Kill Mommy [1989]

With love and remembrance,

apologies and sorrow

Do you remember how we played the bus game? I remember so I know you must remember, because we remember the same things and say we remember them at the same time. We call it Wanna Ride the Purple Bus? except one of us said it puhple bus, puhple anything many times since purple is the best color, but Mother and Daddy can never remember which on of us says it which way. And they threaten to send us to Speech Class, which is the Saturday afternoons after cartoons wasted in the livingroom of the old lady Baby Powder. But the livingroom isn't a livingroom the furniture is ancient wood, probably so old it's petrified, and even the big sofa is small and hard, prickly and hot from all the horses inside, horsed that were sheared naked then died hundreds of years ago. All of the furniture was stolen from a museum, we know this is true because they smell that way. The carpet, we are afraid to step on the carpet when we think about it. We think about it all morning and it spoils the cartoons and bowls of cereal, the milk tastes curdled. When Mother pushes us up against the door we look at each other and know we're both thinking about it the most. When old Baby Powder opens the door we have to jump and take giant steps to the island, sometimes we use the coffee table for a last safe step, but then they both yell so loud. We don't do it every time, sometimes you do it, sometimes me, sometimes we both have to do it. We don't care when they yell, we cover our ears, make boom-boom noises inside our heads and pretend to be scared that a thunderstorm is coming. But once we're on the island it turns into a boat and we are safe, we just sail away and we might be pirates. We have hundreds of swords long enough to cut off their heads or run them right through from way over here. But we are two of a kindness, we always say. And we are safe, safe from the carpet. The carpet is covered with sticky drippings of deep-fried Baby Powder, we know that that smells. The carpet is like alligators and acid. You have to be safe in four steps. The fifth your foot dissolved and you had to walk funny the rest of the day. The sixth we didn't know so it was always the coffee table. It scares us. After the second Speech Class we decided you just slipped down into the carpet like quicksand, and probably underneath you fell into Baby Powder's deep-fry. At first we were surprised, bitterly disappointed in Mother. She didn't realize the carpet. Now we feel like how Miss Kitty sounded when Miss Kitty's kittens went away. One Saturday night we gasped and hit each other in bed, we were crying and shouting in whispers, "But she does know, she does know, no next time watch, she knows all about the carpet, watch watch, remember? she never steps through the door, the carpet, she knows!" We saw each other's eyes in the street light that came through the window. We both saw what we didn't say, what didn't need to be said because it was the shudders running up and down our spines, even as we hugged tight and tired and tried to be not the same but one. The way Miss Kitty went made us wonder how the kittens went, and we know, light and soft like they went before they were gone, the same as Miss Kitty but higher and lighter like the wind blowing through the trees and the swingset when it's swinging, going ee-ee ee-ee. The next time we got safe you sat on one arm of the couch and were Miss Kitty and I curled up in the other corner and was Miss Kitty's kittens. You went MROoWr MROoWr and I went mew mewmew and we were singing. We stop for good because then the faces are faces that we've never seen before. Mother does not step on the carpet. Then we know for sure. One time the door opened and we kick off our shoes and use them for a bridge. Mother screams and calls us back and smacks us on our butts and then later old Baby Powder makes us each take one from the bowl of peppermints we know she stole from the Candy Museum or saved from going to the doctor's when she was a little girl if they even had them way back when she was never a little girl, she makes us unwrap them and eat them and touches us on the hands. We know she is a mummy and that's why she steals everything from museums. When she leaves the room we take the peppermints out from under our tongues and poke them down scary cracks the sofa seat goes down. We take turns leaning over and watching, spitting on the carpet underneath the sofa. The spit is stringy because it's mostly spider webs. We agree the coffee table is the best way. You think the carpet is the carpet because she deep fries baby powder for dinners then pours the grease on the carpet and rubs it in with her feet. I think she never takes a bath, she just waits until she's all sweaty then rolls around on the carpet. She is old Baby Powder because that has to be her name. You say when she takes a bath she uses her washcloth when she unstops the drain so she can save the baby powder, putting the washcloth in the oven to dry into a powder puff. I insist she doesn't take a bath except the carpet and just keeps putting on more and more baby powder. I tell you she has a skin on top of her real skin an inch thick of baby powder. I dare you to scratch her. We know we're both sort of right, and we know that where the oldest baby powder and her skin are, they're all mixed together and it must be