drafts
My name is thick and short, just enough to stand without bite. one-syllable. I am not the jessicacaitlynamandashley of my classmates. One syllable slick like the fish we caught. I just liked the sound – no water in Arizona, when we moved and I heard that running water I fell in love. If you were a boy I would have named you Moss. My dad would have named me Dylan after Bob. But I was not a boy – I did not even the scales; now three girls one boy but I am the youngest and I attach the most meaning to things and I know my father didn’t name me, but my name makes sense with his name. It makes sense with us standing next to a creek or inside a canoe, our feet in an inch of water while I am digging in the Styrofoam container of black black worm dirt and I look up and he is holding his camera. My name makes sense then but it was my mother who named me. Brooke brooke brooke brooke. One syllable. Good for shouting and lectures and goodbyes.
But before I gave my name meaning it was just six letters on a piece of paper and a sound I learned from my mothers lips. I was not the first child by three so my name was not a reverent prayer over a bassinet in a pastel-colored room. My name was just another name in the list of four that got progressively simpler; Rebecca Alisa John then Brooke like a period ending the sentence of our family. Rebecca Alisa John did not like my name, and at first they cut my middle name in half and called me Nikki like a baby prostitute but I grew into something that was not flamboyant or mean enough for a name like Nikki and Brooke stuck to my simple blonde hair.
The punctuation at the end of a family is just that, an end, and 7 years after my appearance the 20-year book of my parents’ marriage banged out of existence and I turned into something more like an ellipsis … waiting for a thought to finish what we were meant to be.
But before that we live in a sleepy sentence of a town that someone forgot to finish. It’s like the beginning of a novel where everything goes wrong and no one knows how because my god, look how beautiful it could have been. We Are Here, we say, holding up a hand, mitten-mapped. We Are Here, next to a smudge of a bay on the great smear of Lake Huron. We Are Here on a dirt road, pulling mayflies off a screen door, pressing our thumbs down on mosquitoes until they are just little wet brown stains on our legs. There is gravel embedded in the soles of our feet. We are permanently damp with humidity. We Are Here in a place that registers as some idyllic nowhere – just enough struggle to make it interesting, we don’t need a lot of money honey, we’ll live off the land!
Our house was built by my father’s father and on Sundays dust floats in beams of light while I slide across the living room floor in my tights and I am not old enough to understand anything else. I have what I have – simple like my name until everything is not.
There is a garden where I drop seeds like bombs, tiny dirt cities exploded by bright green shoots pushing through them. The dirt smells like copper and blood and is dark enough to stain my hands when I bury the tiny husks. Each of these seeds is a wish that we will have enough for the four trailing commas of kids, each mouth open with an “and, and, and.” But I do not know this. I christen myself with the soil, Ash Wednesday everyday. The dirt rings my hairline for weeks until someone realizes and scrubs the stains away with a washcloth.
Our small, We Are Here middle of nowhere tilts up towards the sun behind our wet green and black garden. In the summer we walk up Monument Road towards the junkyard with the sun in our eyes. The days stretch out like old t-shirts. We never want to go inside.
The fence at the junkyard has slats like missing teeth and maybe there are dogs and maybe there are not, but for the sake of adventure there are dogs and a million piles of tires and old computer parts and barrels full of chemicals or magic or poison. My neighbor Brandy and I dare each other to climb the fence. Rebecca Alisa John scavenge art supplies computer chips broken glass, piles of junk that grow like living things. Later, but not yet, men in Hazmat suits that reflect the sun come and clean up the junkyard, leaving only the broken teeth fence and the piles of tires to sit above the house where we once lived. But not yet.
Next to the junkyard there is a creek, like a brook, a Brooke, but different somehow. Crick, my dad says. The crick. It runs like a spine to split the yard of our house and our grandparents’ house. Runs from the back of the junkyard down to the back of the garden where we plant our seeds like tiny prayers.
We do not get cavities. Alisa stands over me at the sink with a dollar store toothbrush scrubbing my teeth, my chin clenched in her hand. It doesn’t matter though, we do not get cavities and our bones do not break. Even later, when a car actually slams its bumper into John, our bones do not break. We crack, fracture, mend, move forward. Small superpowers.
The water we drink comes from an underground well fed by the stream that runs through the junkyard.
We begin to fold in on ourselves, collapsing our tiny origami lives, living smaller and smaller until something breaks.
