Legless and Under Waves

By Bahiyyih El-Shabbaz

All day I dread the end of it, the knot that will form in my stomach as I climb the stairs in front of the kids, that will move to my chest and stay for a long time after. Sometimes I try to shield myself between them, or I walk behind so I can herd them along.

“Got-damn!” he grunts tonight, the pile of mouth-breathing puke that is my neighbor, Clyde. He gropes for his balls through his sweatpants, jostles them around as he tries to catch my eye. We push past. “Gone give me a heart attack you keep walking around like that, Baby…mmmm mmmm mmmm….” He gets in another preacher-deep “Got-damn! before I can grab Tissa’s hand and pull her with me after Corey into our dark apartment.

“He’s so gross,” Tissa usually sighs. But tonight she says nothing.

The kids flip on lights and drop backpacks, wandering into the kitchen without glancing back.

I stand stamped into the door for a few seconds, deciding. He probably shouldn’t bother me this much, but he does, and I can’t seem to overcome him.

“Listen, you nasty-ass motherfucker,” I say calmly, walking soft as a nightlight, startling him as I show up at his side.

He squints like he’s trying to place my face, like he didn’t see me five seconds ago, hasn’t harassed me every morning and every night for a month, ever since we moved in.

“First of all, it’s fucking winter, and I’m fully clothed, I can’t get any more clothed, so stop telling me what I’m supposedly doing to your putrid little heart. Just don’t look at me. Or, do, and keel over and die, I don’t fucking care, but do not…ever, ever again in life…speak to me as if looking at you doesn’t make me want to scratch out my eyes…and especially shut the fuck up in front of my kids.”

Before he has a chance to slam my head through the wall, or say a word, I spin and duck back behind our door and deadbolt it. I feel so light.

“Who just came in?” Tissa yells in a wavy voice. Corey pops his head out of his room.

“Just me, Baby, just me.”

I can’t hear her release a breath but I feel it from across two rooms.

 •

Even when Tissa was a tiny six-and-a-half-pound newborn, she was overly alert. Even before anything. She didn’t sleep twenty-two hours a day like Corey did when he was born. Every time I went to check on her, her eyes were wide and roaming. Most of the time she wouldn’t cry. I used to say she looked like someone waiting on a ride, she had that nervous energy. Maybe she could feel the current of what was coming.

When she was two and it started I used to pray that she was too deep in sleep to hear. But after an incident, when I got a chance to go to her room, I’d find her lying on her back staring up at the ceiling and crying without a sound.

 •

Later, leaned over my spaghetti, I hear his television flare up next door and kind of feel bad. Not that Clyde isn’t horrible, he’s revolting. But I want very badly to be kind to people, even people who don’t deserve it. And I’ve always been good at rolling with the punches. I’m not petty. I’ve known men like him my whole life, all my teenage years were spent passing by, ignoring them. I don’t know why I let him get to me. Anyway, going back to cuss him out was probably barely about him at all, almost totally about someone else completely.

 •

Despite not being blood, Corey and my husband were close.

Corey’s been uncharacteristically quiet since we moved. I mean escaped. Out loud we’ve just relocated, temporarily. He’s fourteen and the high school here is so huge and everything’s trampling him. He hates one of his teachers, he hasn’t made real friends, he can’t keep up with some of the work. And all of it feels so out of my reach, swimming around above me, I can’t even touch a tail end of his problems. Lately I don’t feel like his mother at all, just a woman who houses and feeds him.

I used to have an answer for him about everything, but I’ve lost that.

Even when we left I kept silent. I let him come home to empty closets. If I’d had to confront him we would still be there. I didn’t even have the nerve left in me to write a note, the thought made me shake. Before him, I used to tell boys and men off all the time, about anything that bothered me. I never dated a guy I couldn’t put in his place. Sometimes I enjoyed it, and sometimes it was nothing.

Corey’s a head taller than me already, not a man or a kid. I have no idea if he thinks I was an idiot for staying so long, or if he hates me for leaving.

