“It's a boy's name,” Em repeats, but I'm not about to give a woman who lives in a one-room shack with an alcoholic husband a lecture on gender politics. “Besides, your mother chose the name Ozora for you. Give the dead some respect.” I narrow my eyes and purse my lips. There's no point in arguing with Aunt Em. She’s my dad’s much older sister, almost a mother since they were twenty years apart. She's from a completely different generation than me, a completely different mindset.
“Why am I in here?” I ask as she shuffles around the small corner kitchen. It's not much, barely more functional than the camper kitchen on my parents' RV, but damn, she knows how to use it.
“You have chores to finish up,” she tells me as I curl my fingers into a fist. Back home, my chores were simple shit like cleaning my room or putting dishes away. Here, it's crap like chopping firewood or waxing the wood floors. And then Uncle Henry storms in and shakes his dirty boots off all over it … “I want you to bleach the bathtub and pull the shower curtain down to handwash it. Get it out to dry before this storm rolls in.”
Auntie Em puts put her hand on her lower back and grumbles something about her sciatica pain flaring up. Every time a storm rolls in, she starts bitching about it. Anyway, we read about changes in air pressure affecting old injuries in my anatomy class, so I guess she might be telling the truth.
“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?
Toto watches the sky, ears pricked with alertness, as I pop the door to the cellar and find Yori and her boyfriend halfway to third base. Gross. I wrinkle my nose.
“Hey.” My voice snaps the two of them out of their hormonal bliss and draws their attention my way. “The witch wants you out. Dinner’s in fifteen.” I shrug my shoulders in a loose apology, and Yori groans dramatically. Must be tough to go home to your three sisters and two loving parents. I’d do anything to have my siblings … parents … and grandparents back.
But they’re all dead.
Everyone I knew and loved, gone. Every living family member on my dad’s side of the family (mom never had any herself) gone in an instant. The only person I have left on this earth that’s blood-related to me is Aunt Em. That’s it. And there’s no love lost between us.
“Can’t we hang out for a little longer?” Yori whines, tossing her raven-black hair over one shoulder. As if in response to her question, tiny pieces of hail begin to come down in icy sheets. Uh-oh. “Never mind,” she amends, grabbing the tattooed guy by the hand and dragging him toward the latch. “Might be a cyclone coming, and I am not getting stuck in here. No Wi-Fi.” Yori pulls him up the steps and past me, waving a quick goodbye before climbing in her green VW Beetle and taking off down the winding road toward the highway.
I whistle to grab Toto’s attention and head back toward the house, wiping mud off my feet at the front door.
Before I go inside, I pause and turn, enjoying a brief moment of alone time on the porch. When I look out toward the empty fields, I can feel this energy in the air, this tingle in my fingertips that makes me want to … oh, shit, I don’t know. Dance in the hail? Steal my uncle’s trunk and run away? Run as fast and far as I can with my bare feet digging into the gray mud?