Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

The air was a thick-petaled flower swarming with baby lizards crawling everywhere over the idiot grass: skinks and whiptails, chameleons twilling their minuscule dew flaps, hatching even now from a clutch of eggs. Just an inch long, they hunted insects, butterfly larvae and worms, baby crickets and katydids. They sounded like a trillion synchronized, reverberating rubber bands, but wetter and more mysterious. The troll spit a glob of marbled mucus into the weeds. The lumpy spit slid down a blade of fool's wheat. Dung beetles and mayflies hatched from tiny gummy eggs, caterpillars spun branches together to make gray mummies, and moths, convinced the porch light was the moon, beat themselves to death against the bulb. She couldn't think of what she was thinking; every few seconds she lost her way, her thoughts going on without her, being revealed behind a closed door, like when she waited outside her parents’ bedroom while they whispered inside. It made her feel like she was already back with the earth. Earwigs crawled over her arms, gnats chewed her ankles, horseflies bit her neck. She was no different than this aluminum lawn chair, the frame tilting to a dangerous degree, no different than the deformed oranges, than the nightshade gone to seed by the side of the house.

The troll put his pen down and got up, walked over, and pulled the afghan up to her shoulders, covering up her chest. He wheezed. “Smoking,” he said, rubbing his fat tongue over his rotten teeth. He moved one citronella candle, smelling of lemon and a needle's prick, closer to her feet, carried the second back to his table and set it down, careful not to spill wax on his work. In the flame she saw auras of tiny handwriting on onionskin paper. The letters were square and uniform. They looked more like a pattern than characters in the alphabet, and there was a picture of Michael Jackson torn out of a magazine and framed with carefully drawn roses and thunderbolts, a blurry newspaper oval of the president with 666 written on his forehead and one of the Virgin Mary surrounded by swastikas. At the top of the page he was working on was a Polaroid of her. He must have taken it while she was sleeping. Underneath, he'd written, GIRL.

The troll was anxious. He used a toothpick to weed out corn kernels from his teeth, smoked cigarettes one off the end of the other, and reeked of fearful sweat like garbage trucks in summer, like bad Chinese food and smelly feet. He drove leaning forward, headlights off, trying to navigate like a moth by moonlight. The passage was tight, branches flicked against both sides of the van, and the mud road made oozy sounds. The party, Sandy decided, was for the turtle because she was seventy-six. She wore false eyelashes made of spiders’ legs and a wreath of violets around her head, and the caterpillar, who was so much younger and always looking for bits of wisdom to improve his rhetoric, asked what she'd learned in life so far.

“Not to eat bad grass,” the turtle said.

They were sitting around the tree stump, drinking flat beer out of Styrofoam cups, and the bear, who'd found the precious liquid scattered among pieces of charred wood, seemed already a little drunk.

“Here, here,” he lifted his cup, “I'll sing you a song. . It was sad. It was sad. It was sad when the Titanic went down. Men and women lost their lives, even little babies died. It was sad when the Titanic went down. ”

“Why are you always so gloomy?” asked the caterpillar. “This is a birthday party, not a funeral.”

The turtle looked depressed. Her husband had died not long ago and the funeral had been a fiasco.

“Cheer up,” the bear said. “Today you're sixty-seven.”

“Seventy-six,” the caterpillar corrected him, “and remember what Lincoln said, ‘If this is coffee, I'll have tea, if this is tea, I'll have coffee.’”

The bear and the turtle looked at him blankly. “Could you explicate?” the bear asked.

“Oh, you know Abe,” the caterpillar said. “He was a nice man, though not always coherent.”

But there was nothing to be done; the turtle was depressed, the big barroom bags under her eyes sagged, and she got teary. “Looks like rain,” she said, glancing up at the sky.

“Yes,” the caterpillar nodded, “everyone make sure to stay away from the swing set because it attracts lightning. If you touch a door handle and it's hot, never go into the hall; and if someone catches on fire, wrap them up quickly in a blanket. Don't go in the water if you hear thunder and try not to be at the top of any trees. Put out all campfires with water and don't throw your cigars into dry grass. Always watch out for stranger danger and be careful if you've had a big meal and feel light-headed and your blood turns into heavy cream. Don't take any pills the troll gives you.”

The ones she'd taken earlier made it impossible to keep awake. Water moved against the shore in its white noise way and she heard a buzzing sound that at first she took for a fly inside the van, then a giant dragonfly hovering outside the passenger window, and then a speedboat towing water-skiers.

The back door swung open and bright light shone in her eyes. She felt her pupils quickly retract and she turned her head.

“You'll like her,” the troll said. “She lies still.” Water licked the wooden poles of the dock, where blue crabs fed on algae and barnacles, and nobody said anything. They like me, she thought, because I lie still.

And a new voice said, “That's Sandy Patrick.”

“Down here nobody will know the difference,” the troll said.

“What, are you crazy?” the man asked. “She's on the news once a week.”

“You didn't take the other one either,” the troll said bitterly.

“She was too old and he don't like them to have tattoos,” the man said. And then the light was gone. The hue under her eyelids changed from orange to wavering black. She was four and had wet her bed again. They like me because I lie still. If the bed gets wet, throw the sheets on the floor, throw the afghan; then it will dry but the whole place will smell of urine. The man who owns this mattress puts water onto the bed. And it's horrible to sit all night in a wet diaper, but if you wet your underwear just try to go before bed. They like me, Sandy thought, because I lie still.

“Bad luck,” the man said. He and the troll had walked around to the front of the van. “Call us if you got something we should know about.”

The troll got in and slammed the door, turned on the engine, glanced at her in the rearview window.

“Never put your finger in an electrical socket,” the caterpillar continued, “and look both ways before you cross the street. Don't swim on a full stomach because you might get a cramp and watch out for swaying weeds at the bottom of the lake, because sometimes tendrils catch your feet and pull you down. Wash your hands after you go to the bathroom and don't eat moldy bread. Never play with matches, hold sparklers at arm's length and scissor blades together and pointing down, and never run at the pool. Don't eat things you find in the medicine chest — it's not food, it's scientific — and always, always wear your seat belt.”

“Home again, home again,” the troll shouted with glee, “jiggidy-jiggidy-jiggidy-gee.”

All night long weather fronts battled for the soul of the house. The doorknob shuddered and wind tried to get at her, invading the glassy installation, snaking through vents in the paneling. Wet leaves, twigs, and tiny wood chips were strewn all over the backyard. A big branch hung off the walnut tree just outside her window, its pulpy-colored wood swarming with earwigs and centipedes. Underneath one of her mother's breasts, cancer broke through like bubbles of steak fat, so tender and oozy that they went through a box of cornstarch every day.