Cricket was nestled in the bushes like his namesake, Lilac Ridge drifted off to sleep until his mother’s voice shook it by the shoulders -- he imagined blinds snapping open like eyelids, golden lights shining through trailer windows onto dry blades of grass. He didn’t like to think about what it was that she was saying, in this memory. Easier to sand the edges of a sharp table so it didn’t hurt your hip if you knocked it while you passed it by. He imagined his brain furnished by many things like this, things he tried to render into something kinder. Sometimes he’d spend hours in bed, silent, lugging pieces across the carpet, rearranging his mind like it’d make it all better, but it was still the same room, no matter how much you moved it around. She had a shrill voice. He’d always thought so, then felt guilty for it after. Somehow gravelly at the same time. Sometimes she’d yell and he’d think it sounded like a small rock flying around a food blender, catching on all of the blades at once. He should’ve come out the first time she called him, that much he knew. He’d been visiting his tin can in the woods again, touching a red leaf he’d stowed inside it so tenderly, he wasn’t sure he’d touched it at all. Usually his parents didn’t mind where he went so long as he was home after dark, which he never understood -- it seemed so unlike them to set a rule like that, almost as if they didn’t want him to get lost, but they’d told him the opposite more times than he had fingers to count. He wasn’t sure when he’d lost track of time, only that he couldn’t move his legs as he crouched behind the leaves, steeped in shadows, watching the breeze toy with the patchy peroxide escaping her elastic band. Her blinks were faltering in that slow, stuttering way that reminded him of Alex from Madagascar after his tranquilliser dart. She had a beer can in her hand and she was shaking it like you might a bag of treats to lure in a stray cat. He didn’t have to be close to know that it was empty. One of their neighbours popped a window to tell her to put a fucking sock in it, and Cricket’s mother, never one to back down from anything, sure as a shotgun barrel shoved into a priest’s mouth, immediately piped up with expletives of her own -- he didn’t think it’d stop until it did, until it was only one shouting voice and hers had gotten lost, until he was forced to open his eyes and find out why. She was looking at him. His hands must’ve rustled in the leaves when he lifted them to touch his head, hardly conscious he’d done it at all, position assumed like a brace in an airplane crash. When her eyes locked his, Cricket had a thought that he still struggles to understand the origins of, that feels like such a pathetic weed sprouting from a crack in the pavement that whenever he remembers it, remembers who he is, he has to close his eyes. Underneath all of your meanness, mom, you could’ve been so beautiful.
