AMERICAN ALLIGATOR
a novel
by Peter Schnake
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Peter Schnake
For all the Caged Ones.
The hunger clawed at his stomach. Josiah stood along the back wall of El Super Mercado de Javier, behind the religious candles and dried beans, and salivated in the chill of los huevos. He stood just beyond the refrigerated air’s reach, content to marvel—worship—the collection of eggs before him. Gray cartons lined the shelves like multiple rows of teeth in the mouth of a humming, nightmare-begotten beast.
A mosquito of sweat rolled down the bridge of his nose and clung to its tip, extracting not blood but his attention. He removed the annoyance with his sleeve, noting that a black shirt looks blacker when wet. He dismissed his curiosity and stepped into the beast’s icy breath.
It smelled like dirty metal and rotten milk and elicited from him a shiver which unglued his shirt from his back. A small smile tightened his cheek. No predator lurked in this secluded corner, or other wildlife—imaginary or manmade. The sun could not melt him, nor could time distract him. The artificial light, the relieving cool, the promise of plentiful food: this was a sanctuary.
He stretched a pale hand—the one with the scar—into the case. Before he reached a carton, the motor growled. He snapped his hand back; then shook his head and scolded himself for fearing a refrigerator.
Quickly, he slipped a gray box from the gaping mouth and retreated from the immediate chill—just in case—to examine the contents: eleven whole eggs. Yellow oozed from the twelfth, through a jagged ring near the apex. Josiah returned the carton and chose another. Perfect. Perfectly white and smooth and un-cracked. He put the carton in his basket and reached for another.
He emerged from the food aisles with a basket full of eggs, unscathed by the toothy, fluorescent-lined beast. Sunlight tirelessly stretched through the wall of barred windows, behind the row of checkstands and the two women who leaned across their registers in gossip. He recognized both women, both permanent fixtures: the Beautiful One and the one who always pestered him.
Adrenaline warmed his chest. He headed for the lane of the Beautiful One.
“Will you go to Mass with me tonight, Silva?”
“I don’t know,” the Pestering One said. “I haven’t been in a while.”
Rarely did Josiah not have to stand in a line for her help. Everyone wanted to be in her line. She was, after all, the Beautiful One. Her hair swept her shoulders—her tan shoulders, Latina shoulders, perfectly narrow shoulders, as if she had swum under the fiery sun for just the perfect length of time. The straps of her tank top rested at her shadowed collarbone, which vanished and reappeared as she used snaking arms to gesture across the lane.
Maya—that’s what her nametag said in pink letters, pinned to one strap of her tank top. Josiah had memorized it the first day he shopped there.
Just as he was about to set his basket on her conveyor belt, an old man—who was probably leaning on his cart more than pushing it—swooped in from the side. His cart brimmed with groceries: three flats of bottled water topped by a trembling mountain of canned goods and heavy-duty gray tape.
Josiah didn’t even think the old man had seen him, fully enthralled by Maya’s beauty. Or maybe her beauty so quickened his blood as to give him a certain confidence which blossomed into delight by the act of slighting Josiah for an advance view of her radiance.
“Sir.” The Pestering One waved at him. “Sir, I can help you over here.”
It wasn’t that she wasn’t beautiful. She might have been beautiful on her own—maybe. It was too difficult to tell against the nonpareil beauty of Maya, as when the stars can’t be seen because the sun burns too brightly for the higher heavens to effloresce.
Josiah shook his head at the Pestering One.
“I don’t have a line,” she said. “I can ring you up and you won’t have to wait.”
Josiah shook his head a little more forcefully.
“Fine,” she said and threw up her hands.
Josiah blinked and looked at the ground. The speckled linoleum imitated sand between his shoes.
“Hola chicas,” he heard the Pestering One say. A short woman, towing a wandering-eyed young girl, wheeled a cart into her lane. The cart could have been a fraternal twin to the old man’s: bottled water, canned goods, tape, plus rope, and a candle bearing the sacred heart.
“Ana?”
The short woman nodded and laughed. The Pestering One lilted something en Español and the short woman nodded. She unloaded her cart and the Pestering One scanned. As she passed a can across her machine, she caught Josiah’s eye and raised an eyebrow. He looked to his shoes again, wrinkled his nose at the odd combination of potatoes and shaving cream emanating from the old man ahead.
He wished he had spent more time in the chill of los huevos. His shirt might have lost its mottled color of sweat. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him yet. He could take his basket and go back.
The conveyor belt started rolling before he could escape. Maya scowled more scathingly than the Pestering One had. Her eyes flared like amber held to the sun, focused the light to penetrate his skin and sear his soul.
“You don’t always have to come to my line,” she said. Contrary to her eyes, her voice was as chilled as the beast’s breath in the back corner.
Josiah shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. The warmth of adrenaline resurged through his chest.
“It hurts Silva. You should go to her line sometime.”
“I don’t want to,” he said, and cleared his throat. He hadn’t realized how long it had been since he had spoken.
“And what would you do if I wasn’t here?”
He wanted to say something, especially since his throat was cleared, but he truly didn’t know what, so he shrugged.
Maya clicked her tongue. “Five eighty.”
Josiah dug warmed money from his pocket, while Maya bagged the eggs.
“Eggs won’t last. Ana’s coming, haven’t you heard?”
Josiah shook his head.
“She’s not coming.”
His damp jeans wouldn’t release the cash. Denim chafed his scar.
“I have a good sense about these things,” he said.
He risked a glance. Her coronated eyes repelled him with a flare.
“I hope you get stuck without any food or water.”
“Hey Maya,” Silva called from her line, “there’s no price tag on this rope.” She held up the white coil in one hand and rested her other forearm on top of her head.
