The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,20

into doing his chores by some clever trade or another. “Wanna see something we just found? Out back?”

Her eyes lit up like she hadn’t just been pushing at the weakest folds of my heart, and she followed him but immediately.

The tree outside our living room window was sickly and small, but it served its purpose. How long Heather remained hanging there, strung by her wrists and ankles by a string of Christmas tree lights, a bandanna tied around her mouth, I’m not sure. She did not cry out or protest, and right before Jackson covered her thin, pallid lips she asked God to save us.

“Shut up!” cried Jackson. “Shutupshutupshutup,” his words coming fast like a metronome gone mad.

When I returned after dinner, terrified, the preacher’s daughter was gone, the ghosts of tiny lights hanging in apostrophe of the day’s events. I tore them violently from the branches, shaking boughs and loosening leaves, crossed the street, and placed them in my neighbor’s garbage can. The thud of the black plastic lid falling behind me as I raced across the asphalt was deafening, and I expected every window on the street to fill with light as if to ask: What are you doing? What have you done?

Just as the first evening we spent tenderly examining each other’s bodies—an act with implications we were far, then, from understanding—was never mentioned, neither was what we did to Heather, or what Heather did to me. In school she made every effort to pass by my desk, sometimes giving my hair a little tug; I would look up from a spelling test to find her looking at me, unblinking, and she would grin and grin and grin. I spent the months after that waiting for a knock at the door, or to be summoned into the living room to find my father and the preacher, a balding man with hairy, stubby hands, talking in low voices about me, about Heather.

The knock never came. One day Heather showed up at school with her arm in a sling and did not take unnecessary routes to pass by my desk; the next day she was gone. That Sunday a crowd gathered outside the church, waiting to be saved, speculating as to why the doors were locked.

For weeks and months, the marquee displayed the same message:

WE ARE

NOT PERFECT

JUST FORGIVEN

Some nights I listen to my ragged breathing and remember: in the space behind my eyes, memories appear Technicolor. Pink and yellow light shines through the visions in my half sleep, as if they were constructed of rice paper, and I try, with such an aching, to replicate the smell of chlorine, to recreate the laughter of those long gone, to set these stories in my head in stone so they can be done with.

Some nights I remember peaches. Tonight is one of them.

Jackson had a job at the market one summer. He was seventeen, I was almost. The sunflowers in the front of the store were larger than any I’ve seen since, and the ancient cashier with the cigarette voice was named Paula. No: Linda. She called me rosebud and complimented my wrinkled sundresses. The bathroom was in the right front corner; it had only one stall and I can’t remember what the hand soap smelled of but I promise myself I will before I sleep. Jackson worked four days a week—or was it five—and his work shirt was never clean. It smelled definitively of him, even from where I would stand, across a display of clementines touted for peeling easily. I pretended I was a customer, crossed my arms and sighed over the selection of fruits and vegetables.

But what’s the difference, I whined as I fingered the donut peaches, and he smiled patiently with the left side of his mouth curving up like it had since we were kids. You see, ma’am, if you can believe it or not, and he’d pause with mock astonishment, these were cultivated especially for a Chinese emperor—and now I can’t remember the name of the emperor but I decide I will, before I fall asleep. Never mind the name. Remember the donut peach. You must, I tell myself. Must.

They were cultivated for a Chinese emperor, Jackson would say, who loved peaches but disliked the mess, so they designed the pan tao, the flat peach, which fit right in between his mustache and beard. It occurs to me between ticks that he may have made this up. No, no, he couldn’t have. Go on.

What about