like jelly. We wonder if she falls against the wall if she would smear or turn to dust, does she leave a stain? would she hover like a cloud then snow on the carpet? We want to die to jump up and push her to see, but the carpet is all around which you can never ever stand on. Besides, when she leaves the room we are scared of the china statues in the not-window's shelves. The wall by your end of the sofa has the empty fireplace and screen and gold shovel and tongs and tiny broom but also the not windows that go tall and thin and don't have glass but glass blocks you can't see through and the shelves with all the children statues small and china and painted and stolen from museums that scare us when old Baby Powder goes away and you and I have to hug and shiver in my corner. We call them her Baby Powder Babies. She says she has children, grown children, but she didn't have any proof, no pictures or toys, just the Baby Powder Babies, which no one would ever want to play with except as slingshot target practices to make them go away for good, to stop the thinking that maybe they really are her children, that she got mad at and rolled in baby powder then deep-fried until they were tiny and hard, then painted and put on the not-windows' shelves where they'd never be bad again. But though some of them look like brothers and sisters, most of them don't, and suddenly we realize we were right and that most of them were children from Speech Class who didn't know about the carpet until too late. We decide we had to bring markers and stop the children being children with mustaches. Both of us start saying only puhple and then we got to stop Speech Class because old Baby Powder found the mustaches and died. So we say, "Wanna ride the puhple?" what we mean. Your are the red bus because of the fire hydrant poking out by the street and about how all the fires one house away would be red and out of reach and burn to the ground, and I was the blue bus because of the sky. Nothing else in the whole world is blue, except paint, except the sky and then there is no rain so the houses down beyond burned red to the ground. You are the red bus and you are in the front yard. I am blue and in the back. We race in a derby around the house. Our passengers are the bucket of old golf balls, our collection from the country club beyond the woods across the creek. We fill all pockets and crossed arms and run circles around the house until the red bus and the blue bus crash and we fall to the grass spilling our golf balls, the dead scattered on the green grass like round tombstones. We are the only ones to know about the ancient civilizations that built giant golf balls not pyramids. But then we are the purple bus, and we treat all the surviving golf balls to a popsicle ride on the purple bus dancing round and round until we trip, always on roots or tufts or molehills, never our feet the same, garlands and creepers and we lay in the grass separate, the red and blue buses panting side by side and then we gather up the golf balls because they're all alive again, they need to go somewhere on different buses, the red one or the blue one. I am Matt and you are Mark and this is because of the Bible, Mother says this is why. This seems like ½ the way everything is ½. ½ isn't right. We have an older brother but he is wrong, he's Ron. Sometimes we call him Lukejohn but he doesn't pay any attention. So we get the fish, we go with Daddy to the department store and get the fish in the pet corner. We get two goldfish who are Luke and John and the man gives us a free fish probably because no one will buy them black with pop-eyes. We don't know who it is, we decide it's too ugly to be Jesus. Luke and John are gold as holy, but we see they're really orange so we say that they're both on fire, then you laugh and say the other one is already burnt up, burnt to a crisp I shriek. We know what Mother would say, I say, "They're all very much alive and if you ate one you would find it quite cold and raw." "Besides," you say, "as even the dullest of the dull are supposed to know that water puts out fire." Daddy stares at us all the way home and when we get home the burnt one is dead in the kitchen in the bowl on the table, "Dead as a doornail," Mother says as she scoops it out in a dixie cup. We look at each other and know we want to flush it down the toilet through all the pipes back to the ocean where it belongs and would want to be and where, we both suddenly feel it prickly head and hair standing up, knowing how important from the lightning storms roaring along our backs, where it will be as far away as possible from Luke and John. Mother turns away and splashes it out the back door, telling us, "No, why waste it? You know it's good fertilizer for the lawn. And the way you two tear around it every little bit of help helps." She won't let us outside, she says, "Take your bowl of common carp and go to your room and don't come down until I call you for dinner." In our room we rename Luke and John Lukejohn and Johnluke so that if something happens there won't be ½. We know we have to do something or else Miss Kitty will eat the burnt fish and die. We wash up for dinner together in the downstairs bathroom. I turn on the water while you open the window and slide the screen, then I help you out and you sneak and get the burnt fish and hand it to me and I drop it down the toilet