“Twelve ninety-nine,” Maya said, half turning and craning her neck. The man-made light above and the natural light from the windows lining the front of the store met on Maya’s neck, elongated it, illuminated it, made it glow from collarbone to jaw.
Suddenly, Josiah had the urge. He needed to go. Badly. He needed to get out of there. Music of impatience played in his head.
“No, no, no,” the short woman said. “Cuatro. El señal dice cuatro noventaynueve.”
“Cuesta Doce,” Maya said. “Yo hice la señal.”
The young girl’s wandering eye had fixed on Josiah. She peeked over her mother’s cart, hung on its edge, sucked the back of one hand.
Josiah held out his money for Maya and tapped his foot against the speckled linoleum, not to get her attention but to calm his nerves, hold back his urges. Sweat beaded at his temples and along his spine, a swarm of mosquitoes with eager saline proboscises.
The women argued over the rope. They ignored his needs, abused his time.
“Here!” Josiah almost shouted. He threw wadded money onto the scanner, more than enough to pay for the eggs. He didn’t wait for change. He grabbed the bag of eggs, stuffing in the cartons which Maya had neglected.
“Hey,” Maya said.
“Lo siento,” he whispered. “Gotta go.”
He ran to the automatic doors and didn’t look back.
Once outside, he half-ran the few blocks to his apartment. The bag of eggs swished at his side. He almost stopped in the alley outside—the one near the protesters—to relieve himself, but he knew home was safer, more private, and so he fought the urges and kept going. He climbed the steps of his apartment building two at a time. The bag of eggs swung wildly into stuccoed walls. He raced to his door, but was forced to stand still while digging for the key in his pocket—which seemed worse than running. He tapped his foot. Then he tapped his whole leg. Then he jumped up and down. His right hand never worked properly; scar tissue had forced his fingers to separate and they weren’t as dexterous.
He set down the bag, which he knew would cost him valuable time, and used both hands to retrieve his keys. The clicking sound of the opening door was better than music. He picked up his bag and set it, in passing, on the kitchen counter as he raced to the bathroom and slammed the door.
After a short interval, he emerged from the bathroom and leaned against the wall adjacent, breathing heavily—happily. He adjusted his sleeves down to his wrists as he caught his breath.
He suddenly felt tired—sleepy. He would have to give in to these urges—in a moment. He’d go into his bedroom, pet the birdcage and thank the alligator and take a nap. First, he had a decision to make. He ran a hand through his hair. It fell against his forehead like a row of teeth.
He massaged the scar on both sides of his hand—palmar and dorsal—pushed the mass of dead tissue back and forth between the splayed phalanges, flexed his permanently clawed fingers in a deformed Vulcan salute, and debated whether or not to wash the blood down the sink.
He decided not to.
Josiah stared at her as they drove and tried to imagine something more beautiful than she. He failed. He didn’t believe he lacked the imagination—what seven-year-old does?—only that nothing could surpass the woman who sat next to him. She was the epitome of a southern woman, and this car was her sanctuary. The wind rushed to worship the fragments of beauty which escaped her oversized sunglasses and fluttering scarf. A deity such as she could not risk being too accessible to such an untamed admirer.
She steered her mint-green Cadillac with the most delicate touch. The very tips of her fingers impelled the purring beast along the curves of the road. The Cadillac obeyed readily, as if it in fact desired her capricious subjugation.
She glanced at Josiah and smiled without showing teeth, the way a southern lady does. Josiah returned the smile and resumed playing with the small toy alligator in his hands. He had gotten it some time ago, he didn’t remember when, maybe a birthday. Its green plastic didn’t reveal much detail. Its teeth weren’t as pointy as he wanted them to be. The paint trespassed where it shouldn’t have, the pupils dotted the eyes off-center, the whites overlapped the lids, but its crude form didn’t matter when his imagination vivified it, corrected the paint, filed the teeth. He imagined where it lived and the things it ate—how it hunted. Sometimes instead of imagining or playing, he simply rubbed the ridges against his palm or at the skin between his fingers.
“Now Josiah,” his mother said as they pulled into the parking lot at the Piggly Wiggly. Lack of wind finally permitted conversation. “If you really want your eggs, you’re going to have to control yourself.”
The warning reduced Josiah to the size of his reflections in her sunglasses.
“No episodes,” she said. “Do you understand?”
Josiah nodded.
“If you feel an episode coming on, you tell Mommy right away, okay? And we’ll forget the eggs, and we’ll leave, you got it?”
Josiah nodded again.
She paused from digging in her purse to look at him.
“You don’t feel any coming on, do you?”
Josiah shook his head.
She loosed dark tresses from her scarf and inspected herself in the rearview mirror through sunglasses. After stuffing the scarf into her purse, she smiled—this time with teeth.
“Let’s go.”
When they emerged from the aisles of food, Josiah’s mother towed him to the checkout queue. The single carton of eggs swung at her side. Josiah’s arm strained at its socket as his mother lifted her wrist to look at her watch. Her sunglasses caused her to inspect the timepiece closely. She eventually read the time—or gave up—and lowered his arm.
“Are you doing okay, sweetie?”
Josiah nodded.
The woman in front of them turned. Her basket swung dangerously close to Josiah’s face.
“Susan!” she said. “I thought that was your voice.”
“June,” his mother said. Her grip on Josiah’s hand tightened. “How are you, dear?”
“Fine, fine. Another migraine?”
His mother nodded vaguely.
June’s basket contained—from what Josiah could see—popcorn and bread and seeds: bird food. He always thought she looked slightly birdlike. Her nose pointed and she bobbed her head to the side when she talked.
“You get them so often. You should have them looked at.”
His mother shrugged, momentarily lifting Josiah’s hand.
