For the rest of recess, I followed the path around the playground, walking backward. Each time the wind gusted, I leaned back into it, trying to see if it would hold me up.
✴
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, my father returned, smelling of pine sap. He’d shut down his lots and stripped his rain gear at the door without speaking to my mother. He turned up the heat that she kept low since, as I’d heard her complain, he didn’t give her much money for gas and we’d once run out and had to warm ourselves around the stove. He sat in his chair wearing boxers, and stared at the TV as the anchorman mentioned the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was a clip showing men outside a church, all wearing sandwich boards printed with The End Is Near.
At least when the end came I wouldn’t have to go to school, and my life would be like The Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe I’d do things my father had, catch huge salmon that took hours to reel in or drive a truck without brakes, crashing into things that people no longer needed.
“Did you like school?” I asked him.
“I didn’t go for very long,” he said, his eyes on the TV. “I had to work, but my brother and me, we’d walk my sisters to school and beat up kids who bothered them on the road.”
“Where are your sisters now?”
He didn’t answer, just stared at the TV, sitting tensely, as if he might jump out of his chair and run forever.
“Can I stop going to school and work with you?” I asked.
He smiled faintly, almost sadly, and said, “Someday.”
I wanted him to tell me a story about what we’d do. If I could think about the future, then each boring day at school wouldn’t be so bad. But he said nothing, and I sprawled on the rug and watched the news, which felt more serious even than school. With his eyes locked on the screen, he inhaled slowly through his mouth, the way I did when my nose was plugged. I wondered if he breathed like this because of something to do with his nose.
“Bonnie said your nose isn’t real,” I told him.
“What?”
“She said doctors gave you a new one. How did it get broken?”
He hesitated, cheeks scrunched up, though I kept my expression curious and unafraid. It wasn’t easy, but it worked.
“Someone hit me,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s a long story. I was coming out of a … a bar, and they were waiting for me, and they … they hit me in the face with towing chains.”
“What’s a towing chain?”
“You use it to pull cars.”
He returned his attention to the TV, so I asked, “What did you do?”
“Well,” he said and then hesitated before cracking a grin, “I gave them the worst beating of their lives. They cried like babies and ran away.”
I expected the story to go on, but he yawned and returned his focus to the TV, and I grew so bored of the man’s head droning away on the screen that I left to read at the kitchen table.
After dinner, I asked my brother what would happen if there was a nuclear war. He focused his large brown eyes on mine and described a future of cannibalistic humanoids in caves who’d hunt down good humans. The monster humans would eat people because there’d be no animals left. The good humans, though, might not eat at all. Given that I had to eat endlessly, it occurred to me that I might become a monster human.
Later, in bed, I stared at the dim ceiling until the house became quiet and stayed that way for so long I thought I might fall asleep. Then, downstairs, footsteps slowly crossed the wooden floor and just stopped, as if someone was standing and thinking, not sure where to go or what to do next.
In a dream, I crossed a yellow field, running toward my mother, who was gray, caught in motion, a colorless snapshot—her hand extended, floating before me as I reached. In the center of the sky appeared a black shape like a fighter jet. It began to spin as, from every horizon, darkness rose, and there was no more light.
✴
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, my father was gone, and after breakfast my mother said that we were going into town. A bag held her presents, and if ever there were proof of the nonexistence of Santa, it was this: my mother with her receipts, leading us into the mall to return everything my father had bought her.
Outside the clothing store, she put my brother in charge while she went inside. My sister sang quietly to herself as we watched the crowds surge past Boxing Day signs.
A slouching woman stopped and stared. After glancing around, she came closer. She had blond, frizzy hair and a long jacket that reminded me of burlap. She asked if we were alone.
“Our mother is just over there,” my brother told her, repeating the words that my mother had drilled into us.
The woman’s big eyes rolled from one side of the mall to the other. Instantly, I knew she’d do something repulsively sexual. Both during school assemblies and by my mother, I’d been warned about perverts.
She slipped three pamphlets from her purse and gave one to each of us.
My brother blanched. “We can’t,” he told her.
“It’s all right. Your mother won’t mind,” she said and hurried off, not having exposed her naked body from beneath the jacket after all.
His shoulders slumped, as if he’d returned home with a bad grade. The pamphlet showed two abandoned-looking children in saggy diapers waiting in a doorway as Jesus approached along the sidewalk. He’d probably change their diapers. No, whatever he’d do had to be bad if my mother hated Christians so much. Maybe he’d feed them processed foods. She’d never explained why, if proselytizers came to our house, she slammed the door.
She snatched the pamphlets from us.
“Who