Tissa never asks why we moved without warning or why we can’t see or call him. She never turns her nose up to our new neighborhood, the litter pressed into the yards, or complains about the two a.m. screaming from sidewalk to window. If it wakes her she just slides into my bed and falls back asleep, pressing deep into my back like she’s trying to stick. When the word “dad” is mentioned on TV or in her presence I have seen her reach up unwittingly and rub her arm above the elbow, the raised jagged patch that remembers him in ridges and light-colored lines. She has a heart the size of his rage. Sometimes I picture it like a piece of red popcorn, blooming big and soft out of a small hard start, soaking up everything it touches.

 •

“How’s it going?” asks Lana, a dog-voiced woman with a thinning cap of black hair. “The two day stretch?” She grabs a long package as it moves down the conveyor belt and struggles to get control of it.

“We’re okay,” I sigh, which is true and untrue depending on the second. “We have Ramen. Cereal and milk. Think we’ll make it.” I smile up at her.

“Ramen! A godsend, ain’t it?” She cackles until it rolls into a violent cough. I’d ask if she’s okay but by now I know it’s as much a part of her as her Alabama accent. “You let me know if you ever need a little loan. I don’t have much but least my kids is all grown. I know how it is.”

“Thanks, I may take you up on that sometime,” I say, though I never, ever would.

 •

When we reach the landing of our floor a little past six, Clyde isn’t there. This hall hasn’t been empty since we’ve walked it. I get a flash of him hanging by an extension cord in his closet, a suicide note quoting me verbatim: Stop telling me what I’m doing to your putrid little heart. But when we walk by I hear movement inside his place, a television.

“Where’s that crazy guy?” asks Tissa.

“In his apartment for once,” I breathe.

“Good,” Corey says. “Because I was finna whoop his ass if he said something to you again.”

I give Corey a warning look about his language, his empty threat, but on top of it I’m grinning. He’s never acted protective of me like that before. And I’m a sucker for being stood up for. “Yeah right. Get on in there and get to your homework, boy,” I fake snap at him. Inside I’m swirling around.

 •

They love Ramen. They never had it in our old life.

They each eat a whole package. Tissa lies on her back with her belly rising slowly like a ghost until her skin stops. “If we had more I’d still eat it,” she announces, lifting her head up to see what I’ll say.

“We do,” I tell her. “But we have to save it for tomorrow.”

“Okay…can you put on my movie please?”

Her favorite right now is The Little Mermaid. Probably because it’s one of the only DVDs I grabbed from the cabinet on our way out of our old house, and we don’t have cable. She used to watch it a lot when she was four. It’s kinda young for her, I think, but she says it brings back good feelings, which is so relieving. I worry that she has none, sometimes, that there’s no nostalgia for her.

I put it on for her and go to my room. I can’t stand to watch it. She just pisses me off, Ariel. Such a fucking idiot, gambling her beautiful voice away to that greedy sea witch, all on the high hope of someone she only saw once, only knew by what she could see from where she was stuck, legless and under the waves.

 •

I used to throw parties. That was my thing. I cooked for days leading up to them, I baked mounds. I loved everyone being there, so close, around every corner, using both bathrooms. I loved the way he had to act at a party, how he had to smile and hold onto his hands. I kept thinking he was going to put a stop to them but he didn’t. I like to think that he loved them too, the way they forced him into decency once a month, that he wanted to be the man he was at parties as badly, maybe worse, than I wanted him to be.

 •

“Goodnight, sleep tight, Babygirl.”

Tissa beams up at me so hard that her eyes go under.

As I go for the light her face flattens into a puddle, like she’s seeing a terrible vision over my head. “Maaaamaaaa?” She smacks her face hard with both hands.

“What, what is it, girl?” I’m so anxious to slip under my layers of old quilts and knock out for six or seven sweet hours. My feet are killing me and the apartment is extra icy tonight.

“I forgot to give you the note about it yesterday! I’m ‘posed to bring in a treat tomorrow for my birthday!”

“What?” I try to ask and not yell. But she shrinks.

