“Sounds like a fun way to spend a Friday evening,” I quip, grabbing a slice of bread from the wooden cutting board in the center of the old table. I tear out the middle, toss the crust down for Toto, and stand up.
I'm not one for taking orders, but also, I need to ride out these last few months before graduation without getting booted from the house. Once I'm done with school, I'm done with Kansas.
I head into the bathroom, grab a jug of bleach from under the sink, and unscrew the cap.
“Did you know if you mix certain household chemicals, they can form a toxic cloud in an enclosed space and kill you? Or at least cause brain damage?” Toto stares up at me with his bit of bread hanging from his mouth and cocks his head to one side, ears standing upright. I sniff the bleach, wrinkle my nose, and then pour a bunch of it in the tub. “I feel like the pesticide-ridden dust has already messed with my head, don't you?”
I kneel down and start to scrub, but it's not really that hard of a task. Auntie Em makes me do the tub three times a week. It doesn't even have time to get dirty before I clean it again. But if Uncle Henry comes home and he doesn't smell bleach? We're both getting our asses kicked.
The pot's made me slow, but meticulous, so even though I tell myself I'm going to half-ass this job out of principle, I end up scrubbing until my shoulder hurts and the white porcelain basin of the old clawfoot tub is shining. Running my arm across my sweaty forehead, I stand up and glance over my shoulder at Toto.
He's sleeping on the rug in front of the closed bathroom door, but there's a strange shadow in the mirror behind him, a shadow of a man.
Blinking rapidly, I turn away and blame it on the weed. It has to be the weed.
I look back at the mirror and find nothing but my own melancholy self staring back at me. Even getting high doesn’t change the expression on my face; there’s pain and loss etched into every single line. And really, I’m seventeen, so I shouldn’t have lines yet, right?
Yet there they are, on either side of my chapped lips. When I lived in Washington, I loved my mouth, even though my upper lip is much fuller than my bottom. I had a shiny, pink mouth. Here in Kansas, everything is dry and lifeless. Even the corn that grows half the year doesn’t feel real, just some pesticide-laden, GMO Frankenstein monster made to feed factory-farmed pigs.
Tugging on my brunette braids, I sigh and lean my head back against the frosted glass of the window. My hair used to be the same emerald green as my eyes, but Aunt Em made me dye it when I moved here. Back home, I lived in Emerald City, aka Seattle, so it seemed appropriate. Now that I’m out here, and everything’s as gray as Auntie Em’s hair, the brown works a little better anyway.
I close my eyes for a moment, waiting until I hear the front door open. Uncle Henry’s back. Great. And Aunt Em’s worried about a tornado? Seriously, there’s no worse cyclone than her husband. He’s a monstrous force of hate and pain and rage. Thank fuck he has a bum knee or else I’d never get a moment of peace, not even up the steep attic stairs to my bedroom.
When I don’t hear screaming, crying, or broken dishes, I figure it’s okay to head back out into the kitchen/living room/my aunt and uncle’s bedroom area. Yeah, living in a one-room house blows. When I lived in Seattle, my siblings and I all had our own rooms. We had a game room, too, and a guest bedroom, a home office for my mother’s construction business, and a finished basement with gym equipment.
This life … is nothing like that one.
“Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” Aunt Em tells me, facing the stove and stirring the pot carefully. Last time she splashed chili on the stove, Uncle Henry gave her a black eye for the effort. “Why don’t you send your friends home?”
I nod and glance over at Uncle Henry, sitting on the couch in front of the TV. He doesn’t even say hi to me, so I flip him off while he’s not looking and head back out into the gray prairie with Toto trotting along behind me like a shadow. The wind’s picking up, swirling dust across the cracked earth, and the sky’s a sickly splatter of black and gray. Personally, I hope it rains. Then it won’t be so dry, and maybe I can finally get my lips to stop cracking and bleeding?
