Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

“Good night princess,” the troll said, closing the door. The light went out and she was alone in the dark basement. How could she make the smelly stuff in the bucket into milk and where could she find a horse made out of white chocolate and a pink teddy bear that could sing the national anthem without looking at his notes?

She curled up on the newspapers. In a dream she spit gold coins and dried rosebuds fell out of her ears. She smelled like lake water, like a girl who'd been swimming all day in a pond where cows drink and frogs splay out from lily pads. Bits of leaves and blades of grass stuck to her cool skin under her bathing suit. Every word she whispered was trapped in a bubble and the bubbles formed a long necklace and her hair unfurled and she heard his footsteps above her, pacing this way and that.

Everything was right here. Furry blue elephants hovered like kites above her face, moving to the bouncing melody of “My Funny Valentine.” She turned her head, watched Elena the ballerina twirl as the notes grew farther apart and more sluggish. Inside her jewelry box, along with the gumball machine rings and the silver cross her aunt sent from Illinois, was the pink plastic bracelet she'd worn in the hospital, her name written in black magic marker with the officious slant of a nurse's handwriting.

“Stop,” she said, “if you're going to be like that.” The sound of her own voice, muffled and discordant, was like the mumbling of the retards in special ed who walked as if their legs were attached upside down. The banana warmed her, snaked through her body. The floor didn't seem so cold and who cared about the white spiders hanging upside down from the water pipes and the mouse in the corner that sometimes ran over to gnaw threads off the afghan. Her brother said, “Just lie still.” And the darkness came into her like a mop's wet tentacles. The white kittens shouldn't be hard to find, or the baby-blue chick. And what about the little chipmunk in the floral apron who made tiny pink cakes, each layer no bigger than a quarter? It was cold down here and she let her teeth chatter like the Halloween sound-effects record her father'd bought the year they turned their living room into a haunted house. Sandy Patrick rubbed her arms and then her calves. But there was no way to warm herself; better to go sit in the lawn chair in the backyard, let sweat dampen the crotch of her bikini, let the deer look at her with his big brown bedroom eyes.

Inside the Barbie suitcase with the fat metal zipper lay a bathing suit with sand in the crotch, a pair of Snoopy shorts, and a T-shirt with a jelly stain. Underneath was her blanky, the silky top of a blanket worn to threads.

If you fell asleep too early at the slumber party, then the mean girls stole your training bra and put it in the refrigerator. They put plates of onion dip beside your cheek so when you turned your head, cool sour cream stuck to your eyelashes and oozed up your nose.

The boy was there, the one who sent the letter that read, “I luv U because your eyes are brown as the sequoias, your lips the fiery red of hell, and yourself like I like them best.” In the closet, during her seven minutes in heaven, he gave her an Indian handshake and made jokes about slobbery kisses.

As the night wore on the girls got crazy, dancing to their favorite songs like lunatics, arms flying everywhere and legs akimbo. They screamed out the lyrics and Robin told a story about how her mother bled through her white Easter pants suit, how their dog tried to get the used sanitary napkin out of the trash. The girls’ faces twisted up with exhaustion and they started telling each other that they were stuck up. Robin got so overheated that she went completely nuts and tried to strangle Sandy with a jump rope and the basement door opened and the troll came downstairs, holding a candle that illuminated his hunchback and runny eye. He scooped her up, carried her over his shoulder, walking in a slight incline deeper into the basement and farther into the woods. Her cheekbone bumped rhythmically against the small of his back as she listened to starlings call one to another. Leaves trembled and the troll squashed tender green seedlings with his heavy boots. She held the afghan to her face and sucked her thumb. Snakes hung like moss off tree branches.

The troll hurried along the path littered with plastic potato chip bags and french fry wrappers, then stopped abruptly. She heard his key chain rattle as he unlocked the little wooden door. The troll set her down in the dark and lit a paraffin lamp and she saw in its glow that the walls and floor were made of red dirt, the bed of green moss, and in the middle, before her, a giant tree stump for a table and fat logs for stools. On the table oatmeal waited in a little wooden bowl, and the troll pulled the silver spoon with the filigree handle out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her, then sat down to watch her eat.

* * *

“I got a letter from him,” the bear said sadly. “It seems we've grown apart.” He was smoking rose petals in his acorn pipe, puffing on the bamboo reed. From his birch-bark poach, with the leaf-stem latch, he took a pinch of yellow petals, struck a wood match against the tree stump table, and leaned forward to light up. The smoke smelled like sunshine heating up one's hair, and of yellow finches with singed feathers. “Letters from the other side,” he said, “are always filled with gobbledy gook.”

All afternoon the bear catalogued his sorrows. Summer was long over, so there were no more berries, just bark and weedy plants to eat. He was horribly lonely and missed the caterpillar so desperately, some nights he barely slept a wink. But she could tell by the preoccupied cast of his eyes and how he held his snout straight out that the bear loathed himself for sinking down so deeply into self-pity, and he said in a voice meant to chide himself, “For goodness sake, let's not whine about it. I have my health and my reputation. Life goes on. The earth circles the sun, the planets go around. It's all like some complicated game with different colored balls played by invisible and benevolent giants.” He puffed a huge cloud of creamy smoke. “Maybe that's why I feel so anxious all the time.”

Sandy offered some herbal brew in the chipped teapot the bear brought as a housewarming present. He found it wrapped in a moth-eaten cashmere sweater inside a bag of trash. But he waved her off and took the well-worn envelope from his pocket and began to read. “I have my memories. You dominate them. The space you fill in my mind is overwhelming and now being alone is the best way for me. I can live this way. But I still pull you out from my memories to spend time with you. The best times. The happiest times. When you and I were all that mattered. I miss you today, today especially. I want to hear your voice and listen to your words. I want to see your face and touch your cheek. There is a park here with a tree for you to sit lazily under. I would watch as you stray from the directness of the sun.” The bear's voice cracked and he trailed off but tried to act indifferent by rolling his eyes and flipping his wrist dismissively. “That sort of sentimental gibberish always puts me to sleep,” he said, faking a yawn. “If he really cared, he'd come back for a visit.”

Little Miss Nobody, the troll kept saying, his hand tight on her upper arm. First she heard the whoosh of the match, then a lush crinkling of paper and the smell of smoke. The red ant bit between her shoulder blades. The sting was accompanied by a smell like hair singed in a curling iron. Her brain went sliding backward, dissolving into vaporlike heat off summer asphalt. A spark snapped out of the fire and bit her knee and her father pulled her back, said that campfires were dangerous, that once he saw a little girl who wasn't careful get fire in her hair.