For Breathing

Yesterday I was hit by a car.
A Police Car.
I was in a crosswalk.
I had looked at the face of the man behind the cruiser, and trusted that he saw me, that he was there to protect and serve, and so, the pregnant woman in the big floppy sunhat stepped off the curb.
About halfway across the lane, I realized he was coming and he was coming very fast right for me. I had a fraction of a second to sort of skip forward, and in doing so, got my body out of the bumper's way, and it was my leg that the tire grabbed and bounced off of.

He pulled over, I limped over to the side of the road, and leaned against the nearest building trying to catch my breath, trying to calm the torrent of tears that were coursing down my cheeks.
Fourteen weeks pregnant I kept thinking. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. I bent over double and told my heart to slow its roll, calm down. I can be as fucked up as I need to be, but that fist sized baby deep in my abdomen needs to know nothing about this. That baby needs to keep on doing its thing, growing bones, and figuring out how to make a trachea.
I looked at the huge raw patch on my leg where the black rubber of the tire now mingled with little dots of blood. The welt inflated as I watched. I threw my head back and said fuck it. Breathe.

The cop came over. He didn't apologize. He said he didn't see me. He said it again.
I said I looked at his face. I said I was in a crosswalk, and I thought because he was a police officer I could trust him. He said he didn't see me. He said my leg didn't look so bad. I said I'm pregnant. He said he'd call emergency, and he did, and then he walked away.
He never apologized.

When the ambulance arrived, they washed my leg. The saline burned like gasoline. They took my name. A Lieutenant showed up and began to question me about the accident. I asked for his name. I asked for the officer's name. He gave it to me, but not before correcting me. Sergeant, he said.
I realized the reason the police officer who hit me hadn't come near me was because he wanted as little contact with me as possible in case I claimed he did something he didn't. I realized he was already thinking about how to protect himself when he pulled over, before he saw my leg, before he knew how bad he'd hurt me with his car, he was worrying about himself.

I breathed.
I signed the refusal the EMT's gave me when I said I didn't want to go to the hospital.
The Lieutenant found me a police officer to give me a ride home. She was the first woman I saw since the accident. There had been other cars at the intersection when it happened, another pedestrian who'd just crossed before me. They had disappeared. Nobody came forward as a witness.

The female police officer gave me a ride. She chatted amicably about her three children. She tried to keep it light. She asked how far along I was. She might have been pretending, but she was the first person to ask anything about the pregnancy. When we pulled up in front of my building, she said she was pretty sure her sister had lived on the first floor apartment. That's where I live, I said. What's your sister's name. She told me. We still get her mail. I'm pretty sure the lady cop's sister is in pretty deep financial trouble, we've gotten some scary pieces of tax evasion looking mail, which I've returned to the post office, and wondered if the previous tenant had died. I guess not. She's just looking out for number one.

I called my ob gyn. They said I should come in as soon as i could so they could examine me.
I called my herrband. He didn't pick up.
I texted four friends for a ride, nobody was free. I didn't tell them why I needed the ride. I called a taxi.
I called my friend the paramedic, who I knew was working. She said she would come.

My mother told me today that at the exact time that I was sitting on my front porch with a bloodied leg incapable of getting hold of anyone that she had been obsessed with hearing from me. She wanted to write me an email so badly, but she couldn't think of anything to write about. She was startled out of her reverie by a student.

The taxi arrived.
The herrband called. I told him what had happened, where I was going. He said he'd meet me there.
The taxi driver was a sweet old guy. He asked me why I was going to the dr. I said I'd been hit by a car. He asked if it had been in Salem. When I said yes, he said, Bridge street? I said yes.
I just drove by there, he said. Who hit you?
A cop.
A COP?!
He drove me to the dr, and talked to me about Malamutes and wolves. He told me a story about a girlfriend of his with a Macaw. He made me laugh, and he wished me the best of luck when he dropped me off. It was a twenty dollar ride, easily. He charged me ten.

At the dr's office, the herrband showed up right when they called my name.
We went in, and the midwife was more concerned with my leg than the baby. I lay back.
I let them fuss. I let Beard tell her nicely to please get the fetal heartbeat for us. She did. She found it. It was nice and strong. One hundred and fifty beats per minute. I wept silently down the sides of my face for relief.

The midwife asked what happened. When I told her, she made me promise to go to the ER.
When we walked out of the office, I stopped before the door to the waiting room and I threw my arms around Beard, and I tried to breathe, and not cry, and he held me, and he said it would be okay, that I was okay, and I got myself together, and we walked out into the waiting room, where my friend the paramedic was waiting. Her uniform was open like she'd run all the way from Revere. I hugged her really hard.

She came with us to the hospital.
It's really cool to be escorted by a uniformed paramedic through triage and into a room. I highly recommend it.
She blew up latex gloves and made them into little elephants. Beard kept looking at my leg.

There was no fracture, no torn ligament or cartilage. My knee was tight. The wound wasn't even bleeding anymore just oozing plasma. The nurse bandaged me. The doctor told me I'd be all right. Another nurse gave me a tetanus shot.

We left the emergency room.
We got pizza.
A lot of pizza.

Later, we walked down to the ocean after a thunderstorm and watched gold shimmer on the water, and I thought about how grateful I was.
For trotting.
For taxi drivers.
For Moms with spidey-senses.
For Bearded Herrbands who don't lose their shit in front of you, and wait until you go for ice cream to do it alone in the house.
For ice cream.
For Paramedic Best Friends who know everything, and deal with bloodied strangers every day, who leave their job getting paid to sit in a hospital to sit in one with you for free.
For fist sized valkyrie babies who keep fighting to get into this world.
For my lungs that kept on breathing.
So grateful.

Later, I called my parents and sisters, and one of my sisters kept howling about how horrible it all was. What a terrible world full of awful people that this happened, and I stopped her.
I said, I can't look at it that way.
Today something really good happened to me.
I get a tomorrow.

Trailer Park Love Story So Far: All Three Parts Edited. More to Come.

DUST TO DUST. Part I

DUST TO DUST: THE TRAILER PARK LOVE STORY

J. Mann

When I pull myself free of the sand, there’s a moment where the last of my ghost doesn’t want to be free of this shallow grave. I sit down on the packed, dry earth, and I look at where he put me down.

            The wind blows a little of the loose dirt off one of my bare toes. The pink, faux feathery toe straps of the slippers I was wearing blow away from my cherry pie  varnish toenail, and for a moment I think I’m at the bottom of the ocean. I think about a sea anemone I saw on tv once. It was pink and waved like the toe feather waves, and a little pink fish swam in and out of those lovely, tender little fronds underwater, just like my poor dead toe. Except my toe doesn’t move like that little fish darting back and forth, like I used to tap it when I was nervous. My toe is dead now, just like the rest of me out here in the desert.