“Cupcakes?” she says, covered in blankets up to her eyes.

I breathe before I ask, “For how many kids, Tissa?”

“I don’t remember. The note’s in my bag. Twenty-eight. I think. And our teacher.”

I can’t hold my sigh in.

“I’m sorry….” Her tears are all reckless first responders. I see them pushing their way up.

“Don’t cry, Baby, let me think.

There is 79 cents in my account. A few coins in the bottom of my purse. I think about our cabinets, how they don’t hold flour or sugar or salt or baking soda, the fridge with no eggs or butter chilling inside. I wonder how much the packaged kind would cost. And there’s frosting.

I kneel down, peel back the yellow comforter, the stiff stained sheets like old skin. She’s wide-eyed and chewing her lips off. I pull her up a little and nuzzle my nose to hers, something we do. I stroke her head. “It’s okay. I’ll figure something out. Go to sleep, munchkin-butt.” I tickle her ribs a little so she can be assured I’m not mad before I leave the room.

 •

I find a few pennies on the counter, some change at the bottom of my purse. I probably have almost two dollars combined, if I use the self check out and put in my coins and then swipe my card. I don’t think this will cut it, but maybe if I just go to the store I’ll find something on super sale.

“I’m running out,” I step into Corey’s room to tell him. He’s awake and still in jeans, staring at the ceiling. I start to walk out, I can’t stand to ask him. But I have to, so I come back. “Hey, do you have any money, any change or anything?”

He looks over sharply like I called him a name. “Only the two dollars for lunch tomorrow…You need it?”

He doesn’t even have enough left for Friday’s lunch, he must have overspent one day. We’re just not used to this yet.

I think for a second. “No. Any quarters lying around, or anything?”

He shifts homework and cheap cologne bottles and magazines around on his dresser, comes up with a dime.

 •

I hum a steady prayer on the five minute drive to Walmart that the gas won’t run out on me for pushing it so far past the line, that they’ll have a huge rollback all down the baking aisle.

There’s no way I’ll afford all of the ingredients to make them from scratch. I check prices on the premixed boxes, cans of frosting. With the foil liners it would add up to like ten dollars. Maybe if I buy one box and stretch the batter meant to make twenty-four into twenty-nine, if I skipped the frosting and called them chocolate muffins. It depends on the tax. Also, fuck, they call for eggs and oil. I wonder if they’d be horrible with extra water instead.

Maybe just maybe a miracle will happen at checkout.

Walmart is always packed after nine like a secret society. I stand in line hoping no one steps up behind me. I don’t want anyone to see how little I might not be able to afford. When a man approaches with a sigh at the wait in front of us I let him go ahead and he looks at me funny before bumping around to take my spot. But then a woman walks up with cleaning supplies, and a woman with a stack of Lunchables, and a man with a basket of small things.

I keep my back to them as I scan the first barcode and the mellow robot woman inside the machine announces, “One…fifty nine.” I scan the second and she says, “Ninety-nine cents.” Then, silently, comes the nine percent sales tax: $2.81.

I re-count the change in my hand and add it to the 79 cents on the card in my pocket and stand there not knowing how to turn around and walk past all these fidgeting people to put these two things that equal less than three dollars back on their shelves. I don’t see a cancel button, the girl at the register between all the self-checkout stations who’s there to block theft will have to come over and key in codes and stall the line.

I wish I could just quietly beg her to take what I have, two dollars and fifteen cents, have mercy.

I hurry past the long snaking line with my eyes pinned down, put the items back in their spots. The burn slowly subsides but will linger, at least a little, way past tonight. It will add to all other tortures that refuse to go, things from yesterday and years ago, that sometimes rise so high I can’t see when I wake up in the morning.

I check out the packaged cookies, the roll of refrigerated dough, the bakery items that are marked down for their lack of freshness. But nothing is cheap enough for me tonight.

Outside, walking fast against the wind blowing in from the lake to the west of us, I almost cry. But I get behind my wheel and shake it down until it settles back in place. I turn the key and it struggles but it starts.