and flush, then I help you back in and we wash up for dinner and flush again. We remembered and ran back upstairs so Lukejohn and Johnluke can eat with us. We'll put the bowl in the middle of the table. We are right inside the diningroom door when all at once the entire world is completely silent. Everything seems thick and heavy and absolutely quiet. From her seat Mother stares at us with a very plain face. We know she's secretly jealous because we have a prettier centerpiece than she ever made. We also know her look means if it wasn't for Daddy being in the room she would wring our necks, and she might not even let Daddy stand in the way. We leave Lukejohn and Johnluke in the den but turn on the t.v. with the sound off to keep them company. After dinner and dishes and t.v. in the den, after the goodnight pecks we take the bowl back up to our room and set it on the dresser. We don't know why they call it a dresser, we don't wear dresses, we think it should be dressim, but we, we call it our dressus, but we don't tell her that except when we make a mistake. We always know then, we bite our lips and watch as she gets the question mark eyes which usually turn into the V-eyebrows right before she shouts mad. Dresser! Yes ma'am. That night we get in our matching p.j.s except the stripes on yours are red while mine are blue but all the rest are white, and we kneel in front of the dressus like in church pews, which we call phews because the old ladies in front of us always smell like flowers that died before we were even born, with our hands holding onto the top of the dresser and we watch Johnluke and Lukejohn swimming in circles that make us dizzy, spin our heads and fall to the floor. We pretend to be the grown ups, the groan ups, at the parties Mother and Daddy have downstairs when we sneak down and spy. You say that to get our strength back we have to crawl up the front, use the drawer handles I say are ladders, to watch the fish swimming around and around, lick the water in the bowl, drink some of the water like Miss Kitty, but then we see the fish swimming circles trying to eat each other. We agree we have the smartest fish from any store in the world, which are swimming to eat each other's tails, they're going to eat each other and become one fish so there will never be ½, so we do it too. The bed is our bowl, and we bounce-swim and bound round and round in the bowl. If we can do it which we know we can and the fish do it then we'll open our mouth and eat the fish and be all the one and then we know it'll be like Christmas morning forever. We just have to go hard enough. Mother yells at us to stop it, stop it, stop it right now whatever we're doing stop it. Get in bed right this instant, we giggle. In the morning the sun makes the room yellow and heavy, drowsy as falling asleep in the lawn chairs in the backyard in the middle of the afternoon and waking up. Something makes gold flashes across the ceiling. You tell me to hide, get under, we have to stay under the covers or else we'll go blind, but I know the gold has reminded you of Lukejohn and Johnluke too. You can't fool me and you can't beat me to the bowl. The fish are still the same, they're still Johnluke and Lukejohn, except they're not on fire anymore. They're dead floating on top of the water. Now they're the color of the burnt up charcoal left out in the barbecue, grey and soggy from the dew. We look at each other and both know it's ½. Our eyes are big and scared. We know what we have to do right away, we each take a fish, hold our noses and swallow. Only when we're sitting on the floor feeling sick do we remember. Mother! What's she going to say? We decide the best thing is to go downstairs and ask Mother what happened to Lukejohn and Johnluke, where did our fish go? "Well, where did my boys go? you aren't them, my boys are smart. The fish, obviously, are either in heaven or Miss Kitty's belly." But Miss Kitty's belly is where her kittens came from, so everything is even more confusing. We wait, we always have to wait and wait, we wait and wait and wait days and days, we said the waiting wasn't waiting anymore, it always became not waiting but an unspeakable monster lurking behind a door. It will reach out or jump out and grab you when you aren't even thinking of it. When we wait, we talk about it, retelling it, making it bigger and louder. We are afraid to ever sleep. If we were to be woken by it we would have heart attacks and our brains would explode. We wait for Mother to finally call us in. Mother will call us into her room, she'll shout our names and expect us running into the bedroom, politely knocking first. Mother does it again. Even though we are standing right in the room she shouts, "MATT AND MARK!" As we sing "Yes, ma'am?" she whispers us again, "Matt and Mark?" "Matt and Mark," she continues, "why that was all your Daddy's doing, what he wanted. I claim no part of it, nor would I want to. I washed my hands of the entire thing once it appeared as a rapidly forthcoming fait accompli. I guarantee you that. In fact, I disclaim every little last bit of it." You know, and I know, we bump shoulders knowing what we know, dreading waiting with an awful knowing of having to wait for the sign that is ours to run out of the room. Mother sits up on the bed, props the pillows behind her, then dusts off her dress as though she's smoothing out the