            It’s the week before Christmas, and a week before that I was still in the trailer park slipping Dervish the sweet eyes every time I saw him. A week before he kissed, married, and killed me.

            My name is Mae. I was sixteen years old, and I have been dead for a night, and most of this day.

I don’t know how long I stare at my toe, before I decide I had better be getting a move on. I want to remember this place. I want to be able to find my way back here, because I have this strange desire to keep my body company. She doesn’t feel mine anymore, but I have affection for her, and it’s lonely out here.

            I know Vegas is close. Dervish is lazy, or bold, and he only drove my body about an hour outside of the city lights before he dug my shallow grave.

If I can find the highway, I can follow it back to the city, and I had better get a move on. I’m sure Dervish is still there. His eyes were too big when we drove into town three days ago. Has it only been three days? Time is so strange. I guess more so when you’re a ghost. I think it will take me a while to get the hang of this.

            I reach out for the soft, plump little toe. I want to give it a little, comforting squeeze, but I don’t have fingers, and the shape that is my hand passes through the little toe, and it fills me with an infinite kind of sadness that takes possession of my whole being for a minute. But then I shake it off. I look down at my hands. I can see them plain as day, and as my big sister April used to say, ‘don’t let nobody tell you what you are, you square your shoulders and tell them with your walk.’

I know I need to walk away from the grave.  I look around at the landscape. There is an odd rock formation, and a lightening struck tree nearby. Side by side, the tree looks like a scarecrow a little, and the rock kind of looks like a humpbacked turtle. They could be having a conversation about where this young girl came from, and I sort of wish they were, but they’re just a rock and a tree, and I am not a girl anymore.

            The desert feels different than it did when I was alive. When Dervish and me drove through it was exciting and foreign as the moon. I drank up everything through the window of the, pale blue Taurus. It had all been so big and important, and that little breeze of loneliness blew at me through the window, and even though I thought it was the wind of change blowing me and Dervish into the city together, blowing us like a ship into the future, and I had imagined this is what all the great discoverers must have felt like when they sailed from England to the United States for the first time, like in those movies, where everybody calls it “The New World”. That’s exactly how it felt driving to Las Vegas to get married. Dervish held my hand, and it was sweaty, and mine was dry and we laughed, and he leaned over, as we took the exit for the city, and kissed me, and I was glad I’d just put on my cherry lip gloss, because I knew I’d taste hopeful and pretty to him.

            He tasted like dirt a little, but I didn’t care. He was Dervish, and he was mine, and we were in love, and only a few days earlier, I didn’t even know if he knew I was alive.

                                                                        *

            I was Aggie Dell’s third daughter, and I was the good one. Mama was on the welfare, and took up with any man who had work long enough to buy her a decent necklace or a fancy dinner, or at the end, a space heater for the trailer. My oldest sister, Subelle ran away when she was fourteen. I was only seven, and I thought for years she’d come back and pick up me and April and save us from the trailer park.

            In my daydreams, she rolled up in a convertible the color of pistachio ice cream, all grown up with suitcases just spilling big hoops of taffeta dresses in every cotton candy color imaginable. April and I would run out of the trailer as it trembled and shook and hail fell from the sky and shot it all full of holes. Mama wouldn’t notice, she was never awake before three in the afternoon. In the daydream, she doesn’t get hurt, Subelle just scoops up April and me in a swirl of candy colored dream floss, and we all ride away from the Mosquito Pit cackling like witches.

Our long blonde hair is all alike, and Subelle looks just like I remember her, like an angel, but older, and more beautiful and wise, and exactly what I want to look like when I grow up, and when I ask her where we’re all going, she laughs loud and carefree and says, “I’m taking you girls to the beach!” and I understand that we’re going to California, because that’s where everybody runs away to isn’t it?

Usually the daydream ended there, but it started ending sooner when I told April about it. Subelle was sixteen when she ran away. She’d be twenty four now, and running out of time to come back for us. Any longer and we might have had to save ourselves.

April was eighteen. She’d dropped out of the high school before she could fail out and got a job at the corner store to help Mama out.

She got fat pretty soon after that. Not that she wasn’t pretty, April was as pretty as Subelle to begin with, but she got so angry, and she didn’t do anything with that anger, so it just stayed in her. I don’t even think she ate that much, she just fed that anger inside her until it got too big, and then she got too big, and she was fat before you could blink and pull off false eyelashes.

It didn’t matter to the swamper men who came to the store to buy chicken livers and doritos. They looked at her thick eyeliner and her double DD’s and her grubby fingernails and thought she was a kind of girl that she wasn’t. She read a lot of books that she ordered off the internet at the library, and she didn’t want anything to do with those men, but that didn’t stop them from giving her the trouble. It probably made it worse.

            Fat April got meaner the fatter the angrier she got. She was fed up with the Pit. She was fed up with Mama sleeping all the time, and not working. She even seemed fed up with me because I still went to school, and I didn’t drop out and get a job like she did. Sometimes she sniffed at me, when I was getting ready in the morning, putting on my mascara.

“You putting on weight, Mae?” She’d ask, and after I didn’t answer, because I didn’t pay her no mind anymore, she’d get meaner.

“Doesn’t matter how much paint you slap on that face, it don’t mean you’re better than me,” she’d snarl, and slam the door as she left for the store, even though, she could have given me a ride if she’d been inclined.

I took to doing my make up in my bunk bed. I’d lie on my stomach with my rose colored caboodles box, where I kept all my niceties, open, and a hand mirror propped up so I could see my face up close. After I started doing that, April didn’t get so mad at me in the mornings, and I always got a ride to school in her aqua blue Taurus, as long as I didn’t say anything to piss her off. The car was second hand, and she bought it with the first wad of money she saved from working at the store, even before she helped Mama with the rent and groceries. She washed that car every week by herself, and I was never allowed to help.

April was kind of obsessed with cleaning. She and I didn’t have many friends, and she spent her days off doing laundry, cleaning up the trailor, and washing her car. I wasn’t so much into cleaning things, but she made me feel bad, when I watched movies with Mama while she cleaned around us. She pinched me too, every time she walked by, so I’d help until she left me alone, and I could get back to my magazines.

I collected the perfume ads from all the magazines people got at the Pit.  Mr. Pikes, the lot manager, told me I could have any that people put into the recycling bins outside his office. Mrs. Campbell, a friend of Mama’s who came over some nights and watched the tv brought me a stack of glossies whenever she went out to the liquor store. She liked me, I guess. Her breath always smelled like medicine, like Mama’s, and she was missing some teeth, but Mama didn’t have many friends, so I liked her back.

I could tear out a perfume ad perfectly, with no ripping on the edge. You had to keep the page whole. Then you could punch three holes in the side and put it in my special, perfume binder. It was aqua, the color of California pool water, like April’s car.

