LINDY BILLER
cw – allusion to date rape
A History of Running
Daughter
Out of the house and into a simmering August night, leaving the babies curled up in the matching blankets your mother knitted them, butter-soft, the color of blood orange, the six-year-old in his alligator pajamas, mouth unhinged, anaconda plush wrapped like a vine around his chest and stomach, your husband snoring in king-sized bed with goose-down quilt and eucalyptus sheets, the dog a puddle of honey on the woven carpet you inherited from your great-grandmother—all of it messy, wanted, prayed for, happy, happy, happy—into the car with its quarter tank of gas, empty baby food jars rolling around in the backseat, onto the dark road, no neighbors lifting a hand to wave, no glowing eyes of possums or racoons, which might have comforted you—only trash cans on the curb and ghosts kissing under streetlights. Onto a side street, your headlights washing over other lonely houses, then onto a main street, and finally the freeway, which hums deep in your bones, draws you forward through darkness like a fishhook in your cheek, and you’re powerless to stop even if you wanted to, which you don’t. For the most part. The moon glows like a check engine light, but you ignore it, because you still have three hours before the point of no return, the point when doing a U-turn over the median and driving 20 over the speed limit still wouldn’t get you home in time to slide into the kitchen and start the coffee maker and pretend you just came downstairs moments ago to stir breast milk into the babies’ oatmeal, to pour sugary cereal for the five-year-old, to start scrambled eggs and bacon for your husband, to peel a tangerine for yourself, your nails piercing the skin, unwinding it into a long, tapered helix. Three hours and fifteen minutes until not even the excuse of a morning donut run will seem plausible, even if you shout surprise, even if you show up with a box of stale crullers and eclairs like a mother bird dangling worms over her babies’ grasping beaks—“Are you my mother?” the baby asks, over and over, seeking fur and claws and steel in your absence—but right now you aren’t a mother bird and you are barely even a mother. You are a frog spawning a jellied cluster of eggs for your mate to protect, and you hope he’s successful, but you’d prefer not knowing. You are a king cobra, your son’s favorite reptile—the smartest snake in the world, according to his National Geographic handbook, the only snake species in which the mother makes an actual nest. She lays approximately 30 white, leathery eggs, protects them for a while, then abandons the nest and says fuck it. The book calls this good nurturing instincts. If the mother was still around when the eggs hatched, she might not recognize the babies as her own. She might gulp them down. Anyway, if not a snake, you must be some other predator. A wolf birthing piglets, listening to them root and squeal. The walls of your house aren’t brick or wood or straw, only paper, blank and flimsy, dissolving into pulp when wet, crumpled easily in your husband’s fist. Your children mark up the white space with their crayons and their hunger and their beauty. It’s unfair how beautiful they are. They could destroy you if they wanted. They could twine through you like a tree trunk into a chain link fence and even if someone cut down the tree, the disembodied trunk would be there forever. Or is it the other way around? Your children are happy—you have engineered it, insisted upon it, as your mother did with you. They’re getting bigger every day, despite the quality of milk you feed them. They’re soft and sweet as risen dough. You’ve already forgotten what they look like, even though you’ve only been gone for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, even though you stare into the blackness beyond the road and search for their faces. They have brown eyes, or hazel. They are beautiful. You’re almost certain.
Mother
Around and around her circular tunnel, particles colliding, a litany of happiness—ballet lessons and piano lessons and swim lessons and art class, the day camp at the park, Saturdays at the mall, where she pressed twenty-dollar bills into your hand and your sister’s hand, told you to call from the pay phone when you were ready to be picked up, and maybe grab her a Cherry Coke Icee on the way out. On Easter morning, she pretended to ponder the Stations of the Cross while planning the best places to hide the hard-boiled eggs, which she had dyed bloodred with the husks of onions. You and your sister tapped the eggs against each other to see which one would crack first. It was supposed to represent Christ’s resurrection, the tomb cracked open. Your mother explained this once and seemed surprised that you remembered it.