wrinkles. "Matt and Mark, oh my goodness. Boys, if I had had any say I'd've called you," pointing to me, "John the B., and you Jesus!" Her laughter releases us, running, her hideous laughter like the cackle of a crazy witch, her laughter turns our backs into electricity, her laughter usually makes one of us pee before we reach the doorway. But you remember the Tree. We look out the window and it is our friend. The Tree is the one tree in the backyard, it's the only tree we climb. The tree is magic, the grey its color, and when leaves are green or yellow or red, or when everything is brown and the bark is worn, smooth and shiny not-shiny like hundred-year-old shoes. The Tree is playing all the games in the Tree, which we play only when Mother is away for hours. We climb up and sit on the lowest branches. First off we tell each other Mother voices, screeching we say, "Don't you know you could fall and break your necks?!!" We look down at Mother's spot and shout, "Don't you know we could fall and break your neck?!!!!" One of our favorite Tree games is Uh Oh, Here Comes Mother where we climb way up high in the Tree and leave something up there that won't fall out, a sweatshirt or something, and then come back down. Then one of us is Mother and the other one of us is us and Mother has to go inside and boil a pan of water and once inside the door the one of us starts climbing back up to get the sweatshirt and get back down before the water boils and Mother comes back out and runs to Mother's spot and screams out, "What do you think you are doing? Get down from there right this instant! How many times have I told you to stay out of that tree?!" If the one of us who is us gets caught, we say, "How many times have I told you that I'm going to spit on you?!" That's Mother's spot under the tree because that's where Mother always stands and we know it's her spot because there isn't any grass anymore. We can't remember if there was ever any grass there. It's the only place in the grass where there isn't any grass. Mother and Daddy talk about the no grass there, Mother says it must be from when we jump down out of the Tree like we're not supposed to ever be in and several times a year Daddy digs up Mother's spot and sprinkles it with seeds, waters it and covers it with straw and a few times put down sod like green carpet that stains light brown it always dies and tells us kids to stay off it though the only time we stand there is one of us when we play that game. "That is Mother's spot," we know it is useless to say. Every time we go up in the Tree we remember the trick we played on Mother's spot. Wen we talk about the trick we played on Mother's spot we laugh so hard like monkeys we almost fall out of the Tree. We got the idea for the trick from one of the trips we went on, sometimes Daddy and Mother take us on trips, Daddy calls them extracurricular educational sojourns and Mother complains all the time in the car and calls them quality hell time. This time we got the idea we drove to an old pioneer fort, except it wasn't the fort, it was just where the fort had been and they'd built a new fort on top of it to look like the old fort. The town all around made restless Indians seem stupid. Inside the fort was mostly grass like a field, mown but still going up and down and trees. Most the buildings are against the walls, and inside the fort, in the middle, back by the back it's like a playground with all the kids running. We ditched Mother and Daddy in the craft shoppe and ran down to the field. There's a roll on both sides and then a ditch, and the spring, the spring the pioneers had used for their water and built the stockade around to keep safe. It trickled down from some stones that seemed set into the hill, built in and the water spilled into a pool like back in the pioneer days about a foot deep and two across. It was fall so the leaves were on the ground so we gathered a bunch and dumped them on top of the water so it looked like ground and then told the kids to come on and touch this place on the rocks, see how it feels, it feels so good and weird. So many of them fell for it and stepped into the pool, so many we thought everyone must know about it but still more kept coming. So the trick we played on Mother's spot was we dug it all up and used the hose to make a pool but then we didn't know what to do with the extra dirt so we shoveled it back in and stirred it into mud and then we spread dead leaves everywhere. Mother was home and we went up in the Tree, grunting and screaming because we were monkeys and Mother came out and slipped and fell and sank into her spot. We will never do that again. What was round and green we knew was poison, we know it for sure. It is poison so deadly you immediately throw up if it even touches your stomach, it'll make you throw up just having it in your mouth. We tried once to explain this to Mother. Mother didn't care, she said, "That's ridiculous, that's absurd, that's crazy, that's certainly far-fetched, that's ignorant, that's a new one, that's obscene, that's outlandish, that's silly, that's sheer lunacy, that's pish and tush, that's preposterous, that's garbage, that's utter rubbish," and that's all she said. Her only other words were, "Lord, how did I ever give birth to two such imbeciles? it must come from your daddy's side, especially you John the B., John the big butthead . . . Matt! Matt. That is the perfect name after all. You do have brains to wipe your feet on. I'm going to go down to the courthouse first thing tomorrow and legally change your names to Doormat and Offthemark. Makeyourmark, ha ha, the sign of the cross! hahaha . . . " That time was so awful we never asked again. Right after, we told ourselves that had been a big mistake, we knew it before it began happening. For revenge she served the round green things almost every night and she always made us try them, singing her song at the top of her lungs, "Taste me, taste me, and you will see . . . " but all we ever saw was the vomit. Usually we tried to go in our laps, that seemed safest, just a few swats and having to wash out our own pants. If we went across the table they would take turns spanking us until bedtime, but if you ruined her carpet you were as good as dead, even if it was the flu that made you do it. The round green things were little vomit pellets, they were so squishy, they had these unchewable skins that would stick to your teeth and the back of your throat and inside it was a little plop of vomit, poison vomit to make you vomit all your vomit. And they make us eat them, they are so terrible, they are almost as bad though we do agree not worse than these round green things they call pees that they always make and then make us eat. They taste like pees, it's little round vomit pees, they call them wee pees and we scream in our chairs, "Oh no! Not the wee-wee pee-pees, wee-wee pee-pees, wee-wee pee-pees," until they smack on of us in the face and kick us up to bed. One night I only got to my first couple chews and you knew just by watching me I was sicker feeling than I'd ever been just about. I opened up my napkin and I just had to spit the whole mouthful and a gallon of spit right into it. Mother's entire body went into spasms, "Now you take that napkin and finish eating what you were eating and enjoying so much, every last bit, every last spit, I want you to lick that napkin clean." I could barely make it, never in my life have I ever choked back so much vomit, you saw it dribbling out my nose but lucky Mother didn't, she made me give her the napkin so she could decide if it was licked clean enough for her. I'd done a fine job, but it was when she started handing me the napkin back I threw up on it. A small spray hit the cuff of her blouse that was her favorite, that was an heirloom, that was rare and one-of-a-kind, that was possibly the most unique and precious and valuable objet d'art in the entire world. When we were finally supposed to be asleep we discovered that though it was the worst thing it was also the best thing. It was the best idea we had ever had, it was the perfect plan and the only way out. From then on we simply waited for her not to be looking and then we pretended to be lifting then chewing the forkful of pees and then we spat them out in the napkins and since if she's told us once she doesn't need to tell us a million times we barely bother lowering the napkins from our mouths before pushing them back up and licking them clean as if there's anything in them so soon we decide there better be something in the napkins so we sneak jelly beans or gumdrops or any squishy candy so we can imagine and make the faces real. We can never rest. After dinner you told me, "Mother isn't stupid, we have to remember to always be ready to outsmart Mother. First pees, then it'll be poop." We already know what to do when she gets suspicious and decides to start counting out the pees on our plates. We each get twenty-five little round green things, and we each have to eat at least ten. It makes dinner a top-secret mission, each dinner we have to find a way to get rid of ten of them. We get awarded medals of courage in our bedroom if we shoot them from our forks, hiding it with our other hand reaching for the glass of milk though it's harder for you having to shoot left-handed. Wearing long-sleeve shirts it's easy, slipping them in one at a time. Or we sneak them and hide them, little shelves underneath the table, ridges in the chairs. If we leave pees in the diningroom, we always go back later and get them. The one way that never fails is just to gradually and while she's not watching fork them into your mouth and chew and chew and swallow and then start eating something good and from the beginning the little round green things are stored safe and not too bad in those pouches down there where the teeth and gums and cheeks are. We even make desserts just so we can spit the pees out later. Since we never really ate the pees anymore, to get her back, we decided that anytime there were pees we would call the main dish poop food. Broiled poop, poop stew with pees was her favorite. "Poop phew with wee-wee pee-pees," we never said, not at the table. But we did say things were poop. Mother got us back by serving even more pees, making pees into everything, pees stews and baked pees, pees pudding, noodles and pees sauce, pees bread and pees surprise, and for dessert pees greenies à la pees. We think about it and exclaim that there is nothing worse than peesoup. We're at the pond way back past the woods when we decide that pees are exactly like all the duck poop, the ducks leave little green poop pees everywhere, you can't get down to the water, you can't get anywhere near the water, there's no way to come within miles of