I never used the perfume in the ads. I just liked to flip through the binder and admire them. They looked so glamorous, always so shimmery and glamorous with splashy pictures of cities lit up at night like fireflies, or lovers entwined with silken sheets. I could peel the ad open just a tiny bit and sniff at the sample hidden away inside and close my eyes and imagine I was classy and glamorous like those beautiful women in the photographs.

Poor April could wash her clothes a thousand times and it wouldn’t do any good.  That’s why I never used those samples. No matter how hard you wash something in The Pit, it’s still got the dirt of the trailers on it. That’s something that just doesn’t wash off. Not if you’re still there.

            If you get out, I used to think, I bet it’s easy to get clean and stay clean, in the rest of the world.

One day in December, after the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I was sitting in a yellow and white plastic chair behind the trailer. April was in the chair beside mine that was mint green and white. The bottom of her chair drooped, and she balanced a thick book on her pale, chubby knees, and read silently. I could feel her getting angrier just sitting there next to me. Even though I wasn’t talking to her or anything.

I had a pile of magazines that some of the ladies had brought me next to my chair. I had already gone through them and torn out the ads I wanted. My binder was tucked under my arm, and I was dozing off a little, daydreaming about the pages of a magazine open on my lap.  I was imagining what it would be like to be on a boat covered in Christmas lights. I would have a diamond clear martini glass between my fingers and a whole bottle of gold colored perfume waiting back in the cabin. 

After a while, April said the sun was too bright to read her book, and she folded it over her eyes and fell asleep. I thought about waking her up and telling her she was getting a sunburn, but she might have been even angrier at me for disturbing her, and I got to enjoy ten minutes without her sighing every time I asked her where she would go if she had a boat.

That was when I saw Dervish for the first time.

It was true. The sun was too bright for a December afternoon. If I let my eyes go out of focus, I could see the heat waves rising out of the black asphalt road that circled through the pit and the trucks and the homes.  I might have been falling asleep myself, but there was this rumble that shook me out of it, and a new pick up that I’d never seen before come bouncing over the gravel, towing a shiny green trailer that looked like a big hard candy, all gloss and shine, in the afternoon sun.

I don’t know what it was about that trailer, but I felt like it was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, like a stagecoach from a Western, or a car in a fancy old train where people drank champagne out of shallow glasses that tinkled and rattled like jewels. I wanted to elbow April awake and point it out, show her that something was happening, but behind my curiosity, there was this pinch deep down in my stomach that told me to shut up and wait, because something else was going to happen.

The truck pulled to a stop in front of Mr. Pikes’ rabbit hutch of an office. It was about the size of an outhouse and Mr. Pikes was almost never there, but he came out that day, swung open the door as soon as the truck was in park, and he went around to the driver’s window, while the passenger door opened, and the truck shivered as the weight of somebody got out on the other side.

Dervish was tall and wrought tight like a rope. His skin was tawny and he had a mop of dark hair that looked like it might be wavy if it was clean, but it was so dusty and dirty clod, he ran his hand through it and it stayed in place like some old movie star. He was wearing a white t-shirt with some logo I didn’t recognize on it. His jeans were slung low, and he wore boots like a cowboy. He had broad shoulders and a sunburnt neck, and staring at him across the Pit, I thought he was the most perfect looking person I’d ever seen.

He kicked the tires of the truck, stuck his hands in his pockets, and ambled to the back of the trailer. I froze in my little plastic chair. My denim cut offs suddenly felt too short, and I could feel the soft skin of my thighs sticking to the plastic seat uncomfortably. I wanted to move, but I was afraid I’d make a squeak or a peeling noise, and I just couldn’t stand that kind of humiliation. Instead I just looked at him, terrified that he would look back.

He didn’t.

Mr. Pikes scuttled away from the pick up’s window back to his office. He was short and narrow, with an unbelievably round belly that made him almost look pregnant. He waved to Dervish, whose name I didn’t know yet, and the boy loped lazily alongside as the pick up started crawling off the asphalt onto the dirt of the lot.

April started awake just as the back of the lime green trailer slipped behind a line of homes.

“I’m so bored,” she yawned.

I stood up from my chair finally, gripping my perfume binder to my chest.

“Not me,” I said, and before I knew what I was doing I was standing beside Mr. Pikes’ office door.

“Who’s that?” he called out through the screen.

“Just Mae Dell,” I said in a singsong.

“Well little Mae, I don’t have any new magazines since yesterday, and I’m busy right now, so what is it you need, honey?”

I opened the door a crack, and felt the relief of Mr. Pikes’ office fan working doubletime in the back of the tiny room. He was wedged behind his little desk with all the lights turned off, and it was hard to make out one thing from another in the gloom. Mr. Pikes was just a potato shaped shadow. I pointed my face at him.

“Did we get a new set of neighbors, Mr. Pikes?” I asked, sweet as pie.

“Yes, honey,” he replied.

“Where they from?”

“Didn’t ask. Honey, I gotta do up this paperwork before I can get back home to Mrs. Pikes. I got the grandkids coming this weekend, and I got about a half a million things to do. Do you need anything, or can I get back to it?”

I could finally make out Mr. Pikes looking up from his desk and reaching for a glass on the desk. Ice clinked in a sound that made my mouth itch for some sweet tea.

“Just curious,” I said, backing down. I pulled my face out of the doorway and let the screen shut.

“You all right, honey? You been out in the sun long?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” I said, and turned heel to walk back to April, who surely was fried to a crisp in her chair at this point. I looked up just in time to walk right into the logo on Dervish’s t-shirt.

The half a second where I bashed right into his chest was the single most exciting thing that had ever happened to me up until then. I made a little gaspy noise of surprise, and I felt my stomach lurch and my face color. I clutched my perfume binder to my chest, and stepped back looking down.

“Oh, hey, sorry,” said the boy’s voice.

I stared at the toes of his boots. They were scuffed and dusty.

“Hey, are you all right?” he asked.

I swallowed hard and looked up at him. He had milk dud colored eyes, all sweet and caramel and chocolate. I was close enough to see the way a smile wrinkled them at the corners. I was close enough to see the freckles on his nose; the bright red mole on the corner of his mouth that looked like a fleck of raspberry jam.  I was too close. His face swam in the heat, and I gulped for my breath.

“That you Dervish?” I heard Mr. Pikes call from behind me.

“Yes Sir,” the boy answered.

“Dervish?” I repeated.

“Hey, you can talk!” he chuckled, and I blushed hard again.

“Is your Dad coming with those papers?” Mr. Pikes asked, oblivious.

Dervish bent strangely to look directly into my eyes. “What’s your name Candy Apple?” he whispered.

“Mae.” I said.

“Mae?”

“Yes?”

“You smell amazing.”

And with that, he stepped around me, and jerked open Mr. Pikes’ door.

I trotted all the way across the lot back to my chair, and then didn’t stop to wake April, when I should have. I pulled open the door to our trailer, and I went inside to my dim room, my heart pounding.