“Is that all you’re getting?”
“Yes.”
“Why,” June said, “you could have borrowed some eggs from me. No need to run to the store just for eggs.”
Her head bobbed and her beak shook.
Josiah shuffled his feet and slipped his hand—the one that wasn’t firmly in his mother’s—to play with the plastic alligator in his pocket. He thumbed the ridges on its back while its teeth chewed the skin between his fingers.
“You wouldn’t believe how many eggs we go through,” his mother said. She withdrew her hand from his and smoothed his hair. “They’re Josiah’s favorite. They’re practically the only thing he eats.”
June turned to Josiah—for the first time since she turned to speak with his mother. He didn’t like it.
“How sweet,” she said. Her razor-thin beak seemed ready to peck his eyes out. “I’m envious of you, Susan. Of your beautiful Josiah.”
Her gaze lingered though she didn’t address her conversation to him. Josiah repositioned his hand inside his pocket so that the alligator nibbled between two other fingers.
“You know,” June continued, “Rick and I are trying to adopt.”
“Really,” his mother said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” She finally looked away from Josiah. “I hope we get a boy just as sweet as yours.”
She looked back at him.
“Josiah,” she said, leaning down, tipping her basket precariously, threatening to spill seeds on his shoes, “I heard your music on the radio today. Exquisite. Your star is burning very bright.”
Josiah stepped behind his mother’s back, out of sight of this June lady. His mother’s dress provided safety. Elongated bumps like silkworms ran through the material. The slippery and iridescent fabric eluded his grip, so he picked at her hem instead, rubbed a single thread-worm’s swollen body.
“Shy little thing,” he heard June say. He peeked around. “You know,” June said, “you really should have those migraines looked at.”
“No, they’re fine. They don’t bother me too much.”
“No, Susan,” June said, forcefully. “You need to seek some help with those migraines.”
June rested a hand on top of his mother’s, the one that held the carton of eggs. June glanced down at Josiah. She tilted her head in hunt for worms which didn’t belong to her.
Josiah lunged and swatted June’s hand away. She recoiled; the carton of eggs slipped. The Styrofoam box tumbled with the grace of a diver unaware that someone drained the pool. Before impact, something clicked inside Josiah’s head, like a switch had been flipped. It set something off, all of it together: an episode.
The music leapt into Josiah’s head, or out of a tiny part of it—he didn’t know which—like horses, thundering across the open prairie. It quickly drowned the noises outside of his head and sent throbbing pain to his ears and eyeballs.
He tugged at his mother’s dress and rubbed his head, shook it, trying to make it stop, to go away. His mother’s face suddenly eclipsed the entire store. She moved her mouth, said something—something which he couldn’t hear. She lowered her sunglasses. Bruises ringed one of her wide eyes. Josiah’s head lolled to the side, and he saw the upside-down carton of eggs. Its seams oozed yellow and syrupy translucence.
But the music, oh the music was so loud.
His arm was suddenly yanked and his feet dragged along. The shelves flew past him. The shelves stopped. The shelves backed up. The shelves kept moving again. Cereals passed him: the fruity ones, the chocolate ones, the yucky ones. Then, the bags of charcoal and the soaps and detergents and then he saw the linoleum. His knees hit the floor with little feeling.
The horses stomped through his head, on his eyeballs and in his ears, whinnying and neighing and swishing their tails, but always their hooves were in rhythm. They were so very rhythmic.
Posterboard suddenly appeared on the floor in front of him and crayons rained. Josiah took the blue and scribbled as fast as he could. He scribbled the horses out of his head into blue quarter notes and eighth notes and sharps and flats. The rhythm of their hooves stomped its way over the entire sheet of posterboard and Josiah shoved it out of the way. His crayon broke barely into the second sheet. He continued with purple the rest of the way. The horses, one by one, ran out of his head, until only one remained; it reared up and neighed, agitated by its fate.
Josiah quickly noted the last measure and corralled the wild beasts with a double bar line. Fin.
He sat back from his work, feet underneath him. Sounds of the store returned to his ears: the hum of lights, the rattle of carts. He swallowed between gulping breaths to elicit saliva from his cheeks but his body refused to cooperate.
He looked down the aisle to where his mother stood watching him from a short distance away. A middle-aged and bald man stood behind her, whispered something in her ear. He extended his arm, pointing to something over Josiah’s head. Josiah turned to find June at the other end of the aisle, mouth agape, basket tipped, a loaf of bread on the floor. She averted her eyes from his and adjusted her purse straps as she stooped to retrieve the bread.
His mother didn’t say anything as she gathered up the posterboard, grabbed his hand and led them out of the store to the car. They sat in the Cadillac for a while, with the colorful music in the back seat, crudely drawn, but somehow sophisticated.
“I’m not mad at you, Josiah,” she finally said. “I’m just mad that that...June had to be there. I mean, I was so embarrassed. I can come borrow her eggs. Ha. As if they aren’t all shriveled already. And she wants to lord it over me. She has to have the perfect life. It would be so perfect for her to give me some of her shriveled eggs.”
She slammed her palm against the rim of the steering wheel.
“And then for you to have an episode.” She reached over and cradled his face in both of her hands. Her eyes evaded him behind her sunglasses. He yearned to see her eyes.
“It’s not your fault, sweetie. I just wish you had more of a warning.”
She pulled away.
“I mean, how dare she offer me her eggs!”
Josiah cleared his voice. His swollen tongue sanded his cheeks in search of refreshment. They relinquished nothing.
“What did that man whisper to you?”
“What man?”
“In the store. A man whispered something in your ear. I saw it. Right after.”
“Oh,” she said with a smile. “That was the store manager. He was telling me how thrilled he was to have you in his store, making music.”
