Rebecca Coleman: The Kingdom of Childhood

“Sure,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. There was no point in play-acting as though he expected the conversation to take place right here. He lifted the mask and set it on the table, slipped off the gloves beside it. His instructor met his eye, but only by way of accounting for his safety; nice to see someone at this school paying attention to that, for once.

She stood beside the door that led outside, her hand on the push bar. It was brazen of her to corner him like this, long after the bazaar was over, with no conceivable excuse for pulling him out of class. He hadn’t spoken to her since their ill-conceived rendezvous the week before; and earlier that day he had, in the courtyard, succumbed to the urge to kiss Fairen, to the approving whoops of the few present to see it. It would not surprise him to learn that Judy had been spying on him. It had to be the most tedious part of sleeping with somebody’s mother: no matter what you did with her, she was still a mom, and the eyes on the back of her head seemed to have twice the range when she was creepily obsessed with your body.

He dropped the apron on a stool and followed her out the door, bracing himself against the rush of frigid air and a flurry of small icy snowflakes. She made her way toward the corner of the parking lot that bordered woods, but he stopped where the asphalt did and refused to step into the brush. Something felt off about her. He knew she felt hurt and possibly angry and, undoubtedly, full of anxiety, but he sensed a harder edge that made him cautious. Not that Judy posed a danger to him—she was barely over five feet tall, for Pete’s sake—but there was a bobcat energy to her that he didn’t care to incite.

She turned at the tree line, giving up on luring him further, and tucked her hands in her sleeves. She had looked relatively normal when she came into the workshop, but already her face was blotchy with tears. He felt taken aback by how foolhardy she was, out here where anyone could see them. He wasn’t going to entertain this very long. She could take a hit for it, but he had no intention of doing so.

“You’re done, ” she accused.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I am.”

“You’ve taken up with Fairen.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she spat. “You wanted her all along.”

He felt his lip curl. “Who cares whether I did or not? And since when do you give a shit about what I want? I say no, and what do you do? You blockade the goddamn door.”

She pushed the heels of her hands across her cheeks. Shaking her head, blinking down at the ground, she said in a hopeless voice, “I ought to turn you in for what you did to me that day. I never… invited you to do anything that… violent .”

He bristled and felt something inside him turn. “You go ahead and do that,” he retorted. “You’re going to do—what? Accuse me of rape?”

“Maybe I will.”

Snorting a laugh, he recoiled, taking a step backward. “Go for it. Get right on it. Bet you they’ll find evidence for it all over the fucking place. Bet Russ is sleeping in some of it right now.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’ll turn myself in. Would that simplify it for you?”

She lifted her face in a delighted smile, as if he’d just told a great joke, her eyes bright. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Damn, you’re big with the threats all of a sudden. Why can’t you just let it frickin’ lie? It ran its course. Get over it, move on.”

Her shoulders heaved with an enormous sigh, and she took two steps forward to lean against a tree. She looked exhausted. He almost felt sorry for her.

“Couldn’t we just be together one more time,” she proposed in an even voice, “so the time in the den doesn’t have to be the last memory?”

When pushed, pull. He shook his head. “No.”

She shifted her gaze sideways, toward the line of cars. “Maybe we can drive someplace after school, just discuss it?”

“No.” She wanted to blow him, anybody could have guessed that. He wasn’t even the smallest bit tempted. It wasn’t out of the question that he’d find his orgasm interrupted by an icepick in his chest, like in the movies. Not a turn-on.

She nodded, resigned. “Can I hug you goodbye, at least?”

“No,” he said a third time, but she was already coming toward him, arms outstretched, and there hadn’t been a great distance between them to begin with. Stiffly he allowed him self to be hugged, and with a quick economy of movement she slipped her retreating hand into the front of his pants. He grabbed her by the wrist.

“I said no, ” he told her.

Her smile was brittle. She’d only managed to get her hand between his jeans and boxers, and with his hand clenching the tendons in her wrist, her cold fingers flailed like a mouse caught by the tail.

“I hope she enjoys it,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”

She retreated and walked past him into the school, her body small beside the hulking frame of the workshop. Zach turned toward the building, looking around guardedly for faces in the windows; finding none, he ran a hand through his hair, the snowflakes melting at his touch into pinpoint cold. With a low grumble in his throat he made his way back toward the workshop, hiking his jeans higher on his hips, to face the forge.

Rhianne had said nothing further before she left me that morning. She didn’t need to. She had said enough.

After she left my classroom to tend to her three imaginary children I retreated to the bathroom, where I threw up three times. Coffee splattered on the rim of the toilet bowl, on the tile, on my jumper. I rested my forehead against the cool tile wall until I heard a knock and a small voice saying, “Mrs. McFarland, I have to go pee.”

I called in the music teacher to watch my children for the day. Then, except for a detour to the workshop, I went home, where I retired to the floor of a bathroom reserved for my own use. And there I stayed, my hands sweaty on the porcelain, staring into the water.

The water in the sink floated with my mother’s underwear, broad polyester panels that undulated like jellyfish between the dollops of Fels-Naptha foam. Next to it, shucked aside at a careless angle, sat the box of matches. The old wooden radio, elegant and well-dusted, blared out a melody at high volume: baby don’t leave me ooh please don’t leave me all by myself. The matches smelled of sulfur. The flame, in its small way, held the whole spectrum of color. It’s very, very wrong, you know, said the rhyme in my schoolbook, and even at ten my nerves tingled at the thought of it, perhaps because I was my father’s daughter.

Each doorknob was cold bronze. Turn, turn; and then again, turn. The irony: I knew before I opened it what I would see, and instead I saw nothing. But it burned into my mind anyway, skipping right over the part I could reach and embedding itself in the deepest recess, a stone falling into a pool so fast and so smoothly that the surface records barely a ripple. And now, having dived much too deep into that part of the water lately, I could brush against it without meaning to. There it was: two adults nude and sweating, Kirsten’s head hanging off the edge of the bed, her braids loosened and flopping against the mattress, a sloppy metronome. My mother’s pillow wedged beneath her back, my father’s face snarled like that of a barbarian from a warlike tribe, hideous and rude and dismal to behold. The smell of it was thick in the air, her arousal and his, entirely foreign to my senses. And if the language of that nation sounded to me like the original speech of humanity, then here was that which came before language—the voice at the core of every human in the world, when the breath moves in concert with the drive to continue the species.