 •

Corey is asleep now, snoring like his dad used to. Tissa is detectable only in hills and lumps. I didn’t notice her habit of sleeping completely covered until after we left him. Maybe it’s something she’s always done and it has nothing to do with anything. I could never do it, I always need to have an overabundance of air. When she’s in my bed she’s fine, cuddled up to me and open.

I sit and rub my temples for a while. I looked for change in the parking lot and leading up to our building, didn’t find even one corroded penny. It feels unreal that I can’t scrape up enough for even one bag of Oreos. Also, I see, reading it now, the note says to send in juice, and cups, and little plates or napkins.

Every year for the seven other birthdays leading up to this one she’s had it all, the school treat, real parties at places like Chuck E. Cheese’s, one time we took ten of her friends to the movies and did cake and presents in a little room in back. But even after pay day that would be so far out of the reach of this life. Every cent spent matters now, like it did when I was growing up three states away in a neighborhood just like this one. I haven’t settled back in but I will, at least for as long as I have to. Fifteen years ago he took me out and I let go of the language and the customs, because I never imagined coming back.

Sunday she’ll turn eight without fanfare. I know she’ll say she doesn’t mind, she’ll smile and squeak that it’s okay, but it still won’t be.

I comb through the house again, through Corey’s room quietly. All the dropped and discarded change in the world but none of it fell here. I think about searching his bag for that lunch money but I can’t take the thought of him standing alone against the cafeteria wall with a growling stomach on top of everything.

All my friends were lost along with our old life. None of them were mine alone, so the risk of someone telling him where to find us heavily outweighs the comfort of having someone to Western Union me a few bucks in a pinch.

It’s midnight, and I’m out of ideas. I sit in the dark living room and just let it weigh on my chest for a while. There’s stealing, which I’ve never done, and which I’d probably suck at, and there’s the getting caught ending to consider, which is way worse than Tissa waking up to zero cupcakes.

No cupcakes, that is an option. Kids have lived through worse. She’s lived through worse. But when I imagine her jumping out of bed and running into the kitchen to see what I’ve created, when I think about having to tell her sorry, again, for another thing I couldn’t come up with, of her trudging into school to tell her teacher that they’ll have to skip her celebration, when I hear all the kids asking her why in a chorus, see her teacher shaking her head, I feel faint. I rip the cushions off the couch for a third time tonight. Isn’t this always where people find everything they didn’t even remember losing, rolled out of pockets, slipped between cracks?

I go through all the jackets and pants in my closet again. Of course there’s the same nothing that there was an hour ago. I plop down in the middle of a circle of my jeans, pockets turned out like double tongues.

I can hear laughter through the thin walls, from Clyde’s apartment. I doubt he’s in there with anyone, it seems to be him alone all the time, living for coming into the hallway when he knows I’ll be passing. Sounds like he’s watching old sitcoms. It’s amazing, actually, that I don’t hear him groaning to a porno.

As repulsive as I find him, he is the only person I know for miles.

He takes a while to come to the door. Maybe he doesn’t hear me. But I don’t want to knock loud.

Just before I walk away I hear footsteps, then silence. I’m sure he’s staring at me through the peephole. I keep my head low and knock again softly.

When he opens up his face is limp and he says nothing. He keeps one hand on the back of the door like he might slam it. He seems taller than ever.

“I want to apologize…for the way I spoke to you earlier.”

He looks away, into his apartment. All of his lights are on.

“I mean, I don’t like the things you say to me…in front of my kids…but I was stressed and angry about other shit and…I took it all out on you…I’m sorry.”

He chuckles for just a beat, sniffles, nods at the spot where the old flat hallway carpet meets his wood floor. Then he looks up in my eyes and I instinctively look away and he starts to close the door in slow motion.

“Hold on, I need to ask you…for a favor.”

He raises his eyebrows. He sighs and strengthens his stance, squares his shoulders, like he’s about to take a hit.