“Really?”
His mother nodded. “That’s why he gave us the paper for free.”
“He didn’t look thrilled.”
“Well, sweetie, you can’t always tell what people are thinking, now can you? That’s what makes them people.”
She patted him on the knee and started the engine.
“Mommy, I’m hungry. Can we go back to get eggs?”
She turned to him and bit her lips.
“No, baby. Not for a real long time.”
Like a great uncle plagued with scoliosis, the music hunched in the armchair in the dimly lit living room. Josiah peeked at it through the doorway from the dining room. The foreignness of the blue crayon intrigued him.
It didn’t seem possible to him, that music such as that could come out of him. He didn’t doubt though. The lingering pain of the horses was enough to convince him that the music was real, or magical—a magic trick whose secrets would never be revealed.
“Eat your dinner, sweetie.”
Josiah sighed and pulled his mind back to the table. He picked at the food on his plate—two fried eggs from the carton June brought over—and listened to the music of forks against china: his mother’s. His father didn’t seem interested in his plate either.
“June told me just today how much she enjoyed Josiah’s music. I think we’re on the cusp, that’s what I think.” His mother winked at him and continued, “I’ll talk to Mikey. If we get more airtime, on a wider scale, we’ll be set in no time. The success will come, just leave everything to me. We’re on the cusp.”
Forks clicked. Josiah pricked the bulge of a yolk. It bled yellow.
His mother cleared her throat.
“How was your day, dear?”
His father raised a chicken leg with his fork and stared at it, scrutinized it.
“What the hell is this shit?”
Josiah quickly looked to his mother. Her smile disappeared. Her spine stiffened.
“Coq au vin. I worked very hard on it.”
His father sipped from the glass coexistent with him. The ice cubes played like marbles against the rim; the awful smelling amber dampened the rattling when the glass returned to the table.
“It tastes awful. Lucky son-of-a-bitch gets eggs.”
His father scratched the stubble at his neck and stretched his starched collar even wider against his loosened necktie. His fingernails played skin like a washboard, rhythmic and grating.
“It’s all he eats.”
“I was just saying he’s lucky he doesn’t have to eat this shit.”
“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to finish it. I’ll make you something else.”
She stood and took both of their plates, but before she turned to the kitchen, he caught her wrist. Josiah heard the almost inaudible inhale through her nose, quick and tense. His father took another sip from his glass with his free hand and pulled his mother into his lap.
“You don’t have to go to all that trouble.”
Silverware clattered to the hardwood. Some chicken fell too, but didn’t make any sounds worth hearing.
Josiah saw the look from his mother. Her head nodded subtly toward the stairs. He took his plate and slid from the room. His father didn’t even notice. His face was buried in his mother’s neck, kissing her roughly.
His parents’ voices resonated up the staircase.
“Ow, Jeff, you’re hurting me. Stop!”
Something crashed against the floor.
“Don’t struggle and it won’t hurt!”
He heard skin strike skin, and a woman whimpered.
“See? Look what you made me do!”
This was the music of his house, not the bent posterboard which waited to be freed by Mikey’s musicians.
He closed his bedroom door against the music. Though muffled, it bled into his private space like the ghosts of horses.
Josiah set his plate on his desk—he really wasn’t hungry—flopped on his bed and picked up his favorite book. It was all about alligators. It had pictures of alligators eating birds and deer and even other alligators. It had pictures of alligators swimming and wrestling with large snakes, and even hiding in muddy water. It had everything about alligators.
A muffled scream interrupted his reading. He abandoned his book and covered his head with his pillow.
Josiah couldn’t hear a thing: no birds, no traffic, no protestors. Somehow, this silence bled into Josiah’s subconscious, into the part of his mind not fully asleep, yet not awake—the part which floated in gray. He inhaled pillow-scented air and relished the slight give of the mattress against his body. His slow, audible exhale broke the silence; his open eyes broke the gray.
The Florida sun illuminated the white bed-sheets which sufficed for curtains. The hem floated in an idyllic breeze. It reminded him of a gull soaring over the beach, intermittently gliding on a current and flapping its wings in curls to maintain course.
His stomach growled. Although he didn’t want to get out of bed, he knew it was probably time to make dinner. He rolled over to his clock, the mattress more gratifying than the beach beneath his hips.
Nine seventeen. It seemed bright for so late at night. A.M.
“Shit.”
That was some nap.
He jumped from the bed and grabbed his backpack. He leafed through a stack of papers on the desk and found his class schedule. Wetland Biology started at 9:30. Thirteen minutes. He stuffed everything into his backpack and ran. Before he made it out of the bedroom, something pulled him back, to the bullet-shaped birdcage on the desk. He slipped his fingers through the bars and petted the wooden beast. Its carving was rough and comforting.
“Thank you for the silence.”
The alligator neither acknowledged him nor responded to his touch. It stared hungrily at the small plastic alligator which Josiah allowed to roam free on the desk.
As he ran past the kitchen, another epithet escaped his mouth. The bag of eggs still sat on the counter. He debated half a second whether they might still be any good before he squished his feet into shoes and bolted out the door.
Thin rubber soles did little to cushion his feet from the sidewalk. Time expired with the shock of each second. The collected birth- and death-cries of the passing seconds became a warmth in his shins which soon leapt into his lungs.
He wished he had taken time to change clothes—especially his shirt. Although the one he wore had returned to a singular and shallow black, it retained its olfactory history. Running in the morning sun could only make the smell worse. And yet, this place—this city, this state, this habitat—was the only place he’d ever felt free: free to wear the clothes he chose, eat what he chose, take the classes he chose. A little sun to make him sweat was a small price to pay for the feeling of freedom.