                                                            *

I can’t leave the toe behind.  It feels like abandoning her, abandoning me, and I want to protect her. It’s hard to explain.

I spend a lot of the first day trying to push sand over this one little token I have left. Reaching out and pulling up a handful of sand is impossible now but I try anyway. I sit on the ground slipping and sliding my hand through and over the ground, and I relive every handful of dirt I’ve ever let foolishly slip through my pale, fleshy fingers.

I think about sandboxes I played in as a child, that syringe I found at the one in the playground and brought to Mama, before she wouldn’t take me there anymore.

          I think of the dust of the Mosquito Pit, yellow and brown and cracked. Some of the other women tried to make it grow things. They planted tomatoes, little herb gardens. They all died- the plants, not the women- they gave up and all bought those hanging plastic ones from the late night infomercials and grew upside down herb gardens and tomato plants in cubes and stuff. That dirt, the untillable ground of the trailer park ran through your fingers like chalk dust with little loose rocks in it.

I remember sugar and flour from a yellow cake mix box, and how easily that slid through my grasp. I loved the feeling of it sliding through. I never thought I would want it so badly.

          The sun goes down, and I watch the stars. It’s probably cold, but I don’t feel it, and all I can think about is how the little toe is sad and vulnerable out in the desert night. One of the stars I watch goes out after a little while. This is very scary for some reason. I don’t like that it was there one second, and the next, just gone. I wait for it to wink back on like a streetlamp. I wait and I wait, and before long the sky is turning cornflower blue, and then the sun rises, and it’s taffeta pink clouds strewn everywhere like the change room floor of a fancy lingerie store.

I don’t know why I try, but I press my lips to the ground just beside the toe, and I close my eyes, and I blow. A tiny drift of red sand settles gently beside the cold little toe, and a joy bubbles up inside me so instant and glorious that I whoop and holler with victory.

It takes most of the next day to cover up the toe by blowing sand over it, but I do succeed, and when I stand up and look over my handiwork, I realize that aside from the turtle rock and the scarecrow tree, there is nothing to this little spot of desert that seems out of the ordinary. You would never know I was there.

For a moment I want to sit down again and weep for the loss of my toe, my life, my family, and hell, even the Mosquito Pit, but I don’t. Instead I square my shoulders, and I think about Dervish’s hands around my neck, and I turn away from the place he put me in the ground.

I begin to walk the way the car had gone. It’s tracks are still there a little, smudged by the desert winds, but I can follow them, and I know if I can find the road, then I can find my way back to Vegas, and to him.

Hell. I’ve got nothing else to do, and all the time in the world. 

                                                      *

I walk for a day.

I don’t see anyone, but the ground shimmers sometimes, and I think I see people. I think, at one point I see an Indian on a red horse. He’s bent low, and he’s riding as fast and as hard as anything. Just when he’s right on top of me, and I think I’m going to be trampled, he vanishes, and I stop short, breathing heavy. I didn’t know ghosts could see mirages, and that’s what it must be, a mirage, even though I swear I looked into his eyes, and we saw each other.

One thing that’s nice about being dead is you don’t get tired, or hungry. I walk through the night, and at first I want to be scared. There are these howls in the desert at night, and you can’t see where they’re coming from. Some of them sound like coyotes, and some of them sound like screams. I don’t need to, but I climb a big rock formation in the morning, and I watch the sunrise. It’s bright like a kerosene storm lamp being lit, and the streaks of scarlet across the sky look like places where matches are struck to light it. If I turn around, I can see my lightning tree as a little speck in the distance, but I’m too far away to see the turtle rock. If I look ahead, I can see a winding, brown/grey snake, and my heart leaps. It’s the highway, and it’s not that far at all.

I’m almost there, as the sun starts going down. These sunsets are so big here. Big and purple like bruises and violets. I really missed eating today. I was thinking about all my favorite foods, as I walked, and it passed the time so quickly it surprised me to find I was almost on top of the asphalt. I’d been swimming in gravy and mashed potatoes and fried chicken from a greasy cardboard box. There was a place just outside the Pit where April and I used to go to pick up dinner sometimes. It was called Goldie’s and they made the best fried chicken and po’ boys.

                                    *

I took Dervish there, when he knocked on my window the second night after he’d moved to the Pit.

I still have no idea how he knew which window was mine. I guess he must have watched me a little. I didn’t think about it at the time.

I was in my chickie shorts that I wore only to bed because of how short they were. They were soft yellow like a baby chick and made out of the same stuff as a bath towel, so they were the best to sleep in during the summer months. I’d painted my toenails silver with little sparkles, and I was wiggling them because for some reason I’d heard that helped them dry faster. While I was doing this, I was poring over one of my older magazines. I’d already been through it six or seven times and cut out all the pictures I’d wanted, and torn out all the perfume ads, but I was bored, and you never knew if you missed something good until you saw it.

All of a sudden I heard a loud knock right beside my head on the tiny window. I just about jumped out of my skin it startled me so badly, and it happened twice more before I could even bring myself to lift the little purple curtain and look.

When I did, I saw him standing about ten feet from the trailer.  I must have looked so foolish because he was the last thing I expected to see, and I got so surprised, I just said, “Oh!” just like that, one word, no more.

He was wearing a grey hoodie, and his jeans and boots, and he had the hood up like he knew he was going to be sneaking around, and he smiled wide when he saw me, and waved.

Still in shock, I lifted my hand and waved back slowly. Dervish looked down at the ground, then back up, and I swear my heart was not beating this whole time, but he motioned with his hand for me to come out, and I dropped the curtain, and had a little moment with myself.

I could stay here.

Or.

I could sneak out, which I had never done in my whole life, and see what this boy, the most beautiful boy I had ever seen, mind you, wanted with me, of all people.

I lifted the curtain back up, and he was still there, a slight smirk at the corner of his lips, like he knew that I was coming, like he would wait all night, or however long it took me to come to my senses and run out there to him. It was that look that did it I think. It was like he knew me better than I did, and he didn’t know me at all.

I held up my finger to say one minute, dropped the curtain, and took three deep breaths.

Mama would be out like a light on the couch. Mrs. Campbell and she had gotten halfway through a box of wine before dinner, and she had finished it off by herself when I took myself off to bed, so that wasn’t a problem. When I turned off my little fan that I had clipped above my window, I could still hear the television, which meant April was probably still awake, and that was going to be a problem.

I slithered off of my bunk casually, and looked down the little hall at the living space, where the tv was. It’s light flickered across the floral settee where Mama was dead asleep, and, bless her, so was April! They were leaned on each other like two little old biddies, and I paused a moment to think about how cute they looked, before sliding my pink hoodie out of the Rubbermaid container I used to store all my clothes under my bunk.

I ducked into the bathroom for five seconds, so I could get a bra on, because a lady never leaves the house without one, and I spritzed on a little of my best perfume from an actual bottle that I hid taped to the bottom of the sink, because April would spray any bottle within arm’s reach after she used the bathroom.

