THE WORDS SHE SAYS OUT LOUD
By Jenny Arnold
(This story was generated from Randall Brown's course
at the Long Story Short School of Writing –
"Max! What are you doing?" Spit gums at the corners of his mother's mouth, and she uses her electric voice, the one that is shrill and insistent and seems like a person all by itself. She used to wear lipstick and earrings like the pretty mothers. Now her bare lips are dry and cracked, always crusted brown where her teeth won't stop their chewing. He's on the floor playing with the train set, already hunched, and now he curls over further. Of course, he knows the train is Super Jackson's. It was Super Jackson's fourth birthday present, his last one. His parents had explained that Super Jackson wouldn't have very many birthdays, that they had to make each as special as they could. He can understand that, but today is his seventh birthday and there is no present at all.
"Super Jackson said I could play with it." His voice, like his eyes, barely peeks up past his eyelashes. Maybe it is the wispy quality, the words barely floating on silence, that fold his mother inward, that pull her arms, crossed, over her stomach. "Super Jackson said so," he says.
And suddenly, here she is – his mother standing over him, her fingers nibbling greedily at his scalp.
That night at dinner, he squirms and fiddles in his seat until finally his father relents on the spinach issue. "Fine, go bring us your surprise." He comes back with construction paper cone hats, a large bulk wrapped in pages torn from coloring books, all colored in marker and taped together, and three Super Max buttons.
His mother had buttons specially made after Super Jackson left them. The buttons feature his brother's four-year-old picture inscribed with "Super" arcing across the top and "Jackson" arcing across the bottom. They all must wear the buttons every day; it is a family rule. Now he's taken some of the extras and drawn three self-portraits, carefully cut them into circles and taped them on top. He'd first written just "Max" across the pictures, but in the end he'd chewed at the skin just below his lower lip, kneaded the wet flesh in his mouth, and added "Super" in front of his name. He gives his mother and father each their party hat and button, and then he tears open his gift. It is Super Jackson's train.
"Super Jackson said he wanted me to have it." His parents sit, still, at the table. "For my birthday."
His mother gets up slowly. She takes off her party hat as she walks to him. "Careful," he says as he sees it bend between her fingers.
His mother stands above him for a moment before she drops the hat and crouches, slaps him across the face. He tries to blink in the tears, but his eyes are hot. "It is a gift," his mother says in her snake voice, "that your brother talks to you." Her hand slithers to his arm, grips it. His eyes rest on the crushed party hat on the floor. "How dare you use Super Jackson like this?" He looks to his father. His father uses his fork to push the spinach around on his plate.
It is much harder to talk to Super Jackson when he doesn't know what Super Jackson should say. But now, every day, his mother follows him hungrily. Now he must talk.
"Super Jackson loves heaven," he says out loud, "with all the pretty angels and all the best toys."
"Super Jackson says I would like heaven, too," he says silently.
He's taken to sleeping in Super Jackson's bed, curling into a kitten ball and sucking his thumb. He hasn't sucked his thumb since he was three, the year Super Jackson was born. "Big brothers are too old to suck their thumbs," his mother used to say. Now, when he lies just so, mimicking the picture on her dresser of Super Jackson—"He sleeps just like an angel," they used to say—his mother doesn't chastise the thumb. She looks at him with her hungry eyes, tries to swallow him whole. Then she climbs in bed and curls herself around him and presses him tightly to her chest. She smells like sweat and earth. Sometimes, if he's not careful about how he holds his face before she presses, it is hard for him to breathe. Sometimes he is purposely not careful.
Tonight he opens his mouth, works to feel his lips slide, smooth, against her linen gown. "Do you ever wish," he asks, "that I was the one who died?"
He doesn't listen to the words she says out loud. He has gotten good at hearing words that aren't there. In his mother's head, he hears, "You are, Super Max. You are the one."
Jenny Arnold lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where she works in a bookstore and fantasizes about seeing her name on the shelves. Contact Jenny.