I laugh, close my eyes against the embarrassment, drag my fingers down my face. “My daughter needs cupcakes for her class tomorrow. For her birthday. And I don’t get paid for two days. I have next to nothing.”

He stares and I try really hard to look in his eyes as I wait in agony for an answer, to show him it’s possible for me to take him in. “What exactly you need?” he asks finally.

“Well, if you have the ingredients, I could borrow just a little and pay you back for them Friday. I need flour, sugar, eggs, butter -”

“I don’t bake,” he cuts me off. His arms fold and tighten against his chest. He’s smiling a little now, but not in a way that makes me feel that anything good is coming. “All I have is the eggs, so what else can we arrange?”

I know I’ve been lower, much, much lower than I am in this moment, but right now I can’t remember any of those times. “If I can borrow a little money, like ten dollars, I can pay you back with a little interest on Friday,” I spit out quickly and then stand making an ugly face, one eye closed tight, the other open on him.

He starts chewing invisible gum. He looks left and right down the hall as if someone could be spying. He leans in so that I can taste his beer breath when he says, “And what if I don’t want you to pay me back Friday? What if I want you to pay me tonight?”

I sigh. “Well that wouldn’t be possible.” The last thing I will do is lose myself to this by crying in front of him, I hold onto it hard.

He gestures down with his eyes. “I think it would…” He smirks, cases the hallway again.

“Goodnight then,” I say, and turn on my heel, hoping so hard that he’ll call me back and say he was kidding and go get his wallet.

“Wait wait, c’mere!” he shouts in a whisper. When I’m back in front of him he says, sweating across his forehead, shifting around, “Just come inside for a minute and we’ll work something out.”

“I’m not fucking you,” I whisper, and my face screws up against my will, and I start to cry, just a little.

He pulls my arm gently. “Okay,” he says, okay, ain’t nobody even said that, just come in for a sec.”

His apartment smells like him times a hundred. It’s clean though, very neat. The TV is on a muted comedy special, the camera keeps catching shots of big mouths, white teeth. I stand an inch from the door. Even though we’re inside he keeps whispering.

“You don’t have to do shit, just lay there, let me do the work.”

“I’m not fucking you for ten dollars. Or a thousand, or a…” I want to say a trillion but I hold back. I wish I didn’t just apologize to him. And I wish I never snapped on him this morning, maybe he would have been more generous. This is definitely my punishment. I put my hand on the knob. “If that’s the only way you’ll loan it to me, I gotta go,” I tell him wearily.

Clyde looks like Batman’s enemy The Penguin, with darker skin and no hair and glasses that magnify his eyes. He has a body like a balloon.

“I didn’t mean fucking-fucking, just letting me make you feel good. Just lie down and close your eyes. I’ll use only my tongue.” His mouth-breathing gets heavier.

I’ve never ever been a hoe, not for money or free. But I do know what it’s like to have sex with someone who makes you want to die, I know how to close my eyes and go somewhere else until it’s over.

He licks his lips, fidgeting with his little flipper hands.

Maybe we can move soon. Someone at work said they heard of a new building accepting section eight subsidies several miles from here.

There’s this, and there’s no cupcakes, and I suppose there’s nothing else.

“Listen. If I do this, it will be for twenty…and you have to show the money to me first…and there will be a time limit, like two minutes, and it won’t ever happen again…and you’ll tell nooooo one,” I negotiate, but even as the words leave my mouth I’m not sure if I’ll actually be able to pull my pants down and let him touch me.

He nods, grinning hard. “Cool, cool,” he says, as his fidgeting escalates into a dance.

When I don’t move, when I stand with my face in my hands, he puts his arm around my shoulders and walks me through the apartment to his room. On the other side of the wall is Tissa’s bed. I hope she hasn’t woken up, that she’s not padding around faster and faster calling for me or waking Corey. I put my ear to the cool wall and listen.

“What you doing? Relax.”

I sit stiff on the edge of his unmade bed. It’s the only thing out of order in his whole place, aside from him.

“Give me a second.”