I slipped out the trailer door, and wandered out to the back. It was humid out, but a little chilly, and I was pulling on my sweatshirt, when I heard a whisper.

“I was beginning to wonder what I was gonna have to do to get you out here,” Dervish said.

I looked up at him. I couldn’t quite see his face. There was a shadow from a tree over it, and he felt even taller than he had the other day.

I was still wiggling my toes.

Oh damn it. I had completely forgotten to put on shoes.

I looked down in shocked disappointment. I guess I wouldn’t be going anywhere with him after all.

“You really don’t talk much, huh?” Dervish said.

I smiled. “I guess nobody’s ever noticed before,” I said, after a moment.

He offered me his arm, like a gentleman, like a movie star, and I jiggled my newly painted sparkly toes with pure agitated frustration. I could feel the dust between my toes, and every curly piece of dead brown grass was like a ribbon tying me to the front of our trailer.

“I forgot my shoes,” I said dumbly, and then I giggled.

Dervish looked down, and he got a wicked smile on his face. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t move.”

Then he was gone, off like a ghost, or a light in the swamp that you think you see, but as soon as you look hard, you can’t be so certain anymore.

I folded my arms even though it wasn’t cold out, but my legs were barely covered in my chickie shorts, and they blossomed with goosebumps. Dervish seemed to have been gone a while, and I began to wonder if, like a light in the swamp, he ever was here to begin with. I didn’t touch him. Maybe I just nodded off on my bunk bed, and I had a this lovely, hopeful dream that I was about to wake up from any minute.

Just as I was about to give up and go back inside, I heard the sound of a car moving really slowly. I peered around the trailer next to ours, and it was the truck I saw pulling Dervish’s trailer the day before. The lights were off, and he stopped when he saw me. I didn’t think twice. I just scampered right over to him. He flung the door open for me, and I hopped in and shut the door tight behind me. It was a little loud, my door, and we both looked at each other and froze.

I wondered if I was about to see April storm out the front of our trailer, or worse, Mr. Pikes pop out of his tiny office. Even though I knew he was at home with his wife, my heart felt as big as a bowling ball, and I could hear every beat.

Dervish threw the truck into reverse, and we tore out of the Pit like the devil was after us. He flipped the lights on, and I could see the ribbon of dust we blew out behind us, as we pulled off the gravel drive onto the main, paved road.

“Where are we going?” I asked, giddy, and nervous, and not entirely sure I cared.

Dervish looked at me sideways. “Well, I woke up this morning, and I could not stop thinking about this girl I met yesterday. She just seemed like nothing or nobody I’d ever met before, and worse, she smelled like sugar daddies, and jelly beans, and all the cotton candy floss I’d ever eaten rolled up into one. She smelled so good, I thought I might have made her up.”

I was blushing terribly, all the way down to my toe sparkles, while he said this, but Dervish just went on talking. If he noticed he was embarrassing me, he didn’t draw attention to it, and I thought that was polite.

“I had to help my Uncle Joel fix the plumbing on the trailer today, and it was probably the worst day of my life,” Dervish continued, but he didn’t sound so playful when he said that. He sounded angry and sad.

“And when we were done, my back hurt so much, and all I could think about was how much I just wanted some food, and to go to sleep, but Joel ate a frozen pizza, and only gave me a piece of it, and I was so angry, I just went to bed, and I was lying there thinking about how hungry I was, and all of a sudden this girl popped into my head again, and I thought I might go crazy between how hungry I was, and how nice this girl seemed, and as soon as Joel went to bed, I lifted his keys and snuck out.”

“To find me?” I asked, still not sure if I could believe him.

“I know!” he cried. “It sounds stupid. I just don’t know anyone, and you seemed special. Do I sound weird? I can just turn around and take you home if you like.”

“No!” I shouted.

          He pulled the truck over, and turned to face me on the blue leather of the seat.

I looked at him, my eyes must have been wide, because I felt like it took three hours to blink, and while I did, neither of us said anything. We just sat there, in the truck, looking at each other.

Then Dervish asked me something I hadn’t expected at all.

His voice was low and kind of ragged sounding. “Did I scare you?”

I looked over his shoulder at the road. We weren’t far from the Pit. I could have gotten out and walked home in less than twenty minutes, and only about ten minutes drive ahead of us was Goldies Fried Chicken, and it was open until midnight.

“Are you still hungry?” I asked.

Dervish slid a little on the seat, not a lot, maybe not even toward me, but it felt like he got closer. “Yes, ma’am.”

I laughed a little nervously because he just seemed so strange, so serious one minute, and so silly the next.

“Then just take us a bit further, dopey, there’s a place just up ahead.”

Dervish jerked the truck up off the shoulder back onto the road again.

“She called me dopey!” he said to nobody in an indignant voice.

                                                            *

I get to the highway sometime on the third or fourth night. There’s no way to keep track of the passage of time out here, and I’ve forgotten how many sunrises and sunsets I’ve seen even though it only feels like a handful. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to being dead.

When the sun is all the way up, I see the hitchhiker.

She starts out as a white blob way up on the side of the silver stripe that is the road. As I walk toward her, she takes a more permanent-type shape, and I can see she’s dressed up like a hippie. She’s wearing a loose, white dress with a red cord cinching it in the middle, and she’s got long brown hair with bits that have bleached out from being in the sun so long. It’s straight, and reaches the middle of her back, but it’s not tangled at all. It’s smooth and silky looking. As we get closer and closer, I can see she’s got her thumb out, even though I have yet to see any vehicles on this stretch of road. She’s standing under one of those green signs that says how many miles until certain places, and I’m excited to read how many miles it will be before I get to where I’m going.

I don’t expect her to see me.

          She does though.

          She’s got on a pair of huge, green plastic sunglasses, and she’s craning her neck, checking me out, and I stop walking when we get to each other because maybe, I think, she’s never seen a ghost before. I know I haven’t.

“Hey!” she says, like we’re already friends. “Where did you come from?”

“Who?” I say, confused. I don’t know if I’ve spoken since I died. I haven’t, so it feels weird.

She throws her head back and laughs, but that’s no comfort.

“You can see me?” I ask dumbly.

She pulls the glasses down so she can look over them at me, and she smiles. “You’re a trip, man,” she says, “I like you.”

She has really straight, white teeth, and a big pretty smile. She looks like she belongs on a beach in California.

“What are you doing out here?” I ask, because it seems like the right thing to do.

“Oh, I’m looking to get a lift back home,” she says casually, sliding her shades back up again and flicking a long piece of her hair over her shoulder.

“Which way’s that?”

“West, baby. I’m from San Francisco!” She announces then laughs again.

It’s nice to be talking to somebody, but there’s something off about her, and it makes me feel sad.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Talula,” she says, and then she looks up at the highway sign like it’s the first time she’s ever seen anything like it.

