Three crosses on a hill made from rusty clothesline poles watched over the town. The middle one was taller than the two flanking it. “What’s a chigger?” she asked him once. He had smiled while she scratched her ankles.
“I used to have a beautiful name,” she told him playing pool. She hit a stripe with the cue, and it bounced off the corner of green felt instead of into the pocket. Her hair was black and shiny like wet tar. He’d already kissed her lips in the parking lot of the abandoned KFC, that giant chicken bucket no longer swirling, its white sides gone and immobilized gears hanging exposed.
He wanted her but different than Crystal or Renee. Any of those girls he’d known since school. She wasn’t like them. She was handblown glass, the thick kind you can barely see through. She made him feel like there was always a thunderstorm about to break.
“My grandmother used to call my name,” she told him as they drove the Chrysler past the Biscuit World sign reading “Hiring Manger Trainees” in black plastic letters. A child’s bike lay on its side outside a moldy single-wide, wheels spinning. Sumac and Queen Anne’s Lace filled the ditches up Route 6. They passed the “Shackled by Lust?” billboard (Text 83 to TRUTH) then turned right at the front-end loader that had sat still as the Statue of Liberty for as long as he could remember, like the driver jumped down out of it one day and walked to Charleston along the riverbank never looking back.
“Kudzu comes from someplace else,” he explained as she stared out the window at the valley covered in green leaves, ivy-like tendrils scaling brick walls, wrapping entire trees, rising into the air like it would search and search for what it needed all the way to outer space. Like it would climb to the moon to find it.
When he put the car in park, she put her feet up on the dashboard. The three crosses watched through the windshield.
He liked to listen to her talk about what she was learning at the community college. How to pull a sheet so tight onto a bed no wrinkles would harm sensitive skin, how to take off the shirt of a person who has a broken arm (unaffected limb first), how to flick a vein over and over to get it to plump up with blood so you can stick it with a needle. But today, with the sun beating on the treetops and the smell of bread and diesel in the air, all she wanted to talk about was her name.
“My grandmother called it from the house when it was time to come inside,” she told him, moving her sneakered feet back and forth on the dash like windshield wipers, “And the A was long, like obsolete or onboarding. Then it tilted and slid over the N into the C soft like sister.”
He rolled the windows down before turning off the car.
“It ended in a Y,” she said. “Not fast like you say here. Drawn out like episcopal or eaten. Erased.” She tipped her head back and sang the whole word as if into a jungle filled with sloths and barefoot children, a coastline close by with sparkling blue waters, a sky containing the songs of giant, colorful birds.
He knew it was wrong to love her just because she was different. He remembered how his neighbor had bought a bunny for his kids’ Easter one year and they doted on it for a few days and then ignored it. They found it dead in its cage one morning with plenty of lettuce and water in its bowl.
Girls weren’t pets, either. He shook his head sometimes. To clear it of her. He had started running again, every morning out by the old mill and back into town the dirt way past the laundromat. But nothing worked. She lived in there now like he’d been bitten by a mosquito with a virus or missed a tick and come down with Lyme Disease. Even if she disappeared today, he understood, this feeling would be with him forever. The feeling that there was more than this town. That the world was a million times bigger than it had been before he met her, and not only that-he was invited.
His dad said those people were no good. That they were rapists and gang members. His dad said she’d trick him and turn him into a father before he was ready. But she moved injured butterflies off the sidewalk. She wanted to help old people die peacefully.
She pulled her legs up under her in the passenger seat and turned sideways to face him. “You’re different from the guys at home,” she said. “They never shut up.”
He moved his hand from the steering wheel onto her knee. A cloud passed over the sun and they both shivered.
“Tell me your name again,” he said.
~
Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.