Apple

The boy wears a red velvet jacket, threaded with gold. His hair, too, shines orangey-golden in the dusk. She knows he is gay, people say he is at least, so it feels okay to kiss him outside the old gym beneath a tree. It isn't real, just some kind of practice for what might be real someday. His mouth tastes sour and when she tells him, he spits a jawbreaker into the palm of his hand. She looks at his wet lips and feels her stomach churn. The kisses were soggy, with no pressure. His skin is milk-for-blood, and his mascara is shedding. She just read Wuthering Heights for her intro to English Lit. class, and she decides he resembles Heathcliff's sick, whiny son.

"I think no more kisses," she says.

He cracks his knuckles. "This is a crabapple tree," he says, pointing above. Crabapples, a few months ago, were something she'd only read about. "Let me pluck you one," he offers, and he hands her the little gnarled thing.

She asks, "Are you a virgin?" He blushes, but says no. He asks, "Have you ever watched someone die?" And she answers, yes. He looks at her as if she's a cheater. So she tells him the story, beginning with the long drive back from Dallas with her father and the boy who flagged them down. His father was stuck under a truck. Her father told her to stay down in a ditch, and she watched the boy, who was a couple years older than she was, talking to his dad. A trucker stopped, a big black guy, and he got out and they put a jack up and something happened, the truck collapsed on top of the man. Her father, she remembered, kept yelling at her to stay down in the ditch. An ambulance came, and the man was dead. She remembers that boy, how he flung himself on the big trucker, and her father, grabbing her, running to the car, slamming the doors. Her father had left his fisherman's sweater under the man's head. Her father kept singing a song, the Lamb of God song.

What she tells the boy is, "The truck collapsed, and we left." She tells him the detail about the sweater, and the boy holding onto that man. The more she talks, the more she forgets exactly what happened, how it happened. The boy listens, but he doesn't seem too interested. She wonders, is she showing off? After the telling, it all seems like a movie, or a book. She would like to remember what her father's sweater looked like. What she mostly remembers is her father singing in the car and the eerie feeling she had that she'd dreamed him singing that song already.

She and her father didn't talk about it, after. She felt guilty for a long time, and still does, because that boy, she daydreams about him. This seems cheap to her, but she uses him for daydream fodder anyway. He was sandy-haired, wiry. She never saw his eyes, but they are hazel, and his skin is freckled. She has kissed this boy, the one whose name she'll never know, kissed the insides of his wrists, and his shoulders, his pretty eyes. And she has buried her head in the trucker's chest, and cried. He smells of tobacco and coffee, like someone who will take care of things.

"Do you like your father?" She asks the boy, whose name is Michael. She's starting to like him. She munches the crabapple. It tastes awful.

He looks down at his fingers, which are long and elegant. He's wearing a red teardrop ring; she thinks the stone may be a garnet. "Sure," he says, "he's okay. Do you like yours?"

"No," she says, spitting out the seed. "Not really."

She's thinking about the dead man, how all she saw were his legs from under the truck. He was wearing acid-washed jeans, but she can't remember his feet. They were in boots or tennis shoes, she can't remember. She thinks they were boots. She knows the man was talking to his son. She doesn't remember the words, just how the son sounded scared, and how the dad sounded okay. Like they'd be home for supper, and it would all be okay.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

March, 2010

Fiction

Claudia Smith

Claudia Smith lives and writes in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Her latest collection of short shorts, Put Your Head In My Lap, is available from Future Tense Books. More about Claudia and her work can be found at www.claudiaweb.net.