Because it's been a year since I began this Tumblr, I thought I should add some content: the beginning of a queer fantasy tale.
When she opened the Accord’s door, Mackenzie winced at the car’s smell. A pungent funk composed of equal parts teenage boy-sweat and fragrant fast-food wrappers. No sight of the boy, her older brother Drew, but he must have had three cheeseburgers for lunch while parked, waiting for her to finish high school for the day.
Grunting, she picked up the trash and then realized that the wrappers were familiar and old, as in days ago, and they’d been hers. A pang of worry struck her—when had her brother last eaten? She couldn’t remember him doing more than nibbling at the edges of a pizza slice or stealing one of her french fries.
He’s going to die. She swallowed the thought down, digesting it into tiny pieces as she began texting Drew. Where r u her fingers worked. Am at car.
She didn’t have the keys and so couldn’t slide down the windows, so she sat with the doors both askew to allow the car to air out. She nudged Drew’s pillow with a bared foot. She frowned at the many stains, the discolorations reminding her of a tarnished piece of silverware or one of those old mirrors.
Her phone chimed a Red Caps tune she no longer even liked but it would cost money to change. B back soon. Learnin our future.
Mackenzie barked a laugh. Future? A strange word that her mind refused to accept and her ears didn’t want to hear. Because of Drew’s stupidity, because he was not only the dumbest boy born in the state of New Jersey but the dumbest faggot boy in the Garden State, they had no future. Boys should be born not with foreskins but condoms, ones they’d shed after fucking like the moltings of softshell crabs.
She doodled on the ceiling with a black Sharpie, adding to the three months worth of drawings, her traveling Lascaux. Foster parents run over by the Accord, her behind the wheel. Her standing in a rainfall of dollar bills. Her brother reaching inside of him to find a fiery heart.
He’s going to die. Some nights, she’d wake up and struggle to remember where she was. The back seat of a car wasn’t meant to be a fifteen year old girl’s bedroom. And she’d stare at where Drew slept in the driver’s seat, up against the open window, and listen to hear if he still breathed. Once, she reached out to touch him, to reassure herself. His skin felt hot as an oven yet slick with sweat that did nothing to cool him down. Sweat salty like tears.
She had been an orphan as long as she could remember. Parents dying on the highway. Nothing like how it was portrayed on television. She didn’t even have faces to recollect. Just the sense of missing something vital. Like she had been the one in the accident and lost a limb, that’s what it was like. Soon she’d be a double-orphan, a double amputee.
For the past week, the car had been parked in back of a quiet strip mall. An abandoned real estate office and nail salon bookended a florist and a dry cleaner. Three out of the four front windows featured Korean script. The women who worked the salon arrived and left in little packs and scowled at Drew and her. Mackenzie called them the Moon Gals. Not at all PC, but why bother being considerate when you were living out of a crappy Honda? Besides, their faces were lunar round and pale and pockmarked. They bobbed as one listened to the jabber of the others. Mackenzie wondered what they’d say if she came into the salon and just asked them to paint the middle fingernail on each hand. They’d probably not get the insult. Or the joke. Not that she had the money to spare on polish.
She noticed that something new hung from the rear view mirror: a hedgehog fashioned from a piece of steel wool, its tapered snout a whittled tip of a Black and Mild cigar. A red twist tie became a dapper necktie. Drew would always trash pick and turned whatever scraps he found into little pieces of art to decorate both their rooms at whatever foster home took them in for a couple months. Drew should have been an artist or a magician, working debris into whimsy, rather than a fag.
A knock on the windshield woke her. She blinked and saw in the dim residue of the back lot streetlamps her brother standing by the car. In one raised a full plastic bag swung, as if he might be tempting her with a treat to leave the car.
“That better be something green,” she said as she got out of the car and stretched. Though Drew was two years older, he wasn’t much taller than her.
“As in you think I robbed a bank? Money only comes in linen sacks with dollar bills printed on them.”
“Yah, if life were Monopoly—”
“Ooh, I’d want to be the yorkie.” Drew leaned against the Accord.
“No one smart wants to be anything but the race car.” She grabbed at the bag. “And I meant ‘green’ as in vegetables. I think my insides are turning into a deep fryer thanks to all the junk food.” She pulled out of the bag a box of Advil, then a few Snickers bars.
“Sorry to disappoint. I could take you out grazing.” He pointed behind them at the treeline.
She threw a candy bar at his stomach. He curled his body around it. The sweatshirt and jeans he wore were stained and looked a size too big for him. His shaggy hair hung in split ends. He hadn’t just lost his appetite to HIV, he’d abandoned it. Proof: he handed her back the Snickers and reached into the bag, “There’s a health shake in there for me.”
