Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

156
other on a mother's shoulder. I didn't know the way to town.
The truck was outside. I pressed both feet on the brake and
felt it sink toward the floor as the truck stopped. In a moment
Roy jerked open the door on my side. I slid across the wide seat
and the truck began to roll before he slammed the door shut. We
drove through the yard, bouncing over ruts, the truck creaking.
Dust and stones and branches hit the sides of the truck, and rain
crackled on the glass.
Some of the mothers had started to cry when Roy said he was
going out into the storm, though Lily had been silent. I knew that
when Roy left she would have her face scratched again, and
imagined the sound she had made the last time—except this time
I heard those sounds in the dark, mixed in with the sounds of rain,
static, everyone's quiet breath.
When Lily had come, Jenny a small girl hiding behind her
legs, and said she wanted to stay with us, I had heard the mothers
saying she wouldn't do. She was too small, too weak, they said,
and we didn't have enough food. Too pretty, I heard them
whisper over pots of boiling water. But Roy had let her stay—for
weeks I rarely saw her, and knew only that she was upstairs with
Roy. She lived in the house like a ghost, her pale hands and face
appearing suddenly as she crossed the hall or stepped into a room,
the look of her eyes hanging in the air for a moment after she was
gone.
The other mothers said nothing, not even Lily's name, but
they slapped us if we asked where she was. Jenny hid in closets
and behind chairs those weeks, biting the insides of her cheeks
until they bled, turning away her face when anyone came near.
She was lucky, I told her, to know who her own mother was,
though she didn't look at me, and only cried when I asked her
where she'd come from.
"You've never seen one," Roy said to me now. "Of course you
haven't. If you had, you wouldn't have come with me."
Behind us, the house had disappeared in dust and rain when I
turned to look. Leaves blew off trees suddenly, stripping branches
bare as in winter, and then the branches broke off, showing the
white wood inside the tree.
Inside, the windows filmed over with steam, and the wipers
scraped a sound like a question, over and over. Roy's hands on the
wheel seemed small, pale, the knuckles bright red.
"One minute, you see a dark tail drop from the sky," Roy said.
"The next minute, everything it touches is gone."
He looked at me and I tried to look back at his eyes. Instead
I watched as his mouth shaped more words. "Gone," he repeated,
"just like that."
Roy reached for his cigarettes again and drew another from
the pack with his lips, one hand staying on the -wheel. He
punched a button on the dashboard, and when it popped back out
I saw the glowing coils reflected orange on his skin. Then I
smelled the smoke. Roy sighed. I wondered what would happen
when we found Jenny—if he would turn his voice sweet again as
she climbed onto the seat beside me, if he would pull her close to
him, or if he would be angry with her, twisting her arm.
"I've seen them do strange things," he said, his voice quiet
again, but not gentle. "Drive nails through glass, so that the glass
didn't crack but just made a hole clear through. Flatten one house,
but not even touch the one next to it." Roy was silent for a
minute, peering through the fog on the windshield. He inhaled
on his cigarette, and spoke again, the words coming out with the
smoke in one long stream. "Pretty little wisp like Jenny could get
blown away in this kind of wind," he said.
I didn't answer, tried not to listen to what he said. I had never
been alone with Roy before, except the times he and I would pass
each other somewhere. I wouldn't look at him, and he never said
anything, though we may have passed so close that his arm
brushed against mine. He was a secret, and I watched him when
I thought he wouldn't notice. I hid myself from him, hoping he
didn't see me, so I could become like a secret too. Someday, I
imagined, no one would know where I was, even if I stood in
plain sight.
We ate away from Roy and the mothers. The only times we
heard Roy speak were when he told us to bring him something,
or when he said words each night as the sun fell below the edge
of the earth, his voice a sound like water pouring into a cup. Now