Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

Flynn rolls over onto his side with the yellow matchbook. When he lights the match, his son’s face is there, just beyond the flame, the light reflected in his eyes. They watch the tiny fire move down the paper stick toward Flynn’s fingers. Before it hits the bottom and goes out, he leans toward his son. “Do you want to hear a truth?”

How will we know when the biscuits are ready?” Ellie is staring into the oven window. The tray is on the second rack from the bottom. The dough, still wet, isn’t doing much. Harry sits on the countertop, the back of his tennis shoes thumping the cabinet door. His black hair hangs sheetlike over his forehead, and he flicks his head quickly. It’s a tic he’s got.

“My mother’s making me go to church in the morning,” he says.

“When I was little, we went to church maybe once a month,” she says. “But I prayed every night, and I had this magazine cutout on my wall, and I thought it was a picture of God but later I realized it was just Allen Ginsberg.”

“You should just see my mother at church,” he says. “It’s obscene. She waves her arms like this during the songs.” He has his hands up over his head.

Ellie can’t help but laugh. Harry is living at home again and that means he has to do certain things. Take out the trash. Keep his nails clean. Believe in a higher power.

The biscuits glisten in the oven.

“Sometimes I wonder if my mother is on something,” Harry says. “I wish there were more drugs. Different ones. I wish there was a drug that made everything look two-dimensional. Like we were living on a sheet of paper.”

“I wish there was a drug that made everything taste like fried chicken,” Ellie says.

“I wish there was one that let you see every kind of light there is and all the colors we can’t see now.”

She looks back in the oven, and the biscuits are golden, maybe even a little brown.

“Let’s take them to the park,” she says. She wants to hang upside down from the jungle gym. The way they used to.

• • •

They go to the park with their biscuits protected in paper towels. Ellie has blueberry jam on her biscuit. Harry has butter on his. A little girl is already on the jungle gym so they sit down on a bench like the parents do. Ellie tugs loose a strand of her long brown hair and slips it into her mouth to suck on the loose ends. Her mother doesn’t like this habit, says it’s something little girls do and not women. “You could be so much prettier if you acted like it,” she sometimes says, which makes Ellie laugh because pretty , to her mother, means plucked and proper with a big pink Easter hat. Aside from her chin, which Ellie fears is maybe a tad doughy, she is satisfied with her body, the large blue eyes, the waist thin as a wine bottle. Her boyfriend, Bryan, says she’s got a “classic” look, plus amazing lips.

“I’m not a big fan of Bryan’s,” Harry says when Ellie brings him up. “He’s okay, I guess, but I don’t get you two together. As a couple, I mean.”

Ellie has been dating Bryan for not quite a year, but she doesn’t object when Harry puts his hand on her bare knee on the bench. It’s like old times. They finish their biscuits, and Ellie leads him into the women’s bathroom in the public park and locks the door. He lifts Ellie onto the edge of the sink, and the sink is wet. She feels herself sliding back into the basin.

“It’s kind of gross in here,” Harry says. “Sorry.”

He’s right, but that doesn’t stop them. They keep their tops on, and Harry is fast. He goes outside to wait on her. She needs a moment in the stall. On one of the walls, someone has written, HALLELUJAH BATHTUB. Ellie wouldn’t mind a hallelujah bath, whatever that is.

She joins Harry on the bench outside again. The little girl is gone from the jungle gym, but they don’t feel like hanging upside down anymore.

“I know I was a little fast,” Harry says.

“Next time will be better,” she says.

Next time is a little better. They are in her bedroom on top of the covers. Her mother is out to lunch. When it’s over they agree a nap seems like a nice idea, but neither of them can fall asleep. She tries to extrapolate an entire life from this moment, the two of them spooning together in her bed, time marked by the spray of the sprinkler slapping the window glass, by the whir of the overhead fan. She shuts her eyes and sees Allen Ginsberg’s shining bearded face. Harry, arm draped over her side, pretends to snore, then asks if she wants to make something in the kitchen. Biscuits — or maybe éclairs? His mother recently taught him how to make an amazing cream from scratch.

“Do you ever want to be somewhere other than here?” she asks.

He sits up, his back against the cloth headboard, silent.

“I used to say I was going to study dolphins when I grew up,” she says. “Bottlenose, Long-Beaked, Short-Beaked, Spinner. I had all the species memorized.”

“I do remember you having dolphin stickers on all your notebooks.”

She slides out of bed and stretches with her hands on the back of her head, spinning back and forth like a weather vane before a storm. “I’ve got plans with Mary now,” she says. “But call me later, okay?”

Ellie doesn’t really have plans with Mary because Mary is working today. Instead she drives over to her boyfriend Bryan’s house because he’s been out of town for the last few days to see his aunt and uncle. They watch some television and eat fruit Popsicles. During a commercial break, Bryan mutes the volume and announces that he may be moving to Charlotte.

“Why?”

“My uncle got me a job at his bank.”

“But you’re a drummer.”

“I’m still a drummer,” he says. “And now I’m a banker too.”

But she suspects that it is not really possible to be both things.

Bryan asks if she’d like to move to Charlotte too. It would be a big step, he knows — their names on the same mailbox, on the electricity bills, on a one-year lease. Ellie says she wants some time to think about it, and then they kiss for a little while.

During a commercial, she asks, “Did you know millions of years ago dolphins lived on the land and they looked like rat-wolves?”

He mutes the volume again. “Wait, what are we talking about now?”

“Dolphins. They had legs. So, basically they evolved from being water animals to land animals and then went back to being water animals again.”

There is an analogy here, somewhere, she’s sure of it, one in which she is the dolphin and Charlotte is either dry land or the ocean.

• • •

When she leaves Bryan’s house, Harry is parked across the street in his mother’s car. He has followed her here. His window is down but he doesn’t say anything until she’s all the way at the car, one hand on the roof. The paint between the ski rack and the top of the door is bubbled and cracked, the windshield splattered with dark berry bird shit.

“I thought you’d broken it off with Bryan,” he says.

She never said that. Not exactly.

“Get in,” he says. “Please.”

They drive to the top of a small mountain and park at the overlook. He sits on the guardrail with his legs over the side. With his phone he takes a picture of Ellie on the hood of the car.

“I’m ready to go home,” she says. “Let’s go.”

They stop for soft serve first. In the car his paper cup springs a leak. He’s got vanilla ice cream dribbled across his jeans. She rubs her hand up and down his knee a few times and points at the milk.

“That was fast,” she says, a bad joke. “Sorry.”

He crushes his empty cup and drops it on the floorboard with all the other trash — receipts, old printed Google Maps directions stomped with dirty bootprints, napkins, fast-food bags, straws with crushed and chewed-up tips. She worries the state of his car is a manifestation of some inner turmoil. Your car is a temple, a twenty-first-century Bible might say.