When I start looking at the body, I wish I’d never started. I wish that eyes had never been invented, and that we all crawled around in shit blindly like worms do, so we wouldn’t have to see things like this.
The idea of it, the shape, the size, the angle, bonks around in my head, my big head, the one that Orphum says makes me look like a just-washed cat, like I can change my head like a shoe or something. Imagine having a head for every situation? You could wear your sincere head to an arraignment. You could wear your crabby head when you have to go catch the bus, and you don’t want the old women from other places talking to you: “You. Go downtown today? You go downtown?” As if I’m going to go someplace different, ever.
Is the body covered in some kind of striations, or is that a horrible rash? Did he get runned over before we got here?
“That’s a big old mess, is what that is,” Orphum says, and I feel like I should be tearing him up for talking about the body that way, but I can’t quite get my grabbers to start swinging. Orphum scrapes the shovel along the bony bits of gravel and I can see the little poofs of dust lit by the headlamps. I feel like the shovel is scraping along my spine, not the road’s.
“You reckon we should wait?” he asks. I was kind of surprised when I thought about it later, since he never really asks me anything, except “You ready?” and I nod and close my eyes and Orphum takes my clothes off.
That part gets easier, which you can guess if you know anything about life at all. Most things get easier, if you just close your eyes or grit your teeth and get it done with.
Sometimes the plan goes wrong, though. Have you ever had sex in the cab of a pickup truck? The other night I was waiting until Orphum was finished, and we slipped on the vinyl seat and I hit my head on the steering column. KA-POW.
Well, I think my brain practically exploded, because now I know why cartoon characters see stars and tweetie birds and God knows what else when they get cracked. I looked at my hands and watched them dissolving into the seat, and watched the roof of the pickup peel back and everything became stars. Orphum was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him because he was so far away. His breath is usually fogging up my ear and his lips always make spit strings tying us together, but instead his breath was somehow like a breeze.
I threw up then, it was the only drawback. Orphum said it was okay, that I could hose off the floor when we got back to his Ma’s trailer.
Things haven’t been the same since then. I had a nosebleed that night, and I told Orphum and his Ma that I must’ve hit my face, too, even though I couldn’t really remember. There’s some kind of imbalance. I think that if I shake my head enough to stop the rattling, or hold my breath all the way over the Indian Sluice, or smoke enough cigarettes I’ll be okay.
“Kill the headlamps,” Orphum says, looking into my eyes, and spits his chew-spit near the body. I look up at him from within the headlamps and don’t want to leave the little ring of moths that are sputtering around me. They know and I know it’s cold with the lights off.
Instead of arguing, I nod. He’s giving me that look again, the same look he gave me earlier today when he noticed that my pupils were off-kilter.
“No one’s perfect, Orphum,” I said. “People are meant to be uneven. It’s in the Bible, if you took the time you’d know.” Orphum didn’t say anything.
A couple of days after the steering column, I was sort of wobbling around my kitchen, about to make myself a snack because I thought that would settle me down and help me go to sleep. I opened the whole refrigerator and leaned in, breathed the cold stale smells that you can’t help but love, just like gasoline and magic marker.
This is the funny part: I was just standing up from pulling the olive loaf out of the bottom drawer, when I cracked my head again, on the freezer door. Almost in the same place, too, what are the odds of that?
The plastic-wrapped olive loaf jumped out of my hand and flopped itself to the ground, and I could see the jar of mayonaise breaking. The glass exploded up like lightning and bounced off the walls, and little slices of olive fell from the wrapper and burned themselves onto my retinas.
The most beautiful thing in the world and only I can see it.
Sometimes my mom catches me at it. She’s pulled me off the bathroom floor, shaken me until my teeth rattle and I can feel the blood sloshing around in my head like its some kind of water park in there.
“Are you on drugs?” she said, breathing years of layers of tobacco up from her filmy lungs. I can only shake my head to this. How can I tell her that the bathroom has the highest concentration of hard surfaces in the whole trailer?
Orphum spits again, and hands the shovel to me. I have the pickup truck keys in my hand, but I feel like I missed something. Maybe I skipped forward, like a film that’s been spliced too many times. I look down–there’s our old friend again, now with chew juice next to his boots, which look like my brother’s size. What a waste.
The wooden handle feels solid and reassuring in my hand. There are dents in the handle that have been made by strong men, working industriously. I see men who look like Orphum squeezing the handle tightly enough to make these slight grooves, the traces of hard work. I feel like the shovel it could tell me something, or dance with me, or put me to bed.
Orphum clears his throat, and spits again. “I’m gonna have a cigarette. Why don’t you start digging?” The moths are gone and I wonder how I will even see to dig?