Forced to stop at a busy intersection, his feet no longer marked the passing seconds. His wheezing lungs assumed the job. He stared at the stubborn light, the red disc which governed this moment of his journey, and willed it to change. He did not want to know if class had already started, or if possibility of punctuality existed. He was glad to be ignorant of the time, glad to know only that he must run, no matter what.
If the stoplight knew of his predicament, it did not care. As soon as Josiah found a break in traffic and before the light turned in his favor he stepped into the intersection. He stopped short when a car honked and swung in front of him. Its motor growled as it idled past. Josiah’s reflection rippled over the darkened windows. Neither his lungs nor his legs worked in the presence of such a beast: a predator of supreme strength and malevolence. In muddied confusion, Josiah took a breath and retreated onto the curb to await the providence of the streetlight.
When the light allowed him to walk, he placed each step deliberately and carefully, conscious of neither time nor heat but only of the texture in the concrete. On the other side, he ran. He ran even faster than he wanted, with long strides and quick steps, barely feeling the sidewalk. The seconds ticked accordingly.
Not many ticks later, Josiah turned onto the college campus—the one whose bright green lawns were shaded by tall palms and leafy walnuts—and brushed a slowly strolling, hand-holding couple from the sidewalk.
“Watch it!”
“Sorry.”
His voice was dry. His tongue strained to elicit words from his throat.
He paused in front of the science building; he didn’t know which classroom to enter. He fumbled with his backpack and dug out his crumpled schedule.
“203,” he read, smoothing out the creases.
He raced up the concrete stairs, against the thick air which clung to the stucco walls and barred his ascent. At the door to 203, he paused again, not because of heat or exhaustion, but because of the unknown behind the door. Maybe class had started. Maybe it hadn’t. He didn’t want to know. He wanted to turn and run home and pretend the morning never happened; he’d catch Wetland Biology on Wednesday.
The door opened more loudly than he expected. The hinges sang like a startled parakeet. He winced at the announcement of his arrival, but because of his slender build he squeezed into the hall before the parakeet could sing more of his presence.
Several refracted columns of light, which Corinthianized the far wall, diminished into oblivion with the door’s click behind him. Josiah strained to adjust his eyes to the sudden dusk. Darkness concealed the closest empty seat. Purple shadows covered the sloping landscape like sentient boulders along a rocky coastline. A nasal and resonant voice engulfed the room; its ebbing syllables lapped at the purple rocks, smoothed them and adorned them with laurels of the sea. The sealed hall concentrated the familiar smell of his own sweat cooling inside of his shirt. A brood of boulders turned to him. He ignored their shadowed sneers to search for a seemingly unfindable place to sit.
The professor at the bottom of the lecture hall, haloed by an amber light, hadn’t yet looked up: auspicious. He seemed occupied by the papers spread out on his elongated podium, enthralled by his own sonority. Only the age spots which patterned his bald head and a purple silhouette which passed papers along the aisle monitored the hall.
Josiah spotted a seat along the aisle only a few rows from the back. Only inches from the thin cushion, the nasal voice stopped. All the purple shadows turned to look at him.
Josiah froze. He didn’t finish sitting. The professor looked up from his papers, directly at Josiah.
“Are you deaf?” the bald professor said, with a little too much diction. “I said, you’re in the wrong class.”
Josiah cleared his throat and stood fully upright. His legs quivered: an indication of imminent collapse. His pulse raced. His face warmed with the surge of blush.
“Isn’t this Wetland Biology?” he said.
“Yes,” the professor said, “but you’re in the wrong class.”
“No,” Josiah said and cleared his throat again. For some reason, the first clearing didn’t work. “I’m in the right class. It’s here on my schedule.”
He raised the crumpled piece of paper, as if the professor were going to read it from his podium. It glowed like a flag of surrender. The professor held his head toward the source of his halo—diminishing the visibility of his age spots—clasped his hands behind his back, and sighed.
“You are in the wrong class because I do not accept tardiness.” And then, with lowered eyes and exploding T’s he said, “Get. Out.”
“But,” Josiah said, feeling the mounting indignation from the sentient purple, “I’m supposed to be here.”
“No. You were supposed to be here six minutes ago. You’re a waste of time. Now get out.”
Those exploding T’s again.
Josiah turned, sure that the other students were thankful that the professor had kicked out the smelly kid.
“Wait,” the professor’s voice said, droning and pained from the front of the hall. “What’s your name?” He sighed and fumbled with his papers. His sonority receded into languid annoyance. “So I can swing by the registrar’s office after class and drop you from my roster.”
Josiah didn’t know why he told the truth right then. His jumbled mind seemed even less coherent than when the car almost nosed him into the pavement.
“Josiah Greene.”
“How do I spell it?”
“G-R-E-E-N.”
He could have stopped there. He could have. But he knew to leave off the last “E,” would be superfluous. He had missed his opportunity to lie and could not correct it.
“E.”
The professor neither said goodbye nor dismissed Josiah. He simply dropped his pen and notepad as if they were the heaviest things he had ever held, as if it were such an inconvenience to have to write down Josiah’s name, and continued droning into the papers on the podium.
The purple silhouettes turned to their notes, while the one standing in the aisle remained transfixed. His hidden eyes probably squinted in a glare of derision.
Josiah let the door shut quietly behind him, careful not to disturb the sleeping hinges, careful to make only the slightest columns of light possible. He didn’t know why. He wanted to open the door as wide as it would swing, let day pierce the shadowed terrarium, then slam the door as hard as he could. But he didn’t. He exited as silently as a predator into the pond: with no ripples to disturb the surface. Only, leaning against the warmed stucco outside, he didn’t feel very predatory. He felt rather foolish.