I close myself in his bathroom. But I can’t look in the mirror. I sit on the toilet trying to talk myself into leaving and trying to assure myself that it will be quick and she’ll have her cupcakes and no one will find out.

I walk fast back to his bed, I lay back and close my eyes and cover them with my arms. I feel him wiggle into place in front of me. His dry hands try pulling my pants down but I can’t stand the feeling so I tell him I’ll do it. It takes me a long time, but he waits in front of me on his knees saying nothing.

“Anyone ever told you,” he huffs into my thigh, kissing it. “That you’ve got a pretty little pussy?”

“Shut. Up.” I mumble from behind my arms. “I mean, please, don’t talk, just do it.”

For a long time I hear and feel nothing. The thought of him just staring at me spread open is infuriating. When I start inching my legs closed he opens them, so gently I could throw up. I kick the air on either side of him. “Please hurry, my kids might wake up. I still have to get to the store…just…please come on.”

As soon as I feel the warmth of his tongue I remember that he was supposed to show me the twenty first. But it just needs to be over. I stiffen and fold my lips in and keep quiet.

I try going numb, tell myself I’m having an exam, that his tongue is a tool. When he uses just the tip it’s easier, I can pretend that he’s just poking around my clitoris, a doctor checking for abnormal cells. When he presses his entire tongue inside me the feeling is too soft, I can’t keep up the illusion that this isn’t sex. But I will not let myself get wet for him.

“Don’t do that,” I say from behind my hands.

“You so dry, Baby, loosen up.”

“You have one minute.”

“Naw, I’m going to go until I make you come…that’s the deal, okay?”

If I said no and shot up and walked out I’d have no money, but I’d still always have the trauma of his mouth and his eyes on me, all for nothing. So I don’t agree or say anything. One of his hands slides from where it has been gripping my knee, barely detectable, and tries getting in on the action, groping at my inner thigh.

“No,” I say sharply, and the hand quickly retreats.

After a minute I make up a moan, quietly because it feels like Tissa could be awake and listening. “Okay, I came, good job, let me up now,” I whisper.

I sit up and he raises himself off of me. I see that he took his shirt off. Patches of his stomach are much lighter than the rest of him, and instead of being made of rolls he’s lumpy all over. He’s like old cheese.

“You lying. If you came I could taste it.”

I breathe in and out through my nose and force myself back onto my back. I try again, I try to sound real, but he doesn’t buy it.

I try again, louder, will myself to relax and close my eyes tight and think of someone else. I imagine that he’s tall, that he has deep dimples, and baseball player thighs. But now his slow strokes start to feel good, and against my will I feel a small internal release, fluid flowing down. He grunts his approval and starts licking me like I’m melting. I can’t stand it another second. I push his shoulders with both hands, snap shut my legs.

“That’s fucking enough already, you agreed to two minutes. I’m done.” I pull my pants on.

“Shoulda let me put it in,” he says to my crotch. “Then I could have made you come.”

I bite down on everything that I want to scream at him, so hard I taste blood seeping from the side of my tongue. I smooth my hair over and over to calm myself.

“Didn’t it feel good to you, though?” He’s still sitting on the floor, looking up like maybe he’ll cry if I say no.

“Sure, yes,” I sigh, shaking my head. “Can you get the money? Please.”

When he walks into the other room I relieve the pressure in my head by letting a few tears drip out. I fan my eyes to make them stop, but they turn into streams. I stand and pace and think about what kind of cupcakes I should make, maybe marble. They start to go back in. I stop at the side of his bed. There’s a framed picture here, an old picture, maybe fifteen years old. I pick it up to make it out. It’s definitely Clyde, thinner and with more hair, in a tux, holding a woman in a white dress, holding her like a baby. She’s holding a lilac bouquet in one hand, her other is around Clyde’s neck, gripping him. She looks like she’s heavy to hold, but he looks so happy to be holding her. They’re posing in front of a fountain I’ve never seen.

I want to know about her and what happened, but more than that I want to get out of here.

