Breadcrumbs #694

Emma Stewart

Memoir #1

My mother describes my birth as; it was raining that day. Passed through the forced lips of the c-section complicated into my mother’s belly. How bitter, that second between “raining” and “you were so skinny! I could’ve had you myself”. And another hand takes my from my mother.

Memoir #2

Another hand takes me from my mother, sitting in the counselor’s office at the Calexico Mental Health Center. “How old were you when your father remarried?” They, the two of them are outside the glass and I am suddenly some strange bastard. Did I come out of my father’s thigh? Who else gave me these eyes? This unending desire to pull things out of my body in order to somehow become whole, or to clean myself like a house made for anyone other than me. I’m 14 and I don’t understand what people don’t see, so I lie “like...6?”

Memoir #3

So I lie and for the next 4 years I don’t talk to anyone except a really nice woman who says “you remind me of my friend, she always has these amazing acrylic nails and paints them wild colors” and I say “I made friends with some vampires, and we go ghost hunting at 3am on weeknights”. All of the homework packets I get from the double-wide trailer at school have the answer keys on the back. I wake up at 3pm, watch cartoons and eat at Denny’s almost every day. When mom takes me to hand in my homework to my one teacher, she sits with the other mothers. Mostly no one says anything about what we look like, but occasionally someone leans over and whispers “so when is she going to start showing?” Mom thinks it’s hilarious that I would get pregnant at 14 surrounded by other pregnant 14 year olds. One of my friends has a pool so we hang out there a lot. His parents are never home. I’m proud of myself; I’m 14 and I only hang out with people older than me. We smoke clove cigarettes and they get the resident goth of El Centro to come hang out. He’s even older than them and knows a lot about ghosts and magic. He buys two big bottles of Jack Daniels from Food 4 Less, his and her’s. They last the length of our 3 year relationship. Mine lasts longer, I think it’s still in his freezer next to his son’s dino chicken nuggets and the champagne from his marriage in ‘98 when he started losing his hair. At 19 I date a man everyone calls Satan. His room is an impossible archeology of his own life piled high and tight so we have to squeeze through the door and walk on two feet of his discarded self. When we’re not high he’s mean. Satan keeps telling me I’m an adult, and adults don’t cry to their parents. My mother helps me fill hefty bags with my stuff while Satan stands at the edge of the bed and cries. She holds my hand in the car.

Check Points
We wanted out, wanted weed not money, scraped bowls, we worked just long enough, didn’t step up when someone said prove yourself, didn’t want proof. We had the desert, all the desert, and time but we couldn’t do anything with time, burned through it like the asphalt in August. Hummed still, low next to the AC condenser unit blaring in what was left of Mike’s backyard, wrote on the couches we found on the street “FUCK THE POLICE” “THIS IS FLAVOR COUNTRY” “YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US” at one point wrote a whole story on the back cushion with Elly, that got cannibalized by some back shadowed bubble grafitti of Gyro’s name in silver Sharpie (tm). We wanted to get out. When the weed rolled through the Valley and left us with nothing we made gas money out of lies and other people’s time, followed it to LA. Put Bule in the Crown Vic and the drugs in the Toyota with me and Mike and watched Bule get searched, his heavy lower lip, his tired-of-this-shit eyes following our car from inside the cage while border patrol waved our white faces through. We wanted to get out of the desert but Echo kept trying and his car got totalled by a falling tree last time so we accepted that the valley was a black hole and went back to scraping bowls when the weed and the money went dry. Headaches. Boot weed. Loud music, louder music, whole days sat high next to the condenser in 115 degree heat. In the winter, we took the screaming wind and threw music under it, out in the salt flats where no one would call the cops. When friends came in from the city with X we pointed up at the stars and let them fall on their asses for the whole night and tell us they wanted all those stars. We wanted to be faster than sandstorms. Looked at the flat horizon and waited for the dirt devils to stop  fucking around and take the desert away. Drove from Calexico to El Centro to the burning haystacks at midnight and watched with all the neighbors we didn’t know. Broke into the abandoned school house and yelled FUCK until something slapped Mitchell across the face in a busted classroom. We wanted ghosts. We wanted to know what ghosts wanted. On the drive from Mike’s place to mine we talked about not wanting to see Echo fail again, and how it gave us an ugly sick gut to see Bule handcuffed and caged while dogs went at the Crown Vic. We didn’t want to be stuck between the border and the checkpoints anymore and they were making the one that led to San Diego permanent because it caught more of us than the one to Arizona. We were tired, we were trying, we weren’t dead yet. We wanted to get out. We wanted to have somewhere to go. We went back to wanting anything else instead.