He slid to the floor.
“Shit.”
“Good morning, sleepy head.”
Josiah opened his eyes. His mother leaned above him and caressed his cheek, eased him into morning. Her face was more purple than the day before. Bruises trespassed down her neck and disappeared beneath her collar. Josiah touched the colors. Both white and purple were soft and smooth. He stretched her collar to continue his inspection. She smiled—no teeth—pulled his hand away and her shield back into place.
“Guess what? You’re on the radio.”
His mother slid the switch on his bedside radio and Josiah’s music filled the room, happy and bouncy: a litter of puppies meeting a new friend.
Josiah shook his head.
“I don’t remember this song.”
“Of course you do. You wrote it months ago. Remember? You had an episode during dinner?”
Josiah shook his head.
“Come on,” his mother said. “Dance with me.”
She goaded him to his feet and they bounced around his room in laughter like two puppies separated from the litter and glad of it, glad to be together, just the two of them. Her dress flitted around her legs; his hair matched the rhythm of her skirt. Josiah liked holding his mother’s hands.
“Why are we dancing?” he asked.
“Because people love you,” she said, face to the ceiling, revealing the purple on the underside of her jaw. “And every time they play your songs, we get richer.”
She stopped bouncing and Josiah discerned the moment her mind floated down from beyond the ceiling and into her face again. “Get dressed. We have to get you to school.”
She concealed her neck with her hand and left the room.
Josiah danced just a little longer, even though the song didn’t exactly appeal to his taste.
“Josiah!” she called.
He stopped dancing and snatched his uniform from the back of the chair.
“Coming,” he whispered, and turned off the music.
The doors of lecture hall 203 burst open, stirring Josiah from his reverie. The door hit his shoe; the force of it promised to crush him against the stucco. He quickly stood to avoid the surge of students. When the hallway had dried of peering and unfriendly faces, he stepped inside the lecture hall.
The spell which cloaked the hall during the ancient professor’s incantations had shattered. Conjured dusk cleared into the warmth of day. Devoid of living rocks, the seats became a stadium of seashells awaiting thoughtless footfall. Instead of droning hexes from his papers, the professor gathered them from the podium and packed them into a briefcase. The loose pages rustled like a nest of pigeons.
Josiah hoped to speak privately with the professor, but a lone student stood at the professor’s side, helping to wrangle the avian papers. Josiah advanced against the scrutiny of age spots. When he reached the podium, the professor ignored him, wholly absorbed. His assistant, however, paused to flip hair out of his eyes in acknowledgement. He quickly buried the surprise which crossed his face in pigeonry.
Josiah cleared his throat.
“Professor?”
The professor looked up.
“It’s Dr. Stecholz.”
“Forgive me. Dr. Stecholz. I’m Josiah Greene. I’m the one who interrupted your class.”
“I recognized you,” he said and returned to his papers.
Josiah looked for help from the One with Hair in his Eyes who only continued to fluster the paper pigeons.
“I was hoping you’d reconsider your decision to kick me out of class.”
“Why?” he said without looking up. “How did these get out of order?” He handed a stack to the One with Hair in his Eyes. “Sort these for me.”
“Um,” Josiah said, “well, because...because...”
“Because usually you’re on-time and this was just a one-time thing, and you’ve learned your lesson and you’re going to work harder this semester?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I’ve heard it all before. There are too many people out there who are smarter than you, and who work harder than you, and who show up on time. If you really wanted to be in my class, you’d have been here. On-time.”
He snapped his briefcase, handed the papers he hadn’t fit to the One with Hair in his Eyes and marched up the aisle. The One with Hair in his Eyes stood for a moment, a mess of papers in his hands and looked Josiah in the eyes, as much as he could under his hair. “Sorry,” he mouthed.
“Hurry up, Clint,” Dr. Stecholz said from halfway up the aisle.
Clint slung a backpack over his shoulder, a bouquet of peach roses protruding from its partially-zipped apex, and raced to catch up. Several papers fell from his arms and he stopped to retrieve them. He looked back once more before a parakeet announced his departure from lecture hall 203.
Josiah’s mother guided the mint Cadillac to a stop in front of the school. His seatbelt prevented him from hitting his head against the dashboard and returned him roughly to the seat.
“Here you go, sweetie.”
She popped the locks and Josiah reluctantly opened his door. He stepped onto the brick courtyard, holding his backpack close and his plastic alligator closer. He clutched the green ridges tightly. Only its tail protruded from his fist. The early Louisiana sun was warm against his shoulders.
“It’s going to be a good day today, right sweetie?” his mother said.
Josiah nodded.
“No episodes today, right?”
Josiah nodded.
“That’s my boy.”
She pulled his door shut, and drove off; exhaust lingered just long enough to reinforce Josiah’s isolation.
He thrust his plastic alligator deep into his pocket to keep its mordacity concealed yet accessible should the skin between his fingers tingle and itch. He approached the storm of kids playing on the front steps of the school and picked out Felicia sitting on the rails. She smiled; her white teeth dazzled against her dark skin and eyes.
Graham stepped in front of him. His larger frame blocked Josiah’s sun.
“My daddy says you’re an idiot.”
Graham was a bully. Being held back a grade—and shoved in Josiah’s classroom—only made him more of a menace.
“Is that right? Are you an idiot?”
Shadows concealed Graham’s face but Josiah recalled what he knew should hang there: the gray eyes, freckled cheeks, and chapped lips. Josiah did not need to recall Graham’s rancid breath. He could certainly smell that in the shadows.
One of Graham’s friends from another grade stood nearby.
“Idiot,” the friend taunted.
“Idiot,” Graham said. He leaned even closer and heaved sour warmth. “Idiot, idiot, idiot!”