I hear him come out of the bathroom and realize he was in there for a long time. He moves around the kitchen and returns with a clean, crisp twenty in his hand. I feel the spaghetti in me churning, trying to turn into a chunky geyser.

At the door he wheezes, “Next time you need something…I hope you come to me. I always got you, okay?” His breath is a sour mix of his beer and me.

There’s no way I can agree to this arrangement. There’s no way I can thank him and there’s nothing else to say. I walk back to my door and slip inside as he watches.

 •

Twenty whole dollars in my hand, I float back into Walmart at one-thirty. I have enough to make them from scratch now but I buy the boxed chocolate mix and the canned white frosting, shiny pink liners, the juice that’s on sale and the cheapest cups and napkins. I’ll maybe have a few dollars to put into the tank so we don’t have to get up early and take the city bus to school and work.

As I move through the store I’m aware of my stickiness, I’m sure that people passing me in the aisles can smell what I did. I just want to get home and hide in a dream, or no dream, disappear into nothingness for a few hours, wipe clean and wake up fresh to repress tonight.

 •

While the cupcakes are baking I scrub myself raw in a hot shower.

When I slip into my bed I’m startled by a body already there.

Tissa turns onto her stomach. “Why you take a shower in the middle of the night?” she mumbles into the pillow.

“I got gross…making your cupcakes,” I say, snuggling up to her. “Go back to sleep.”

“They smell real good,” she yawns. “You the best mama I’ve ever, ever had.”

“I’m your only mama you ever, ever had,” I sigh. It’s something we always say with a giggle but I can’t make myself.

 •

I walk Tissa to her classroom with the three tubs of cupcakes balanced in my hands, she drags the juice.

“I’m so sorry, I left the napkins and cups on our counter,” I grimace to her teacher, a tiny blonde who wears jeans and doesn’t even look old enough to attend prom. “I’m so sorry.”

She doesn’t smile, just squeaks, “Okay. We’ll figure something out,” as she reaches up to take the tubs from my arms.

This morning I couldn’t even look at them, I wanted these cupcakes out of my life so badly that we left the house ten minutes earlier than we ever have. But now it’s hard for me to release them into her hands, like they’re heirlooms I’m being forced to sell. Like they’re worth much more than she’ll ever have the capacity to appreciate.

 •

“One day ‘til payday,” Lana announces as I walk up adjusting my jacket, and it’s annoying, how she says it, keeps saying it, like I’m not keeping count.

“Are you good, girl? You need something to make it ‘til tomorrow? I know you got kids, I know how it is.”

I don’t know what it is with her, if she’s so desperate for connection that she has to keep bringing up our mutual motherhood all the time, our struggles. Maybe she’s one of those people who finds fulfillment in always being owed something, no matter how small.

“Thanks,” I tell her. “But there’s nothing we’ll need tonight.”

 •

I pull up to Tissa’s bus stop around the corner from our building and keep the car running until she arrives from her after-school program. I hate that she has to stay at school so long now, especially during winter, not getting home until well after the city has been taken by darkness and bitter cold. But there’s no way around it and, when I’m thinking soberly, when I stop dreaming some imaginary hero is going to swoop in and save us, I know things probably won’t be better for a long, long time.

The air has dropped well past zero tonight. I hope she’s remembered to put her gloves on, that she grabbed matching ones, and her hat.

When she steps off I see she’s struggling with the three tubs balanced on top of her little arms. I jump out to help her before she splats into the snow. For God’s sake, I told her flakey-ass teacher I’d pick them up tomorrow.

“Hand them here, Baby.”

She hesitates. “Mama, I have bad news about them,” she sighs.

My heart drops. “What, were they nasty?” I grab the empty tubs. They’re heavy, the same weight they were this morning. When we get into the car I turn on the light to look. Pushing up into the translucent blue lids, the frosted white tops of all thirty cupcakes look like captured clouds.

I clear my throat. “What happened, why weren’t these eaten?” I try to make my voice dip with curiosity, strain with a little annoyance, but I can’t control it. It comes out honestly, hot, laced with anger.

