Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“Easy, sweetheart,” he said. From his mouth escaped the scent of rot.

Something leaden and malignant seized Luz’s heartmuscle. She wrenched away. “I can’t breathe,” she said, barely.

Ray turned. “What?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m dying.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck.

“I can’t breathe,” she said. “I fucking can’t breathe.”

Ray didn’t laugh at this, though it was laughable. Luz knew it was even now, except the knowledge was buried somewhere in her beneath bird tongue and daddy-o and sweetheart asphyxiation.

“You’re okay,” he said. “Listen.”

She gripped his shirt in her hands and pulled. “I can’t breathe , Ray.”

“You’re all right,” he said. “Tell me.”

One of the birds went wrat , impossibly loud, and Luz flinched. Wrat again and she began to claw at Ray’s midsection. People were looking at them now, some laughing, and she had designs to open her boyfriend up and hide inside him.

Ray took Luz’s two scrambling hands in one of his like a bouquet and looked her in the eye. “You’re okay,” he said again. “Tell me.”

“I’m okay,” she said, though she was also dying.

“Tell me again.”

She looked at him; she breathed. “I’m okay.”

“We’re walking,” said Ray, taking her by the shoulders.

They walked and breathed and walked and breathed and soon a dim disk of light floated ahead of them. Ray led her to it, miraculously, Luz saying, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.

Their blanket — a duvet meant for guests of the starlet — was still under the footbridge when they got back, another miracle. Ray sat Luz down. He passed her his ration jug. She refused it and he passed her hers.

He watched her as she drank.

“Thank you,” she said after some time.

“Do you want to go home?” he asked. He wanted to see the bonfire, she knew. He said, “It’s fine if you do.”

What she wanted was a few Ativan and a bottle of red wine, but those days were over. It was cooler in the canal and the air was freshish, or at least it moved. The long shadows of the mansions stretched to shade them and the blanket had not been taken and there was Ray, trying. She told herself to allow these to bring her some comfort.

“No,” she said. “Let’s stay.” She sat on the blanket and breathed. Eventually, Ray asked whether she wanted to go back to the drum circle.

“Can we just sit here awhile?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Ray said, which was what he always said. He motioned for her to lie back and rest her head in his lap. She did. She fell asleep and dreamt nothing.

—

Luz woke needing to pee. It was nearly dark but fires were glowing along the spine of the canal, the bonfire down the row throbbing brightest of all. Ray had taken his shoes off and was lying on his back. Luz sat still, studying him in the smoky light: his willowy hands, his steady chest, the tuft of black hair in the divot of his collarbone, barely visible above the neck of his T-shirt. His flat, slightly splayed feet. Everything about him suggested permanence. She rose and kissed him on the head. “I have to pee.”

Ray started to stand.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”

Luz made her way up the wall of the canal. The trench beyond was dark and balmy with stink, but she was feeling much better. She straddled the trench, lifted her dress, urinated, shook her ass some then stood up. Yes, she was feeling better. The sun had gone down and the canals were cooling off, the nap had dissolved the throb in her head, as a good nap will. She was okay. She would have some more water, eat something. There were blueberries in Ray’s backpack and mash in the growler. She was all right. They would go back down to the drum circle. They would dance. They would bonfire. She would not ruin everything after all.

Descending the smooth dusty pitch of the canal, she looked down at the bonfire and then beyond it, where someone had set off a bottle rocket. She saw the little puff of smoke and heard the snap. Just then — at exactly the instant the snap reached her, so that the moment was ever-seared into her memory as a tiny explosion — something slammed into her knees. She looked down to see a shivering, towheaded child wrapped around her legs.

Luz could not remember the last time she’d seen a little person. The child was maybe two years old. A girl, Luz somehow knew, though she wore only a shoddy cloth diaper, its seat dark with soil. She looked up at Luz with eyes like gray-blue nickels, sunk into skeletal sockets. Her skin was translucent, larval, and Luz had the sense that if she checked the girl’s belly she would be able to discern the shadows of organs inside.

“Hi there,” Luz said.

The child stared unblinking with her coin eyes.

“Are you lost?” asked Luz. “Where’s your mommy?” The girl’s forehead bulged subtly above the brow and she pressed it now into Luz’s crotch. Luz, embarrassed, tried to pry the girl from her legs. But the child clutched tighter and let loose a high, sorrowful moan. Luz went weak with pity.

“Shh,” she said. “You’re okay.” Luz patted her back then, unthinkingly, put her fingers in the child’s whiteblond hair, tufted like meringue at the nape.

Luz managed to separate from the girl long enough to kneel. The girl squirmed to reestablish herself in Luz’s lap, hinged her bony arms around Luz’s neck, and sobbed. Luz held her, her dress pulled taut where her knees pressed to silt. She expected someone to come for the girl, but no one did. No one was paying any attention to them.

Soon, the girl stopped crying. She regarded Luz a moment, curious, then reached one hand up and laid it plainly on Luz’s face, partially covering her right eye. The small hand was moist with snot or saliva, slick as a wet root.

“Where’s your mommy and daddy?” Luz said again.

The girl ignored the question if she understood it. She rotated her hand so it lay diagonally across Luz’s brow. The child pinched her mouth in concentration. She pressed, then positioned her other hand at Luz’s jaw and pressed again, as though getting some information from the sensation. Luz felt uncannily at ease. The raindance had slipped away and left the two of them alone in the smoky twilight, only the fires pulsing lure-like in the distance. Luz smiled, and the child smiled too, and when she did Luz felt an unbearable welling of affection, both for the girl and from her.

Then, with her hands still at Luz’s face, the girl said, “Piz kin tim eekret?”

“Tim eekret?” Luz tried.

The child squenched her face in frustration. “Piz kin tell you secret?” she repeated.

“Oh,” said Luz. “Okay.”

The girl stretched to Luz’s ear. Luz strained to make out what she was saying until she realized that the child was not saying anything, only replicating the feathery sounds of whispers. Spuh, spuh, spuh, spuhst.

When she finished, the girl leaned back and said gravely, “Don’t tell, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t tell anyone .”

“I won’t.”

Just then a figure strode through the dusk and toward them. It was Ray, looking purely mystified at Luz where she knelt on the ground, whispering with a child. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“She’s lost,” said Luz.

“Did you ask around?”

“It just happened.”

Another figure drew near them. Caved and tattooed torso, the chain of safety pins along his torn jeans. As he came closer Luz recognized the teenager who had touched her in the sewer. Several heavy chains drooped between his back pocket and a belt loop, swaying as he approached. The jagged black marker on his shirt read I knew I was a nut when the squirrels started staring . He did not seem to recognize Luz. His eyes were on the girl.