“Vegas. eighty miles? Ugh.”

I’m about to ask her something else, but then we hear something, and I turn around, and so help me, it’s a car, a big black thing, speeding toward us.

Talula whoops and thrusts her skinny, brown arm out thumb held high. “This is the one!” she says. “Come on baby! We’ve been waitin’ for you! Come on!”

I feel stupid, but I want to help her, so I stick out my arm too. I’ve never hitchhiked before, and staring down the road at this car barreling down at us feels exciting. I wonder if it’s going to pick both of us up. Maybe it’s a fancy gambling man in a dark suit who will drive us all the way to Vegas in no time flat. It’s getting so that you can feel the ground trembling under your feet now. It’s that close.

Talula’s right next to my ear, “Throw a smile on, honey!” she yells, “You can get anything you want with a smile like yours!”

I look back at her, and she’s got one on from ear to ear. She looks like a toothpaste commercial. I turn back, and the car’s almost right there. I smile, knowing it looks nothing like Talula’s, but the car cracks by us in a cloud of dust and engine thunder. It’s gone in a blink, and Talula’s kicking at rocks and cursing up a storm.

“Aw man! Guys like that don’t appreciate their time here!” she yells, stomping her sandals and waving her arms. “This ride shit is really harsh, man!”

“Out in the desert?” I ask.

“What?” She stops kicking up a fuss to look at me.

“They don’t appreciate their time here in the desert?” I’m confused.

“No, girl,” Talula’s smile is back on like a porch light. “Like they don’t appreciate their time on this planet enough to stop and give their fellow man a hand.” She pauses and then shrugs. “Asshole,” she chuckles and looks back up at the sign.

I’m still not sure what she’s talking about, but I’m glad of the company. She’s already craning her neck again, leaning out into the road and looking with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun.

“How’d you get all the way out here?” I ask.

“My boyfriend,” Talula spits, “EX-boyfriend!” she says and whirls around. “We should walk on some. What did you say your name was?”

“Mae.”

“Wanna walk with me a little, Mae? I think we girls should stick together, can’t be too careful you know?”

“Okay,” I say, and I really hope I don’t have to tell her that I’m dead.  

                                                            *

When we got to Goldies, there were a couple of cars parked around the side. The sign was bright yellow like the yolk of an egg, and, as the truck bounced over the curb, I flew up a little on the seat, and I was closer to Dervish, and my stomach clutched tight like a fist.

Dervish ordered fried chicken, a hotdog on a stick, and French fries.

He got a coke, and I got a big cup of sweet tea with extra lemon. We sat on the hood of the truck, and I watched him eat like a starving animal. He wasn’t kidding about being hungry.

It was funny. I liked watching him. Just eating like that, he was still strange, and new, and I wanted to touch his dark hair as he bent his head over the red and white paper dish and dropped the chicken bones from his fingers with a deep sigh. I sucked at my sweet tea and pretended I hadn’t been watching so closely. I looked up, past the Goldies sign, at the stars.

There was a plane flying overhead, and I watched its lights fade into the distance. The medicine smell of a wetnap reached my nose, and I looked over at Dervish as he finished wiping his fingers and hoisted himself up on the hood of the truck beside me.

“Have you always lived here?” he asked after a minute.

“Not always at the Pit, but Lowport, Louisiana, yes,” I replied.

“I’ve never lived anywhere longer than a year or two, not even when I was a baby,” Dervish said. “I was born in Hawaii, you know?”

“Really?” I tried to remember anything I knew about Hawaii, and I could picture a tropical sunset, lots of palm trees, a beach, and a bunch of hula dancers. “What was it like?” I asked.

“I don’t remember much,” Dervish said, and he sounded sad. “We moved when I was two.”

          A whole landslide of questions piled up behind my lips. What happened to your parents? Why did you leave? Where else have you lived? What brought you to the Pit?

I didn’t know where to begin though, so I just sucked down my sweet tea, and then I felt him get even closer on the hood of the truck. He held out a big, tawny hand in front of my face and counted off on his fingers,

“Arizona, South Dakota, and Texas for most of my schooling, until I dropped out and went off on my own for a couple of years.” He took his hand down and brushed my cheek with a knuckle. It was so sudden, my heart stopped, and I looked down, but he didn’t seem to skip a beat, and the hand went back down beside him on the truck, just as easily as it touched me. 

“I fell out with my stepdad,” he continued, “So I went looking for my real dad for a while, but the services caught up with me, and I got sent back home to my mom’s. So I ran away again. Then again. Until finally the only way they could get me to finish school was if they sent me to live with Uncle Joel, and that was fine with me. Joel doesn’t care if I go to school as long I help him with his plumbing business, and I don’t care to go to school as long as I can make money.”

“Why’d you move to the Pit?” I asked when he was looking longingly at the empty carton of chicken next to us.

“Joel’s girlfriend kicked us out of her house, and Joel and I struck out two town’s over, which is here. I turn 18 in two weeks, and I promised Joel I’d give him a year, and then I was takin’ off for real.”

“Where will you go next?” I asked, breathless at the way he talked.

He was so easy with his ambitions. He made it all sound so simple, and I’d never even been outside Louisiana.

“Oh that’s easy,” he answered.  “Las Vegas.”

A perfume ad from my collection popped into my head. It was a photograph of a beautiful woman with red hair in a sapphire blue dress sitting at one of those slot machines. She had her arms raised high in the air like an evangelical preacher, and the machine was pouring all these gold coins all over her lap. I couldn’t remember the name of the perfume, but I knew exactly how happy the woman looked in the picture. Her mouth was wide open, like the picture caught her laughing loud and hard at all this treasure just falling into her. It was one of my favorites because of how easy it looked. 

“What will you do there?” I couldn’t hide the sadness in my voice. I’d only known this boy for about an hour, and I was going to lose him to that sapphire woman in a mystical city I’d never see.

He startled me by touching his knuckle to my cheek again, but I couldn’t look his way. I knew for sure he’d see how disappointed I was.

“I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got a good idea,” he murmured, and I looked over at him anyway. He smiled that smile at me, and I didn’t even realize I was leaning, until he slid those knuckles alongside my jaw and kissed me.

I shut my eyes, and I felt weightless. My entire world was inside his mouth in that kiss. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think outside of the stars, his salt rimed lips, everything I had ever felt about the Mosquito Pit slid away, and I knew then if he ever asked me to do anything I would do it. I wouldn’t even blink. I wondered if he could tell. I wondered how much I told him with that first kiss, because it seemed like he knew everything already. 

                                             *

Talula is up on a rock, that looks like a huge dining room table, spinning with her arms out, and I can still taste that kiss even though I don’t ever want to again. I watch her swirling around on the big red rock, her dress billowing out, and her head thrown back, and she just seems so free. I wonder if I ever lived any moment like that.