Tissa turns to me with her mouth hanging on broken hinges. Her tears start popping like hot oil, hitting my arm. It’s almost like she knows how much these cupcakes meant, which she better not.

I want to be able to tell her it’s no big deal.

But it is, it so is a big deal, it’s not something I can play off. I close my eyes to stay calm, but when I ask again, “What happened, Tissa, why weren’t they eaten?” it comes out in a low growl.

She starts to bawl. “We ran out of time!” She struggles to control her breathing, trying to pull back the tears chasing each other into her half-open coat. “I told her that you had to stay up real late to make them, and that you’d be mad, but she said we cou-couldn’t.” She shutters. “She said that because we have our field trip tomorrow, we’ll have to do it Monday. She said maybe we can freeze these, but they got moved all around and the frosting is too-too cr-crazy now.”

I throw open my door and slide out, let the tubs fall to my seat, let the frosting get as crazy as it can.

Kneeling behind the back bumper I breathe in and out, in and out, but it feels like nothing. I stay crouched a few inches from the dirty snow that’s been shoved aside, think about how it would feel to inhale, to snort some of it up hard like cocaine, if it would be the kind of cold sharp pinch I need now. It’s been so long, over a month, since my body felt any real pain. I never ever thought I’d feel like I need it, just a little to make me strong, that I’d crave it, but I guess there will be times.

When I can I get up.

“I am so glad we get to make these over again,” I tell Tissa as I open the car door. She looks up from where she was huddled in her hands. She looks over with only one eye to say that she doesn’t believe me. “I’m serious. They’re gross. I tasted one, it was the most disgusting thing. I had to make them from a damn box. You know that’s something I never do.”

I drive down the block to the gas station, get out and leave the door wide open so she can see me open each lid and hurl all three batches into a big black garbage can. When I get back in with the sticky, empty tubs she takes them from me, and holds them, decides it’s okay to smile.

“Remember how I told you before, how I said you can taste people’s love in their food? There wasn’t enough in those. That’s why they were so nasty. But we have all weekend now, we can find the perfect recipe, we can make more than one kind and compare, and choose the best.” She grabs my hand. I hate driving with only one but I know other people who do it all the time, make a habit of it, and they’re still in one piece. “Have you ever had cherry cake? Or lemon? I bet you’ve never had pumpkin cake, girl.”

“I haven’t, never. Can we make them tonight?” She bounces.

“Tonight…I have no money. But tomorrow I will. We’ll be patient, just one more day.”

Corey is home, hunched over homework, leaned towards the TV, when we walk in. “Was that man out there, Ma?” he calls as soon as he hears us, before looking up.

“No.”

“Good!” he yells. “He don’t want none!”

I sit and scoot close to Corey, let myself lean my head on him, something I think I’ve only done once or twice. Tissa lays across us. We get so comfortable, so warm, but they’re hungry. I know that Corey is practically grown, that I could tell him to make dinner. But cooking for them, serving them while they sit, filling them up, even with Ramen, is one thing I think I’ll always need to do. So in a few seconds I’ll get up. But until then I close my eyes and sink into them and let them sink into me.

I used to dread the end of the day, the random second he’d pop up on us like a fire alarm into the stretched silence. It could be at five-fifteen, it could be after midnight, waking me out of that first layer of sleep that I could never slip past. It could be two in the afternoon, when I was alone.

When I heard his voice, or his steps, or his keys jingle, I used to lose all feeling from the waist down. My lungs filled up, and my ears filled with pressure. All I could feel was this bone-cracking cold, this deep, drowning burn.

____________________________________________________________

25369_1428382110367_3795498_nBahiyyih El-Shabbaz’s fiction and creative nonfiction has been published in Phoebe Journal, Toska Magazine, The Bronx Biannual, and Hair Trigger, among others. She has received a Columbia Scholastic Press Association Award and was the winner of the Phoebe Journal 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award, judged by Cheryl Strayed. She is currently working on a novel.

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Spot illustrations for Fall/Winter 2023 issue by Dana Emiko Coons

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