Dust

On the day of the fire, I locked my bike up to the house close so that nobody would steal it, but also because Dad told me that he would take it away if I just propped it up against the side of the house again. It was windy that day and the tire was low. I almost fell off of the bike three times on the way back from school that afternoon. It was so bad that when I got to the caliches trail that sprouted off of the County Road, I had to walk it the half mile to our house. The sky was orange grey; a color you’ve seen but can’t describe.

         I was going against the wind now, and my hair tumbling out of my ponytail and onto my neck. My hair stuck to my skin and I kept brushing it out of my eyes which were stinging with the dust and sweat.  The house was a flaking lead painted asbestos with an aluminum door with a giant dent in the middle of it. When I walked inside, Dad was fiddling the little cactus terrarium in the south facing window. The cacti were of varied colors and shapes. One was long and narrow with a yellow dome at the top. It was taller than the rest and held a position of royalty over the other more bulbous and homely cacti. There were three rocks in the shallow dish garden with the cactus kingdom, and Dad was rearranging them in various positions across the gravel soil. Behind him, there was a window without any kind of covering on it. The sun was just starting to bob its head over the top of the window frame, and out in the field behind the house I could see hundreds of prickly pear dotting and tormenting the country up to the patch about a mile away that had been cleared and plowed and small sprigs of cotton were starting to pop up.

         I went to the cupboard and pulled out a bag of stale potato chips. The grease would stick to my fingers and hands and muddy up the dust that was on me from the storm. I chewed each chip until it would stick like puddy in my molars. I chewed loudly because I wanted to make noise at him, but not talk in particular. Each time I licked my lips, I got a mouthful of salt and dirt and I was made more thirsty. I held out like someone had challenged me to a thirst strike. Until I knew that he wasn’t going to say anything to me today, and then I went into the kitchen and splashed water onto my face and into my mouth from the sink. It fell into the sink, and looked kind of hazy and milky. I came up and reached for a paper towel to blot my face with but there was not one there. So, I let it run down my forehead and face and into my eyes. The sweat and dirt burned a little and I wiped away the mud with a dirty arm that fed into the mix even more dry mud so I pulled my T-shirt up and wiped it all clean.

Dad was still shuffling the rocks around for about thirty minutes. I reached out and touched the king cactus and he finally looked up at me. I was moving my finger around one of the spines, getting as close to the sharp tip as I could before stopping when it hurt. Sometimes I would miss and the quill would unzip my finger in the print line just a little bit. Then dad grabbed my wrist, held it out away from the cactus and dropped it in the air. When he let go, my hand fell onto the particle board table as if he had retained all of my own muscles to himself. I went to my room and laid down on my twin bed and look up at the ceiling for a few minutes. I massaged my index finger with my thumb and rubbed it against the heel of my hand to feel the roughened texture created by the cactus acupuncture. I imagined that it was a secret code that I devised and that it contained a message between the cactus and myself.

I awoke at dusk in a sweaty cloud of steam underneath a wool blanket. It was my dad’s. I was angry that he had come into my room without asking. He was stupid for putting this heavy, suffocating blanket on top of me when it was easily eighty five degrees in the house.  I peeled it off of me in three separate lift attempts.  My clothes were damp with sweat and I could feel at least one but possibly multiple drops of salty perspiration drip from my underwear all the way down my thigh underneath my baggy black sweatpants. I opened the hollow wooden paneled sliding door to my bedroom and went directly across the hall into the bathroom, lifting my t-shirt up over my head as I slid inside and turned on the light. It flickered and then popped and went out. I took my sweat pants and panties off. I put my hand out and felt for the plastic shower curtain. Cooler, though only slightly, air displaced the steam that had built up under my clothes and sent a shiver down my spine and then back up my neck and my ears hummed.

When I got into the shower, I turned on only the cold water, only sliding my foot into the stream at first. It was tepid, not cold, but it sent chills up my legs. The water came from a well dug about fifty yards away from our back door. Blinded, I felt my other senses strengthening and becoming more sensitive. I could smell iron and oil in the water. I lifted my entire face directly into the stream and as a little of the water dripped into my nose, and down my sinus cavity into my mouth I could taste the salty sweetness of the minerals floating in the flow and also the dust I had previously detected. It stung the back of my throat a little with the grainy texture that was imperceptible to the less sensitive skin on the outside of my body. I picked up the bar of ivory soap on the porcelain side of the tub and began rubbing it on my body. With the narrow corner I traced the shape of my figure, and then with deliberate falsity, outlined the shape of a better one. My hands caressed the fullness of breasts larger than my own with the slender, sinewy arms that could reach every inch of a longer back. The soap stung the little nicks on my finger.

When I got out, I dried myself with my t-shirt because I had no towels and slipped quickly into my room and pulled shorts and narrow ribbed tank top on  with the same care that I would fling clothes off and onto my dirty brown carpeted floor at night. I walked out of the bedroom with my wet air dripping down my back. If I said goodbye to Dad before I walked out the aluminum front door, I don’t remember and I’m sure it wasn’t special or nice.

I probably went somewhere that could most easily be defined as nowhere. There was nowhere for me to go, but only somewhere I could not stay. Sometimes, I think I came back because I smelled smoke, but I know that I really would not have even smelled smoke. I would not have cared what some redneck was burning in his backyard hole. Then again, I don’t know if I would have turned back right away if I knew it was our sinking shack.

When I did finally back a few hours later it was because I was hungry and it was cool enough to breathe the sweaty air at the house again. I watched the toxic asbestos shack melting in on top of Dad, I was glad that there was nothing of Mom’s in there for me to miss. But I made a conscious choice to leave whatever I had wished I had of hers in there in my mind so that I didn’t have to blame it on Dad for burning it in a hole in the back yard after she left. I didn’t want to be mad at the man that was in that house. He wouldn’t come out and the fire wouldn’t go out. By the time the fire department had left Dad was mingled into the wet, dirty ruins of a house that never seemed to stand tall. Like Dad, it just gave up that day. The fire wasn’t greedy. After it ate up our house it was satisfied to leave the other houses around it, mostly trailers, alone.  The wind storm absorbed some of the ash with very gust , like a tsunami picking up tiny pieces of sand and pebbles as it blows through a beach.

They scooped up some pieces and some ash and put it into a box that they buried somewhere. There is a black iron marker with his name on it. I don’t think he is there though. I see him roaming through the plains mixed into a windstorm. He is orange grey and confused. His body burned to ash and his soul broken and lost blow hard and angrily on little shacks where Daddies ignore their little girls. 



1603 Words