“Talula!” I call, and she comes to a stop slowly, like a helicopter touching down, and then she laughs and climbs down and walks drunkenly over to me.

“What’s up baby Mae?” she asks, a little breathless.

“Shouldn’t we be walking some more?” I say.

She laughs, and throws her arm around me, and I’m terrified when I see it coming. This girl’s arm is about to slip right through me, and then she’s going to start screaming, and oh hell there’s nothing in this god awful desert, so she might tear off and get lost and-

But her arm comes to rest on my shoulders just as easy as you please, and she sighs.

“I love you!” she crows. “Somebody’s gotta keep me on track, or I’ll just never get home!”

I think she’s going to laugh, but then she goes real quiet, and I have this kind of sick feeling, but we head back toward the road together, and she keeps her arm around me, so I guess it’s all right.

Then we hear another car.

Talula drops her arm, and turns, and when I squint, I can see it’s one of those volkswagon buses that the hippies used to drive. It’s a lemon yellow color, and it’s coming along sure and slow, with no kind of hurry. I’m about to yell something to Talula, like these are her people, and they have to pick us up, and then I see her face.

Her mouth trembles, and she looks around like an animal in a cage. “Not again,” she whispers.

“Talula, what’s wrong?” I ask, but she’s gathered up her skirts and she’s running. One of her sandals left behind in the red dirt. I look back at the bus, and stoop to pick up the shoe. I know she’ll miss it, and I start running after her with it clutched in my hand.

It’s hard work running. Even when you don’t have a body to slow you down anymore, it’s like you still remember how bad at it you were, and you don’t get to fly places, or shoot off real fast in any particular direction, or I’d already be in Vegas by now, and I was never the fittest person, so I’m left in the dust behind Talula’s long legs.

The hippy bus passes me, and I realize this means it’s driven off the road. It’s heading straight for Talula, and that’s when I get real scared. I try running harder, faster. Maybe if I get there, then I can do something, although I have no idea what.

Talula sees the bus coming, and I hear her scream, and then it sways hard in front of her, and stops. I see a man in a black t-shirt, with a pair of those tight bellbottom pants jump out of the side door, and he tackles her hard like a football player.

I can’t hear what he’s saying to her, but Talula’s squirming underneath him, and screaming real hard, and it looks like he’s going to do something with his fly. His hand is reaching down there, and he’s holding Talula’s arm down with his other hand, and he’s sitting on her, and her legs are kicking, one bare foot just flinging clouds of dust up into the air. Her voice is harsh, and it’s stopped sounding like a person’s scream and more like a bird’s. It’s louder, and harsher, the closer I get, and the man starts hiking her dress up over her hips, and I’m close enough now, that I can hear him, and he’s crying, in these low, choked sobs.

“Talula, how am I supposed to…” but I can’t make out the rest of it, and I don’t know what else to do, so I just dig deep down for my mama’s voice, and I yell,

“You get offa’ her right now!”

He freezes, and Talula squirms a little, but then she’s still, and they both look at me like I came out of thin air.

There’s a pause, and I don’t know what to say, and that’s all it takes.

Talula’s candy colored glasses came off in the struggle, and her brown eyes are dark and wet like an animal’s when she looks at me. Then she pushes as hard as she can with her hips and her legs and her arms, and the man kind of loses his balance long enough for her to slither out from underneath him.

Her dress is enmeshed with dirt. There’s bits of rock in her hair and her lips look dusty and cracked from screaming, but she’s out from underneath the man and pushes herself off the ground.

He’s not crying anymore, but there are streaks in the dust on his face, and as he watches Talula, his eyebrows knit together like he’s got a terrible headache, and I know the bad thing’s going to happen, and I still can’t do anything in time.

There’s a rock by his leg, and then all of a sudden it’s in his hand, and as he staggers up off the ground behind her, I begin to run toward him, but instead of speeding up everything slows down. I reach out my arms, and the first time he hits her, it’s the back of her head, and her big animal eyes get even wider, even darker, and as she tumbles forward there’s a sound like a fist hitting the front door of a house, and then Talula’s head drops. Her whole body slumps. The rock bounces off of the back of her head, and when the man holds it up above her collapsing body, I can see it’s dark red, and dripping. He shakes like an old person, and he drops the rock, but she’s already crumpling onto the ground, and when I get to her, he’s already tearing in the other direction back toward the yellow hippy bus.

I turn her over when I get to her, my eyes are so full of tears, that the bus looks like a yellow smear as it whips by us back toward the road, and I choke as I try to push Talula’s hair off of her face, so I can see if her eyes are still open, and they are, but they’re not wet anymore, and they’re not even dark they’re just empty, and all their darkness is pouring out of the back of her head and staining the sand and it’s on my hands, and her mouth is hanging open a little so I can see how small her teeth are, and I can’t do anything but cry.

I stay with her until the sun goes down. When I can’t cry anymore, I think of the way she’d said “EX-boyfriend” before. Maybe that was him. She’d just wanted to go home, and he wouldn’t’ let her go.

I sit with her all night. Her body is so still and motionless, nothing like the girl who was dancing in the road and twirling on a rock earlier that day.

I listen to the coyotes, and I talk to the stars, and I wonder if another car drives by, how do I get its attention? Can a dead girl dig a grave for another one? It occurs to me then, that maybe Talula’s going to keep me company. It’s an odd thought, and it stops me from crying. Then I just sit next to her and wait.

An hour before the sun comes up, a kind of cold feeling blows through me. It’s the first time I’ve felt anything like that since I pulled myself out of the ground, and I look down at my bare arms, my fluffy nightgown, and when I look up again, Talula’s body is gone.

There’s no puddle of oily blood, no sunglasses, nothing. It’s like she was never there, and I’m completely alone again.

I cry for a while this time.

When I am done, the sun is up, and I drag myself up and away from the spot where he killed her. I get back to the road, and I point myself in the direction we’d been heading, and I start walking again.

When I look back, just once, I see her, a flicker of white with a little bit of red in the middle dancing like a heat wave rising up from the asphalt. A ghost forever walking in the wrong direction.

                                                *

When Dervish pulled out of the parking lot at Goldies, he asked me if I wanted to go home. He was holding my hand across the seat of the truck, and I knew I would die before leaving him after that kiss.

I shook my head no.

“Well, Candy Apple, I’m still new to these parts, so I have no idea what you young folks do for a good time around here,” he chuckled doing an even twangier version of his own drawl.

I giggled. “We could go to the Biwater if you like?” I suggested shyly.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a graveyard,” I said. I didn’t mention that sometimes kids would park their trucks down at the Biwater Cemetary and do the things that I’d never done with anybody, but I thought maybe wouldn’t be terrible to do with Dervish.

I showed him where the turn off was, and Dervish parked sideways on the grass right by the gates. We kissed for a while, and right when I thought I might go out of my head, he pulled away from me with that same smirk he’d had outside the trailer, and kicked his door open.

