We walk the streets of cities. We run through subways and catch trains to somebody’s house, not ours. We stand outside liquor stores and badger strangers to buy us beer. We lay out at a beach laden with old men in speedos and hard-ons. Guys in windows expose their dicks and we laugh. No one touches us. Every day, after school, is adventure. We beat each other up. Boy versus girl. Over and over. Winners end up going steady. The guy produces a piece of shit ring for one of us to wear. We disappear. We steal rings from shops.
Home is where black and blue resonate love. We don’t talk family. That is for pathetic girls who hang on to charred childhoods as if we aren’t rage peeled away. Step back. Give us another beer. We’ll tell the story. That man in the park we call a tumor in our throat flutters as he knocks us to our knees and grips the back of our heads behind the bushes. Others under lampposts while their friends watch.
What happens en route to wherever? Jacked up on jizz and angel dust. Guys with vans rack up surf; drown-pelt-sog our faces with the spit of them. Now there, snitty girls. We’ll throw you out, easy as dumping an empty can. Go home to Mommy and nighty-nights. Quick with your ‘no’s’ and tremoring silent tears. Hedging your bets on aftershave aching bores who saturate the sheen of protection and adoration. Not here, bitch.
We rock handjobs and blowjobs in the dark from boys who buy movie tickets, while they stiff like company banging out another night of ‘faster, faster’ whacking their junk into cinema. Handfuls of girls disappear over the years. Cops call them ‘cold cases’ when no one gives a shit.
We crack beers and idle around the dead. That one was a smear of memory. She winnowed through footsteps and chitchat. Another was an inferno from her screened window. Her body was discovered three weeks later under a batch of leaves off a backroad.
“Fuck that,” we say. “Those girls were already on their way out,” says one. “Waiting for Daddy to save them,” says another. “They didn’t even know what to look for.” We nod. Ram into each other in the van and stare out into moving blurs that pass us.
Meg Tuite is author of four story collections and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Poetry award for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging. She teaches writing retreats and online classes hosted by Bending Genres. She is also the fiction editor of Bending Genres and associate editor at Narrative Magazine. http://megtuite.com
Lost Balloon 