the end of everything

one

She, light-streaky out of the corner of my eye. It's that game, the one called bloody murder, the name itself tingly nerves shooting buckshot in my belly, my gut, or wherever nerves may be. it's so late and we shouldn't be out at all, but we don't care.

Voices pitchy, giddy, raving, we are all chanting that deathly chant that twists, knifelike, in the ear of the appointing victim.

One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock, . . . And it's Katie, she's it, lost at choosies, and now it will be her doom. But she's a good hinder, the best I've ever seen, and I predict wild surprises, expect to find her rolled under a saggy front porch or buried under three inches of dirt in mums own frilly flower bed.

Six o'clock, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, nine o'clock,  the cruel death trill we intone. Such monsters we, ten o'clock, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, midnight! Bloody murder! We all scream, our voices cruel and insane, and we scatter fast, like fireflies all a spread.

I love the sound of our keds slamming on the asphalt, the poured concrete. There are five, maybe ten of us. And we're all playing, and the streetlamps promise safely, but for how long?
Oh, Katie, I see you there, twenty yards ahead, your peach Terry cloth shorts twitching as you run so fast, as you whip your head around. that dark curtain of hair tugging in your mouth, open, shouting, screaming even. it's a game of horrors and its the thing pounding in my chest. i can't stop it. I see you, Katie, you're just a few feet from the faheys' chimney, from home base. Oh, it's the greatest game of all and Katie is sure to win. you might make it, Katie, you might. My heart is bursting, it's bursting.

It was long ago, centuries. A quivering mirage of a thirteen year olds summer, like a million other girls summers, where it not for Katie, were it not for katies thumping heart and all those twisting things untwisting.
.there I am at the kabar house, all elbows and freckled jaw and heels of hands rubbed raw on gritty late summer grass. A boy-girl, like Katie, and nothing like her sister, maggie, a deeply glamorous seventeen. A movie star, in halter tops and eyelet and clacking Dr. Scholls. Eyelashes like gold foil and eyes the colour of watermelon rind and a soft, curvy body. always shinylipped and bright white teethed, lip smack. Flash of tongue. lashes bristling, color Hugh and surging up her cheeks.

A moment alone, i would steal a peek in Maggie's room, clogged with the cotton smell of baby power and lip gloss and hands wet with hair spray. her bed was a big pink cake with faintly soiled flounces and her floor dappled with the tops of nail polish bottles, with plastic backed brushes heavy with hair, with Faust dappled underwear curled up like pipe cleaner, jeans inside out, the powdery socks still in them, folded up notes from all her rabid boyfriends, shiny tampon wrappers caught in the edge of the bedspread, where it hit the mint green carpet. it seemed like Maggie was forever cleaning the room, but even she herself could not stop the constant, effervescing explosions of girl.
Alongside such ecstatic pink loveliness, Katie and I, we were all snips and snails, and when permitted into her candied interior, we were like furtive intruders.

You see, knowing Katie so well, knowing her bone-deep, it meant knowing her whole family, knowing the books they kept on their living room shelf (the little drummer girl, better homes and gardens new cookbook, lonesome dove), the banana bark chair in the living room and the way it felt under your fingers, the rose milk lotion on Mrs. Barkers dressing table----I wanted to sink my face into it.

I couldn't remember a time when I wasn't skittering down their carpted steps, darting around the dining room table, jumping on Mr. And Mrs. Barkers queen sized bed.
There were other things to know too. secrets so exciting that they were shared only in hushed giggles under the rippling flannel of sleeping bags. Did you know? Katie whisperes, and tells me Maggie is named after the singer whose albums her parents played sixteen times the night she was conceived. It is thrilling and impossible. I cannot, even in my most devilish thoughts about the hidden wickedness and folly of grown ups, imagine Mrs. barker turning her child's name into a lured, private wink.

Not Mrs. Barker. Living next door all of my life, I never knew her to laugh loudly or run for the phone or dance at the drunken block parties every July. tidy, bland voice as flat as a drum, she was the fleeting thing. The shadow moving from room to room in the house. she worked as an occupational therapist at the VA hospital, and I was never sure what that meant, and no one ever talked about it anyway. Mostly, you'd just see her from the corner of your eye, carrying a laundry basket, slipping from hallway to bedroom, a fat paperback folded over wispy hand. those hands, they always seemed dry, almost dusty, and her body seemed too bony for her daughter's, or her husband, to hug.