Back to her dorm at 2 A.M. from that guy’s apartment, the one she didn’t marry, though she kept the ring, because if there were strings attached he should’ve pulled them sooner, because what is love if not the original transaction? They both worked at the particle physics lab—she was an undergrad who ran experiments with the atom smasher, and he was a grad student who shadowed the research advisor—but not an evening shadow spilled across the sidewalk, the other type of shadow when the sun is straight above you, blazing, your whole body pooled up around your shoes. Your mother said, well, I better head home, it’s getting late, and the guy said, fine, and she could’ve asked him to drive her, except that he had tried to reach down the front of her jeans without asking, and when she said no, he turned cold and mopey, laid on the couch and ignored her, started flipping through the channels. He had driven her there and he should’ve driven her home, but she had been running for so long that the sprint across the dark campus felt like a memory— breath tearing her lungs, heavy footsteps behind her, the thrill when they never caught up. Lucky I was a fast runner, she told you, as though luck had something to do with it.
Home from her shifts at K-Mart, even at night, even in the rain, because she was a teenager and wanted her own money to spend, because it was only three miles, because she loved the powder-blue polo shirt with the K positioned over her heart. When she wheeled the Blue Light Special cart to its ordained place, menswear or coats or women’s scarves, when she flipped on the light and made the announcement and heard her voice magnified through the store speakers, she felt not only powerful, but omnipresent, a benevolent god making strangers happier than they thought possible, accepting both cash and layaway. The women thanked her as they rang up their gloves and handbags. The men made warm comments, which she took at face value. What a doll you are, they told her. You must be too young to work here, they said, and in fact, she was, but she’d lied on her application and the manager didn’t care. During her breaks, she drank Coca Cola and ate popcorn, or sometimes a hot dog with mustard. After late shifts, the older ladies in the women’s department offered to drive her home, but she remembered the time she’d accepted—the way they asked three times if this was really her house, the way their eyes moved from her parents’ Buick in the driveway to the flickering light in the windows, the phantom glow of whatever TV show her mother was watching—usually Wheel of Fortune, or the Bionic Woman if it was later—and then to the girl’s face, searching her eyes and dimples and thick glasses for some sign of wear and tear. Your mother felt a churning in her stomach that could’ve had to do with the hot dog, or too much sugar. Oh honey, the ladies said, as she ran from the car. You can always ask, the ladies said, but she never did.
Upstairs from the basement when she was nine, abandoning her place on the rug that had been passed down from her grandmother, patterned with birds and snakes and greenery. She was dressing her Barbie dolls—permanently arched feet, perfect nippleless breasts, pink-painted smiles—while her mother ironed her father’s shirts, steam puffing from the iron, and I have to tell you something, her mother said, and she began to cry, cry, cry, told your mother that it had been a first date, a drive-in movie and then a parked car in the woods, conifers rising on all sides, and she didn’t know the way home, according to your mother, who relayed this story the way someone might describe an unfavorable weather forecast—she could’ve said no, could’ve run, but where would she have gone, and anyway, something about him made her feel wild and alive, like she could slip off her skin and become an animal—a colorful bird, or a furred creature with paws at home in the dirt—and it was a winter wedding, an ivory dress with ruffled sleeves, her belly swollen like a choreg loaf in the oven, dotted with sesame seeds, twisted into a braid, and I didn’t want you, your grandmother told your mother, I cried every day I was pregnant with you, and the point was, don’t have sex before marriage and you will be happy and your children will be happy like I was never happy, so help you God. And your mother, who had finished putting her dolls in their frilly pink dresses, said okay. She held up her end of the bargain. She ran upstairs with her dolls and set them up on her bed and promised she would love them forever.
Lindy Biller is a writer based in the Midwest. Her fiction has recently appeared at Fractured Lit, Pidgeonholes, Milk Candy Review, and Bear Creek Gazette. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @lindymbiller.