Other kids joined in: Graham’s friends and the ones who were afraid not to be Graham’s friends. They rushed over from the steps of the school to chant and jeer and watch. Josiah couldn’t see them all at once. He tried. He spun around to take in all their faces, to match them all to the sounds in his head, but he couldn’t do it. He gave up and looked only at the ground, at the dovetailed bricks and at the baby grass sprouting from the sand between them. He scuffed at the grass. It wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Stop it! Stop it you big bully!”
Felicia wedged through the crowd and pushed Graham back, almost knocking him down. “You can’t treat him that way!”
“I’ll do whatever I want!” Graham said. He regained his balance and towered over her.
“You’re just a bully,” she said, black eyes wide and ready.
The crowd cooed.
“Oh yeah?” Graham said, glancing around. “My daddy says your mother is a whore. A common, dirty, over-used—”
Before he finished, Felicia had him down on the ground, pummeling his face. The crowd of kids screamed with delight.
Josiah pulled Felicia off a bewildered Graham. Bright red oozed from his nose. The circle of kids laughed and pointed at him. Even his friends did. They flapped their arms and slapped their thighs.
Graham scrambled to his feet and ran away. Felicia grabbed Josiah’s hand.
“Come on, let’s go.”
While the other children waited dutifully yet disorderly by the front steps for the first bell, Felicia led Josiah away. The noise of the courtyard dissipated into solitude as they passed the abandoned jungle gym and swing sets. She dropped onto the grass under the large oak at the edge of the playing field and looked up through the branches.
“He’s just upset that you’re on the radio and he’s not.”
She patted the grass next to her.
“Come on, lie down with me.”
Josiah joined her. The morning sun illuminated only the very top of the ancient tree. The glow was fractured by monolithic branches and Spanish moss. From somewhere in this rose window, a mourning dove cooed.
“I heard your song this morning,” she said, her voice dark and green like the lower leaves. “I liked it. I thought it was beautiful. I liked it because I knew it was yours. Your gift to the world. Here, hold my hand.”
Her rough fingers found his. Her warmth overshadowed the wet grass which prickled his arms and backs of his knees.
“I know what it’s like to be hated,” she said. “They hate me too. Cuz of my skin. Cuz it’s black.”
Josiah turned his head. Her profile became a silhouetted mountain range between the blades of grass.
“I think it’s beautiful,” he said.
“Really?”
She looked back at him. The mountain range melted into a curved night and crescent moon.
“I mean, I like it.”
She looked away, up at the leaves, or beyond them—he couldn’t tell.
“Will you write me a song someday?”
Josiah shrugged, as much as he could with his shoulders against the ground. His polo stuck to the grass.
“I’d like it,” she continued.
He joined her stare upward. The leaves swayed slightly, revealed a hint of the sky. The hidden mourning dove cooed again.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Josiah shrugged again. The blades of grass caught his shirt mid-shrug, kept it from returning to its place. Instead, his shirt now rested, it seemed, on two air pockets on his shoulders. The collar caught his neck funny that way and his shoulders felt naked.
“I guess a musician,” he said. “A composer.”
“No. That’s what you are already. What do you dream about? What would make you happier than anything?”
Josiah had to think. He didn’t know.
“I dream about being a dancer,” Felicia said. “A ballerina. And dancing the Swan Lake like I saw on TV.”
“Swans are white.”
“Not all swans,” she said with fire in her voice.
He looked at her and she smiled. She squeezed his hand and looked up again.
“So what do you dream of when you close your eyes?”
Josiah shrugged again inside the hollow of his shirt.
“Come on, you have to know. Close your eyes right now and tell me what you see. Beyond your wildest imaginations.”
“How many imaginations do I have?”
Felicia paused a moment. Josiah looked over at her. She looked at the leaves.
“As many as you want,” she said. “As many as you can imagine.”
“Oh.” Josiah closed his eyes. He shut out the stained glass of the tree and the hint of what lay behind it. He tried to forget the uncomfortable grass and the warmth of Felicia’s hand and the lumpy alligator in his pocket.
He couldn’t imagine anything. He only saw the gray of his eyelids, and felt her warm, black hand.
“My alligator book says that alligator skin changes color because of the water they swim in,” he said. The leaves rustled and he thought he could see—even through closed eyes—the brief brightness of sky. It looked like glimmering ocean water. “It gets darker. Do you think if I swim enough, I could get dark skin like you?”
“Why would you want that?”
“You asked me what I dream.”
The school bell terminated his thoughts.
Felicia’s warmth left his hand and something tickled his shins. He opened his eyes. She stood at his feet and brushed grass from her skirt.
“You’re white,” she said, “and you’ll always be white. That’s the way I like you. Time for school.”
And she bounced away as only a girl born with more than one imagination can.
The sight of the plastic bag on the kitchen counter wrenched his stomach into a stone. The anxiety of being late to class had erased the eggs from his chalkboard memory, but now, returning to his apartment—his very own gray box—their existence proved undeniable, and if he squinted, he could still make out the implications of the residual chalk on the board. The diaphanous bag undulated in a warm current from the open window, caressed the angular cartons inside and passed off his troubles with a wave.
He wondered if they were still edible. The stone in his stomach quickly metabolized into an emptiness which ached to be filled. The eggs had only sat out overnight. They couldn’t be too rotten. Maybe even, the warm Floridian breeze had somehow, like a natural convection oven, cooked them inside their own shells.
He dreaded wasting a whole week’s worth. He could imagine the weight of the bag in his hand poised over the bin, the ghost of waste on his shoulder, whispering chastisement.