A health shake. Mackenzie thought that deserved to be an oxymoron. Then she saw the plastic bottle Drew sipped from had a teddy bear on the label. “That’s like baby formula.”
Her brother shrugged. “This was the only drink that didn’t smell awful.” He tipped the bottle back. As he drank, his pronounced adam’s apple rose and fell like a yo-yo.
“Do you know your social security number?” he asked her.
“Do you know your T-cell count?” she mumbled around a mouthful of chocolate, caramel, nougat and peanut.
“Is this leading up to some sort of scam.” She couldn’t imagine either of them as master criminals. No, they were bums. Hobos, which sounded better than homeless. A hobo was being poor but cheerful in a Disney kind of way. Only, after she said something the least bit funny, she could feel the pain, the sadness, ready to surge in to the gap left behind by the words.
More proof in the famed Idiot Paradox—the lower a person’s IQ was, the smarter they believe they were: Drew was convinced the solution to all their problems involved moving to the Fallen Area. While waiting in-line at the pharmacy, he had overhead an old guy wearing leg braces telling an even older guy leaning on a cane that the government had found a cure for all sorts of diseases—cancer, diabetes, AIDS, jungle rot, you name it—Inside and that was why they had erected those massive concrete walls around the area. Drew couldn’t keep his ears shut so why stop with his mouth, and so started asking questions. The ramblings of two dying senior citizens convinced her brother to further ruin their lives.
On the drive to Philly, Mackenzie screamed at Drew, considered throwing open the Accord’s door and rolling out into the road before deciding to scream some more at him. “You couldn’t even try to be normal!” He kept his eyes on the road. “You got us thrown out!” His fingers tightened around the worn steering wheel. “You couldn’t keep your dick covered!”
In the parking lot of what looked like some urban, quasi-military building, Mackenzie left the car before he had even turned off the ignition. She slammed the door shut.
National guardsmen were everywhere. Toy soldiers made real, yet retaining rigid plastic demeanors and stances.
A couple creepy-looking guys hung out around the parking lot. One approached Drew and asked around a wad of gum if they were going Inside. Drew nodded and then the guy pushed some papers in Drew’s face, offers to buy Drew’s car, cell phone, anything that they wouldn’t need or use once they stepped through those gates. Drew glanced at her—the man asked her if she wanted to sell things, but she gave him the finger—then proceeded to sign away half his possessions. The man handed over a few hundred dollar bills.
“Your phone won’t work—” Drew said as they walked into the nearest building.
“Fine.” She threw it as hard and far as she could. It struck someone’s car. An alarm howled in protest. It had been a birthday present from Drew. She regretted she had only one to throw away.
She couldn’t separate her feelings while hugging the Accord goodbye. They needed to be spun fast, let centrifugal force separate them into understandable layers. She didn’t want to leave it. She never wanted to step inside it again. And she couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting to be inside the car, with its stink, its doodles, and trash, all the dregs and residue of their recent days and nights. If anyone did claim the Accord, wouldn’t they be stealing of bit of her and Drew, too?
They had to stand in line for a long time. The monotony did little to keep her calm. This was not like waiting in line for groceries or a movie ticket. She was surrendering everything. The guardsman at the computer taking their details... no, deleting them from the world didn’t show an ounce of emotion. He looked bored, as if sitting for a geometry lesson or drivers’ ed. Bored. How could he be bored removing her from existence?
After a brief glance at them, the guardsman said, “Minors need the presence and signature of both parents or a guardian—”
“Our parents are dead.” Drew hesitated a moment. “I’m her guardian.” He then leaned over and slid a couple of hundred dollar bills underneath the guy’s keyboard.
Drew held out his license... and Mackenzie snatched it from his fingers. She looked at the photo, taken over a year ago—when Drew didn’t look so sick, but even then the virus had began burning its way through his insides--then showed it to the bored guardsman. “Doesn’t my brother look gay in this?” she asked.
The guardsman’s eyes unfocused from his monitor to the license and then to each of them. She wanted to see homophobic poison in his dark eyes. For him to scream at them, to kick them of the facility, like what had happened at the last foster home when they heard those three nasty letters inside Drew. Instead, the man took the license from her and cut it with a nasty pair of scissors. “You are now no longer citizens of the United States of America.”
Mackenzie had lipped the Pledge of Allegiance for years. She had watched fireworks on the 4th of July and seen movies were people in Africa had shitty lives. But she never thought about being an American citizen until after he had the right revoked. Irrevocably: the word came top mind so sudden, like a test answer in the hall after class was over.
“Why did you do this?” She sniffed back tears, but then she saw Drew react to this... finally this, as if it finally hit him, too, and she could not stop herself from crying. She walked over to the far wall, knowing that other people were staring at her. Others in life to give their life away, and worse, the people who didn’t try to stop them at all.
