The Floating Cradle

Twenty-One

I squat over the lavatory pit—sequestered behind a wooden door in a three-foot-square niche off the main cellar—and wrack my mind for anything to distract myself from the unholy aftermath of what Lyle did before me (subsisting on canned foods for the past day and a half, no matter how meager, has done none of us any favors). I limit the track my thoughts can move along—no careening down rabbit holes into the future, no gliding through theoretical wastelands phosphorescent with nuclear winter—and find it feels safest when I impose borders as well, windowless concrete ones, or cinderblocks; this invariably leads me to my high school and its comforting drudgery, the grind of days spent languishing in its halls and classrooms now excellent fodder for the innocuous B-reel grounding my brain.

"Wallet."

"...Wallet-ino?"

Crystal and I passed a textbook between us, quizzing each other on vocabulary as our teacher graded tests in the last few minutes of class. I kicked my feet up on Crystal's desk; Sra. Doherty motioned for me to remove them, but I pretended not to notice.

"Billetera—so close." Crystal peered over the edge of the textbook, her corkscrew hair framing her face like a mane. "Speakin' of, you gonna tell me why yours has been so full lately? Since when're you buyin' forty bucks' worth of Milk Duds and shit for a two-hour movie? Stuffin' your face through the new Spider-Man, it's a wonder I heard a word of it—"

"Screw you." I stuck my foot in her face. She slapped it away.

"Gettin' spoiled by your new boyfriend?" Crystal teased, clasping her hands under her chin in a mock-romantic gesture. "Señor Simes?"

My cheeks grew hot and I glanced around the room to make sure no one was listening, but our classmates were equally preoccupied with the pretense of studying.

"Makin' out with a guy one time don't make him my boyfriend."

Especially if he's helping you sell the tantic Molly you filched from your brother's hollowed-out copy of Dune.

"Can't hurt your chances, though," Crystal said.

Sra. Doherty held up my test for me to see, tapping a red talon beside the grade scrawled in the upper margin: D.

Gilberto. It had been Gil who'd helped me study for the next test, who'd spent his evenings mucking stalls knee-deep in the subjunctive with me until my term grade had been rehabilitated to a respectable B-.

Gilberto, who is probably at this very moment a charred corpse some fifteen feet overhead, cremated on spot where he fell, alone in a world of mirror agony, maybe trapped beneath a segment of roof wrenched loose from the house or crushed by the bloated meat of a cow, maybe even pressed against the iron doors of the tornado cellar, spread-eagle, baked flat, his fingers fused around the handles, ruled incompatible with life by just a few milliseconds, just a few inches—

I barely have my fly zipped when I burst out of the lavatory, panting; because of the stench, my behavior raises no eyebrows. Truth be told, it doesn't smell all that better in the main cellar, with all our sweat and the spilled jars of food and Dan's desiccating piles of sick. I shuffle over to Pete, avoiding the draw of the dark stairwell.

"Rest in peace, Stonewall." He colors in the cat's malevolent yellow eyes. On the same page are several of our cows, recognizable by their idiosyncratic splotches, and the calf, Holly, who he's struggled to recreate from memory, several false starts floating disembodied around the finished sketch.

"Morbid. Nice," I say. But Pete has always been comfortable with sorrow—at least the overwrought, Black Parade variety. Concentrating it around these little deaths makes sense, his markers like lightning rods, dissipating the build-up safely. Don't think of the strangers, don't think of the scale—there's not enough paper anyway.