face on the seat of her skirt, and hooked his arm into her purse’s glossy leather strap. Meanwhile, people passed by without a glance, their hands full of drooping cotton candy or oversized stuffed dogs with weak seams or shrill whistles in the shape of a bird. Aggressively unattractive parents wooed their children with sweets and grease and cheap toys. Fran pressed the fingers of her free hand to her mouth and choked down bile.
The child stumbling next to her hip was not her own. This child, with thick lips and the watery squint of dull eyes, was her lover’s. Or, more specifically, her lover’s wife’s child.
If a child was an anchor on a good man’s soul, Fran reasoned, if it kept him from daily loving his love, would it not be better if such a child disappeared?
Children disappear every day. Just watch the news.
When Fran was fourteen, she took her little sister to the park. The little girl flew higher and higher on the swing—lace bobby socks, black mary janes, a dress lined with crinoline flapping about her spindly legs like white and pink wings—while Fran leaned against the elm tree and let Jonah Marks slide his hand into her shorts. Let him hang on tight.
Watch me, the little girl cried. Watch me. Her voice bounced against the basketball court, rustled the leaves, floated on the breath of Jonah Marks, on his wet lips and insistent tongue. Watch me.
When she turned, the little girl was gone. The swing still arced back and forth, a memory of her body. She flew away, Fran told her mother, her father, the social worker, and the police. I heard the rustle