Her brother came over to her. “Mac, please. I need this. And I need you with me. I’m dying.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. “I know, I know.”
Another guardsman came over to them and asked them to move into the next room. He handed back the bribe money to Drew.
Hell, she decided, wasn’t someplace awful. It only had to be boring, always boring. And the streets of the Fallen Area were, at least once past the gates. A couple of stripped cars—which inflicted a brief pang of remorse for the lost Accord. The usual graffiti. Her brother insisted they hold hands as they walk, but she couldn’t see any reason to worry.
A husky guy wearing a long apron over a tight t-shirt and cargo shorts climbed one of the cars. “Live to eat!” He pointed at the newcomers. “Listen to me. Finding food Inside is hard.”
“Is this part of the crazy?” Mackenzie asked her brother, who shrugged in answer. She remembered one kid at the last school bragging in study hall that his uncle was one of the national guardsmen who patrolled the walls surrounding the Fallen Area. He claimed to see obit pages circling in the air like vultures.
“The Auction doesn’t treat people fair. No, they don’t.” Apron Guy stamped his foot on the car roof. “But come with me. Live to eat.” He gestured for someone in the crowd forming around him to take his hand.
Then an old woman with a severe crew-cut and a baggy sweater came from a doorway and started screaming “Bullshit! Gurgitator bullshit!” at Apron Guy. He kept trying to talk to the crowd, some of whom started to drift, others stayed, probably hoping to see how terrible the fight might get.
“We need to find somewhere to squat,” Drew said.
Mackenzie saw a woman a block away pushing a stroller. “Let’s ask her.” She seemed safe.
“I’m talking to the shadows from 1 o’clock til 4. And lord, how slow the moments go when all I do is pour.” she sang.
“What’s that in the stroller?” Drew asked.
Mackenzie took a few steps closer. “A coffee machine.” She saw the electrical cord lift and sway, angry like a cat’s tail, and the woman reached down and brushed her hand across the glass. “Soon, baby, we’ll be home soon.”
“Uhhh. Let’s not ask her.”
Before dark they found abandoned the second floor of a tavern that had long ago been smashed into a gallery of broken wood and crushed glass. Drew found some old coats and a quilted moving tarp, and suggested they serve as bedding until they moved someplace nicer.
Mackenzie straightened a portrait of dogs wearing leather vests and chaps around a pool table. A bit of plaster fell from the cracked wall.
“Promise me you’ll stay here—stay safe—while I look around tomorrow.”
She lied to him. He deserved no less.
Steam rising from many pots of hot water found its way to Mackenzie’s face to form beads on her forehead and neck. Everyone sweated inside the tea shop, which made it feel a welcome spot; Mackenzie did not stand out there. She didn’t want to wait all alone in the squat for her brother to return from his daily hunts for the cure. So she crouched against a wall and watched people and hoped no one would ask her to leave because she couldn’t buy a mug.
A thin, red-haired boy, maybe older than her brother, but not much more, brought a mug of tea over to the end of one long table. And everyone else left after he sat down. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it, but the act reminded Mackenzie of cafeteria antics back in grade school. And it had to hurt. So she dared to sit down next to him.
“What flavor is that?” she asked.
He looked up at her. He did look sad. And hungry. She understood those feelings.
“Is that genmaicha? I have no idea what that is.”
“Here, take a sip.” He had the gay voice, which was a relief. And then strange because she found it a relief. He slid the mug over to her. She sniffed the yellow tea and thought she smelled rice in the steam. She took a taste. “Ugh, needs sugar.”
“That, they won’t sell me.”
“‘Cause of my terrible reputation.”
He had to be joking. “Your reputation? With sugar?”
The red-haired boy nodded. “I...well have dealings with kinda a cult. And before that I broke someone’s heart.”
“I still don’t see what either has to do. A cult. With sugar.”
“The cult dealt with eating... I mean, I served the Gurgitator...” the red-haired boy shook his head. “Yeah, none of it makes sense. But the fact is, they hate me here.” He looked up. “There.” He nodded at the street. “Everywhere.”
Why did the Gurgiwhatever sound familiar? “Reminds me of my brother. But I think I’m the only one that hates him. I hate everything here.”
He chuckled. “You must like genmaicha.”
Mackenzie looked down and realized not only was she sheltering the mug in her hands, she had drank most of the tea. “Sorry.”
She nodded. They had been Inside for almost two weeks and Drew had been strict with the money and trading things. Their food was almost gone. Drew spent all his awake time trying to find the cure. Mackenzie didn’t know to spend her awake time.
“Here,” he pushed over to her a wooden token with a cup painted on it. “Now we’re both broke. Get another mug. With sugar. We’ll split it.”
He shook her hand. “Cinnamic was my last name.” When he smiled, she noticed he was missing an upper tooth.
He was gone when she returned.
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