“You make things very difficult for a man who just wants to be romantic,” he said, and I waited, as he came around the side, and opened my door for me. Then he took me to the bed of the truck and started rummaging around in the bed of the truck.

I stood there, trying not to shiver in my chickie shorts. Something about the swamp air at night always got to me, and it could be a hundred degrees and every sane person from here to Mexico could have their fan turned up to Arctic Blast, and if I stepped outside, I’d just get a chill that ran the course of my whole body. Mama used to say it was the humidity. April said it was on account of me being retarded.

I looked at the stars while I waited for Dervish to find what he was looking for. They never seemed quite the same, and I didn’t know much about constellations or astrology, but they always made me feel kind of friendly, like earth had this group of gossipy neighbors who never want to be a bother, but always have their ears pricked up in our direction or their eyes peepin’ over the fence, just to make sure we didn’t get ourselves into to much trouble.

I watched one wink at me, and I imagined it was like the old man star in a fishing cap with a bunch of lures hanging off it. He was sweet. I thought, winking at me, knowing I’d sneaked out with a boy to a graveyard.

Just then Dervish pulled his head out from under a green plastic tarp on the bed of the truck. He had a big mason jar with a lid on it, and a little bit of brown water in the bottom.

“Hang on a tic,” Dervish said, and unscrewed the top of the jar with a hard twist.

He poured the brownish water on the ground, and then took a bottle of water from somewhere else in the truck and rinsed the jar out. He shook it until clear little water droplets sprayed everywhere, even on me. I didn’t mind though. I giggled a little.

He looked at me and smiled, and all of a sudden he caught me around my middle with the arm that didn’t have the jar in it, and brought me in very close to him. I liked that he looked at me in a way I’d never been looked at.

I wondered if anybody looked the way Dervish looked at me, kind of hungry, kind of scary. I wanted to scream a little, but it was too exciting. I tried, instead, to think of how I would describe this moment to April, if she ever asked me.

I thought we might start kissing again, but instead he just busted out laughing, and then he loosened up his grip and thrust the jar at me.

“Here little girl,” he said, “for fireflies.”

I was delighted.

We took the jar, and Dervish followed me in through the gates of the Biwater. It’s not the prettiest place. Most of the old, historic graveyards are closer to the cities, so out here in the country, near places like The Pit, the cemeteries are whatever poor folks can put together.

Most of them started out as a personal family plots. That’s where the Bi’s pretty gates came from. And near the middle or the back there would be a little clutch of nice old tombstones all with one name all carved out in little storybook letters. The Biwater Cemetary, for instance, started out as the Chevelle Family Cemetary.

Surrounding the four Chevelle tombstones the other graves had grown up like weeds and wildflowers. Long after the plantation was gone, the local people just started bringing their dead here, and nobody had any money, so lots of folks just made their own tombstones: crosses nailed together out of spare wood, just shoved in the ground and knocked all kinds of angles by the wind and weather; painted rocks with names and dates, some said Sunrise and Sunset, some just said Mama, or Daddy.

After the sewage treatment plant diverted one of their pipes through the swamp, the place became known as the Biwater. At least that’s what Mr. Pikes said. He heard I went down there with Dervish, and gave me the hell he guessed my Mama was too drunk to give me, but that’s for later.

Dervish and I made our way around mounds of dirt and, raised box graves, teddy bears and fake flowers left near smaller piles, or a smashed jar, or a pair of shoes left at the foot of some turned over earth. There was deep sticky grass on the side of the Biwater closest to the run off pipe, but on the other side of the cemetary, closer to the road, there were a few swamp willows dripping with ashen Spanish Moss, and over there winking around the branches just like that friendly old star, you could see the fireflies.

Dervish and me ran like children toward them, scattering anything we might have caught in the jar, but after some giggling and a lot of shushing, from me anyway, we got still, and they came slowly back. I held the jar, and waited, not even realizing I was holding my breath. Then the little bug was right there, and I lunged with the jar covering up the glass mouth with my hand and whisper yelling at Dervish to get the lid screwed down.

We were out there for a while, until I had at least fifteen fireflies in the jar. Dervish took my hand as we walked out of the Biwater, and I felt like I was walking on a cloud.

He helped me up into the cab of the truck, and as I got settled in with my jar of fireflies, he disappeared for a minute. When he came back he had a little stuffed chick. I’d seen it earlier on a little mound of dirt near the longer swamp grass, but everyone knows you don’t steal from the dead.

“Here,” Dervish said, holding it out to me. “It reminded me of your little chickie shorts.”

I must have looked upset because he stopped holding it out.

 “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We can’t take that,” I said finally, so scared of making him sad or angry and ruining such a wonderful night.

“How come? It’ll remind you of our first adventure.”

“I know, I just, you shouldn’t steal from the dead,” I said, so quiet the words almost dribbled down my shirt and didn’t come out at all.

“Aw, baby,” Dervish chucked my chin and hopped out of the truck. I watched him walk around to the gate, and I thought he’d go put the little stuffed chick back, but instead he just tossed it, easy as a baseball, through the gates. I don’t even think he paused to see where it landed.

My heart went with that stuffed chick a little bit. I felt so sorrowful for it just scudding along the dirt like that, but Dervish had listened to me. He was a boy, after all, he probably didn’t understand why I was being so sentimental. I looked down at my fireflies, and I felt the cab lurch as Dervish hoisted himself back in.

He had called me baby for the first time. I couldn’t let that go by without a slight thrill.

We drove back to The Pit, and I swallowed hard and reached across the bench seat for his hand, and he took mine. We stayed that way right up until he parked the truck beside Joel’s trailer.

Then he let go and hopped back down from the cab, came around and opened up my door. Instead of taking my hand though, he wrapped his freckled arms around me and lifted me right out of the seat. I was still holding the mason jar, and I was glad for the little space it made between us so he couldn’t feel how hard my heart was beating. When he set me on the ground, firefly jar or no firefly jar, my toes barely touched the gravel, and he kissed me again. I kissed up at him, and he kissed down at me, and I felt the scrape of his cheek, and the dry warmth of his lips and everything else was just magic and all that stuff you don’t want to hear about. My stomach felt like it was full of bright white lightening bugs for a full minute and a half, I swear.

Dervish silently walked me back to Mama’s trailer, and then he let go of my hand, and hugged me. I could feel my stupid heart beating away. ‘Take me with you,’ it pounded. ‘Take me anywhere.’

“Goodnight Baby Mae. Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“May…be.” I said, and we both laughed, and I watched him disappear into the shadows between the other trailers, and I left my jar of fireflies on the ground by the door, scared if I took them in, April would be awake and demand to know what I’d been up to.

In the morning, the first thing I did when I woke up was go check on my jar of fireflies, but they were all dead and stuck to the bottom of the jar in some of that brown stuff. I guess Dervish hadn’t been able to get it all out.