Sprout
garden-variety store-bought rope) that I’d run through a little hole in the plastic to a branch of the tree above, and even at the time I worried moisture might get through.
I took the picture out of the frame, laid it on the desk. It was hard not to think of the tracks of water as tears. I tried sponging it dry with an old washcloth but that just made it worse. Half my mom’s face was warped and swollen like the Elephant Man’s, and, well, no one wants to see their mom looking like that. Why I used a leaf to cover it up—the youngest palest green shoot from a locust tree—is anyone’s guess. But that left this strange faceless green oval sticking out of a wedding dress. So I covered the hands next, and then I added little bits of twig to connect head to hands, and then I went ahead and added torso, legs, feet. “Stick-figure” is what I was thinking, but of course what it looked like was a skeleton. And instead of being scared off by this, I was inspired. I began gathering bird bones, which is a lot easier than you might think, given the fact that a local fall pastime is shooting crows out of the sky, whose abandoned carcasses are promptly set upon by coyotes, skunks, and other crows, the gnawed bones picked clean by flies and ants and other insects.
And then, well, it was off to the races. Doctoring pictures, gluing together broken dishes into crazy new shapes, training trees and vines to grow into and around all the furniture in the room. I suppose it was one of those combos of cathexis and catharsis. (No, I’m not showing off, or taking refuge in my dictionary. One was Word of the Day, March 14, 2006, the other came out of Advanced English on Oct. 22, 2007. And anyway, you don’t have to know the name of what you’re doing to do it. Peristalsis is a vital part of your daily existence, and I bet you don’t ever think about it.) And when it was done it was done. It’d be nice to say I stopped spending time in the nidus after I started writing, but the truth is my last big stint out here was after my dad broke the computer, and that happened a couple of months before my fifteenth birthday. Tell you the truth, I was surprised to find everything still standing. I’d half expected it to’ve all collapsed. But I guess the past is more durable than that, huh? Or, if not the past, the monuments we make to it. Just call me Ozymandias—
“Ozzy who?” Ty said. This was sometime after our third or seventh or nineteenth trip to the nidus, when I’d finally finished telling him the story (we didn’t do a lot of talking when we were there). He shushed me before I could answer. “Never mind, show-off.”
We lay coiled together on the sofa inside a four-foot-thick stack of old clothes and towels and sheets. Somewhere incredibly far away I could feel my left big toe, which was sticking out into the twenty-degree air, but the rest of my body could’ve been submerged in a tub of warm water.
“Whatever,” I said now. “But still. Aren’t you glad I made it?”
“I wish we never had to leave,” Ty said. “But …” He extracted his arm from the pile of clothes, pantomimed looking at a watch. Or, who knows, maybe he was just looking at the bruise on his wrist. He extricated himself from the pile and stood up. All he had on was his socks and a stocking cap, and he immediately started shivering as he tried to find the rest of his clothes. Shirt and pants were pretty straightforward—no one in my family had ever gone in for black polyester slacks or off-white shortsleeved poly-cotton buttondowns—but finding his Fruit of the Looms was trickier, guys’ underwear all looking pretty much the same.
“You know,” he said, sniffing undies, trying to tell which pair smelled like sweat and which like mouse feces. “We could just put our clothes over there instead of mixing them in with everything on the couch.”
Still snugly inside the pile, I said, “Yeah, but then we’d have to get undressed in the freezing cold air.”
“Well, this way we just end up having to get dressed in the cold, and it takes like ten times as long.”
I shrugged, but the gesture was lost inside the pile. “What can I tell you? Logic. Not sexy.”
Ty looked down at me with soft eyes, still naked but no longer shivering, and I have to tell you, his gaze made me even warmer. Then:
“Where’d you get off to?”
Before I could ask what he meant, he knelt down and pushed my own cap off my head, ran his hand through my
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