He decided to eat one—just one—to test their quality. The bag rustled as he clawed a carton from its confines. The lid fell back; eggs protruded from the cardboard like twelve incisors, dulled from the repetitive ripping and tearing of flesh from the many who had preceded him in disturbing their nest. As his fingers brushed the domes, he half expected to elicit music from them as from the keys of a piano, but only managed to produce dull thumping.
He chose an egg from the end. It felt heavy and warm as he spun it in his palm. The shell appeared healthy. In its soft sheen he could detect a rough-smooth texture like sandstone: the beach manifested as protective shield. He held the egg to the diffusion of window light. If the egg had rotted, bloated with sulfur dioxide, he couldn’t tell.
As soon as the shell cracked on the bowl’s rim, the secret was out—more pungent than his shirt. He threw the shell into the sink and gagged. His body tried to push his entire stomach up his throat, but the organ lodged itself between his lungs, a shriveled wraith. Josiah washed the shell and its contents down the sink. He wiped albumen from his fingers and drank a very large glass of water.
Having achieved an approximation of stasis, he carried the bag of eggs to the dumpster in the alley—the one with the giant Jesus grafittied on the side of the apartment building—and tossed it in from a safe distance. A thud reverberated from the rusty metal like the sudden manifestation of thunder accumulated from an entire summer’s worth of heat lightning, and through that rolling cascade, Josiah distinctly heard the bright crunch of several week’s worth of brittle shells.
The dumpster must have just been emptied.
Maybe he had picked the only rotten egg in the whole bunch, and had destroyed them all for nothing. Maybe he shouldn’t have acted so hastily.
He leaned against the fence—the one across the alley from his apartment building, the one topped with barbed wire, the one which made his rent cheap—and stared at Jesus. The dumpster was positioned as if Jesus were rising out from its gaping mouth, his arms outstretched, blood dripping from holes in the center of his palms. A sacred heart adorned his purple sash. Flowing brown hair rested at his shoulders and concealed his neck.
He looked so smug up there, Mona Lisa smile and everything. Josiah hated it: the perfect face to greet the girls sneaking out the back to avoid the sharp-toothed protesters down the block. He couldn’t tell if Jesus held his arms open to hug the girls, to pull them close into his thorn-wrapped flaming heart, piercing their eyes out, or to slap them. Either way, the girls would leave the alley empty, scarred and bloody.
The worst part was his stare: eyes which followed you. They were supposed to look down over the fence at the building, condemning those inside, convicting those outside, but instead, they followed you in smug silence, no matter where you were in the alley.
Josiah’s stomach growled.
He wished he hadn’t thrown the eggs into the dumpster so quickly, or that they hadn’t all cracked. Even if they were all rotten, he would have liked to have kept some to throw at Jesus just then. His hands almost itched for something to throw—anything really—the weight of the egg, its rough-smooth shell, would have especially made a good grenade. He traced the lump in the center of his right palm—the scar which would have matched the graffitied Jesus’...if Jesus’ ever stopped bleeding.
He kicked away from the fence and chose a piece of gravel from the middle of the alley. He aimed at the graffiti. The rock glanced off Jesus’ hair. It didn’t cause any damage. An egg would have at least left a stain. The rock simply bounced from the wall and skidded to a stop against the fence. Jesus kept smiling.
Josiah hid his hands in his pockets and headed up to his apartment. At the edge of the alley he turned. Even though Josiah stood so far to the edge of the alley that Jesus was indiscernible against the wall’s texture, he could still feel the eyes.
Inside El Super Mercado de Javier, Josiah quickly grabbed a carton of eggs with his deformed claw before the machine-beast noticed. He didn’t bother to bask in the chilly air, or inspect the gray box for cracked eggs. His hunger urged expediency. Had he not taken the time to change his shirt and to apply deodorant, perhaps his hunger would not have grown to an uncontrollable state, but he had not wanted to appear the fool again in front of Maya.
Upon emerging from the food aisles, he found queues of similar lengths at both checkout lanes. He stepped into Maya’s line, behind a short woman with bright orange hair wearing a vibrant pink muumuu covered in green leaves and orange bird of paradise.
The woman turned to him. Her lipstick matched her dress.
“Is that all you’re getting?” she said.
“Yes.”
Phlegm obstructed his voice; his answer emerged a whisper.
She pulled her cart to the side. The wheels stuck against the linoleum and the cart almost tipped. She righted it—with support from the rack of Spanish magazines—and smiled. “Woah, Nelly. You can go in front of me.”
“Are you sure?” he said, a little louder and less scratchy this time.
“Heavens, yes,” she said, tossing her hand in the air. “I’ve been here for hours already. I just can’t make up my mind. There are just so many things in here. So many delicious things. And I don’t know what any of the signs mean. No habla español.” She chuckled. “Lucky you, you only need eggs.”
Josiah squeezed past her, glossing over the mosaic of food in her cart—brighter than even her muumuu, as if her muumuu were a litmus test for her diet, and she eschewed anything tamer.
She chuckled behind a closed mouth. “Doesn’t it all look so wonderful?”
Josiah shrugged.
“Aren’t you supposed to be buying canned goods and rope?” Josiah said.
“What the heavens for?”
“The hurricane. Ana’s coming. Haven’t you heard?”
Maya tugged the carton of eggs from Josiah’s hand. He turned to meet her, every confident and flirtatious phrase startled from his head like pigeons.
“You really should have gone to her line,” Maya said.
“I don’t really put my faith in the weathermen,” the orange-haired woman said. “Where’s your canned goods?”
Josiah ignored her. Couldn’t she see Maya talking to him?
“Really?” Josiah said to Maya. “You’re not going to let this go?”
He hadn’t meant to sound so rude. Maya turned to the woman behind Josiah.
“He only comes to my line.”