John Jodzio - Knockout

“Where are you going?” Lily yells.

Annabelle’s talking on her walkie-talkie with a trucker named Herc.

“I’m running away,” Lily hears her tell Herc. “Had enough, you know?”

“I hear you,” Herc tells her.

Annabelle walks down the white line of the road. Lily follows behind her in the gravel of the ditch. Lily sees a dead fish lying there, then a bike without any wheels. There’s a torn-up mattress and small birds keep flying in and out of its guts.

“Where are we going?” Lily asks when Annabelle turns into a neighborhood. Annabelle does not answer her, she walks for another block and then she turns up the sidewalk and pounds on the door of a gray house. A woman opens the door. She’s wearing a man’s shirt with different-colored paint all over it. Her hair is up in a messy bun. Lily can see a piano against the living room wall and an easel spread out facing the window.

“We want to see our dad,” Annabelle says.

Lily hates to say it, but Fern’s prettier than her mother. She’s got slender arms and her toenails are painted purple.

“He’ll be back in a bit,” she says. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get you something to drink.”

Fern walks into the kitchen. Lily stays sitting on the couch, but Annabelle gets up and walks around. She picks up a wooden bowl that’s sitting on the mantle.

“It’s margarita mix without the booze,” Fern says, handing them the drinks. “That’s all I’ve got right now.”

A dog runs through a dog door. Its leash drags on the ground behind him. Lily holds out her palm and he licks it. Annabelle notices Fern looking at the Band-Aids on her palms.

“This wasn’t an accident,” Annabelle says, peeling back the Band-Aid so Fern can get a closer look. “It was on purpose.”

Fern’s cell phone rings and she walks into the kitchen to answer it.

“Yes,” Lily hears her say, “yes, they’re here.”

Lily and Annabelle sit on the curb and wait for their mom. Fern gave them plastic cups full of margarita mix to go. Jerry’s truck drives up. Their mother gets out and gives them a big hug.

“What the hell were you thinking?” their mother says. “Running off like that?”

On the ride home, their mom sits next to Jerry in the cab. She touches his knee once, but he keeps staring straight ahead, his eyes on the road. Lily notices that one of his eyes is full of red veins, but that the other has none.

When they get to the apartment, their mother asks Jerry to come up, but he shakes his head no.

“Early shift tomorrow,” he tells her.

“And that’s that,” their mom tells the girls as Jerry drives off. “Even the really nice ones have a breaking point.”

But their mother’s wrong. Jerry stops over the next night. He comes up the stairs carrying a new bathroom door. Annabelle’s sitting at the kitchen table when he walks inside. Her walkie-talkie’s broken and she’s removed the casing to see if she can get it to work again.

“Can you fix it?” Annabelle asks Jerry.

Jerry goes out to his truck and returns with a tool kit with some very small screwdrivers. He works on the walkie-talkie for a few minutes, pulling on a few wires. Soon there’s the cackle of static again.

“Time for bed,” their mom tells them.

The girls fall asleep to the noise of Jerry’s drill in the next room and the lonely sighs of truckers calling out for company. When they wake up the next morning they find the old bathroom door draped over their bodies, keeping them warm.

Ibring a bag of balloons and a mini helium tank to the park. My dog Tater takes a crap by the basketball court and I pick it up with a baggie. I blow up a bouquet of balloons and tie the baggie onto them and then Tater and I sit on the park bench and watch everything float away.

As we sit there, a homeless man flops down next to us. He’s wearing cutoff camouflage shorts and a T-shirt with the words “Cabo San Lucas” on it. There’s a paper clip and some rice caught in the man’s long beard. He’s a bruiser, large biceps and big thighs. He’s perfect.

“Excuse me,” I say, “would you like to form an alliance?”

The man looks me over. I’ve just turned fifteen. I’m dressed like a skater, even though I don’t skate. I’ve gotten sick of trying to grow a moustache, so I’ve just penciled one in.

“Is this some sort of dicksuck thing?” he asks. “Because I’m not down for anything dicksuck.”

“It’s the furthest possible thing from being dicksuck,” I say. “The furthest possible thing.”

The man pulls a bottle of whiskey from his backpack and takes a swig. He takes off his shoe and reconfigures his sock.

“Would this alliance get me some of that helium?” he asks me.

We’re sitting near a water fountain that looks like a big dandelion. The fountain was recently shut down by the city because people kept getting caught having sex in it. I can see the fountain from the window of our apartment. I miss its soft lighting and the people who used to grope underneath its spray.

“You’d get all the helium you could ever want,” I say.

The man runs his tongue over his chapped lips. He’s not looking at me at all; he’s staring right at my helium tank like I’m not even there.

“Then we’ve got a deal,” he says.

I shake his hand and hand him the tank. He puts the release valve up to his mouth and inhales. I watch as his eyes roll back in his head.

“My name’s Frankie,” he says to me in a very high voice.

When I get back to my apartment, my sister, Ellen, is sitting at our dining room table. She’s wearing sunglasses. She has a cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders. She’s running her fingertips over my mother’s old braille book, Braille for a New Century , moaning gently like my mother used to moan whenever she read braille.

“Are you still pretending to be blind?” I ask.

Ellen just turned twenty-two. She became my legal guardian two years ago, after my mom died. For a long time it was just Ellen and me and it was wonderful. Then she met her new boyfriend/acting coach, Cal, in an acting chatroom and a few days later he just showed up at our apartment with his suitcase. Now, through a variety of week-long method acting exercises, Cal is training Ellen to become a world-class actress. Last week Ellen pretended to be deaf. Before that she wore a hockey helmet and was mesmerized by jingling keys. The week before that, she wore an overcoat and talked with a British accent.

“Who’s your new friend?” she asks me.

I see my binoculars on the kitchen counter and realize she’s been spying on me.

“If you’re blind, how did you see what I was doing in the park?” I ask.

Ellen’s hands graze over the bumps in the braille book lightly, like she’s playing a harp. She chuckles a little — like there’s a joke her fingers just relayed to her brain.

“My other senses are heightened,” she tells me. “That’s what happens when you lose one of them. The other ones step up.”

Ellen taps her way over to the refrigerator with my mom’s old cane. She slides her hand inside the fridge and rummages around exactly like my mother used to rummage. She opens a jar of pickles, pulls one out, and takes a snapping bite.

“That guy in the park asked for directions,” I say. “That’s all it was.”

Ellen makes her way out to the living room. On the way there, she smacks me in the shin with her cane. Hard. Her face shows no emotion. It’s like she’d smacked a parked car or an ottoman.

“Sure,” she tells me, “sure.”

When Ellen goes to the grocery store, Tater and I turn on the TV and watch our favorite reality show. There’s a very exciting race happening. To win the race you have to paddle a log boat out to a totem pole in the middle of a river and then you have to shimmy up the pole and grab a red flag. Whoever does this the fastest won’t have to eat beetles for dinner.