the pond without having to get green duck poop pees all over your shoes, tons of it, smeared to your knees and watch out! slip slide! and there's so much all over you can barely walk, you have to puke down your front. You got the good idea, we already knew, we got home from school and Mother told us to go out and run around until dinnertime, "run and play and run hard and build up some great big appetites because I'm cooking up your favorite, a huge yum-yum pot of peesoup!" You have a baggie in your pocket from lunch. There is hundreds of years worth of duck poop spreading out forever. It'll be a not be ½, we'll make peespoop. We get back home before dinner and I go into the den. I pick up the phone and dial BAKER and hang up, which always makes the phone ring for some reason and I shout, "Got it!" and then, "Hello? Huh? Yea, hold on, I'll get her. Mother! Telephone!" I sit back on the couch and study the t.v. guide and she comes in for the phone and you sneak in the kitchen and dump the duck poop in the soup and stir with the whisk without making a sound. Mother yells at me about the phone but I just go, "What? what?" For dinner Mother and Daddy eat the peespoop, they finish their bowls and have seconds and they talk about how good it is, "Darling, this is so good, did you do anything special to it? You and your secret ingredients, trust me, I won't tell a soul." "Oh no, I made it the way I always do, a little of this, little of that." "Well whatever it is, please don't ever stop." After that she couldn't help but notice we hadn't really touched ours, just stirred around the spoons a little. Even regular peesoup was the worst with no way to hide it away. We didn't even have to take a sip, just the smell of the spoonfuls coming close to our noses made us drench the table top. We got sent to bed without. It was the Purple House. We look out our window, in our room kneeling in front of the window looking out at the night, resting our heads in our hands, elbows on the sill and tops of our foreheads against the bottom of the raised pane, looking out the window at the night that is suddenly becoming all orange and yellow and wavering, giant shadows dancing on all the houses over and on across to over where it's still black. I asked you what was happening to the nighttime and then you asked me. We had to invent an answer, make up our own. The sun is exploding, the moon is landing on the earth to get back at the astronauts. "No, the Russians are dropping a bunch of silent bombs." "Maybe it's the Apocalypse." "Same thing." "I know." It's the invasion of colors, "it'll still be nighttime the same from now on but it won't be so black and scary." "monsters can't come out if there're colors and you can see them." Then we smelled the smoke and saw the huge pillows of it rolling across the yards like the nighttime clouds coming down to go to sleep. There's a house on fire! and the sirens are starting from way off faster and faster louder. Hundreds of sirens from hundreds of fire trucks. It's the Purple House, we know it has to be the Purple House, all the other houses hate the Purple House, everyone is jealous of the Purple House, we know the only house they would burn down is the Purple House. Everyone says the Purple House is ugly, they call it hideous, a thumb sticking out, a monstrosity, in poor taste, an eyesore and an insult. We think it's beautiful. It's not a purple house. The first floor is red brick like on most of the rest of the houses and the second story is wood like all the others but they painted it baby blue and the windows turquoise. It's beautiful and they're burning it down because they're all jealous because it was the only house that didn't get blown away by the tornadoes. The tornadoes were before we lived in this house, before our house was even built, back when there used to be another house here, but it got blown up like all the other houses except the Purple House, and we used to drive out on Sundays to check the progress of our new house's construction and all the other houses were being built except for the Purple House which was still already there the Purple House. We go and drive there after church, right at afternoon, after stopping to buy a bag of jelly donuts and chocolate donuts and glazed donuts and the little milks like in school, and the sun shining because it's Sunday unless it's raining and we're singing, "We're going to see the Purple House! We're going to see the Purple House!" in the backseat with Ron who's big and quiet and Mother turns her head with her cold voice and says, "We're going to check on the progress of the construction of our new house." We always said later that she was speaking in ice cubes, she has a North Pole mouth, her teeth are ancient icicles and if your tongue accidentally touched her lips when she was kissing you it would be like licking the handle of the car door in winter, you'll never get unstuck, you'll never get away with your tongue tip and taste buds. Everyone says, "Of all the houses to be left standing, the only one, that one." They ask, "Is there no justice in this world? Is God really this cruel?" Mother says, "They're so goddamn cocky and smug the way they say it every time without even being asked, I swear to God at each and every cocktail party, 'Oh, why, we just simply opened up all the windows the way you're supposed to, something to do with alleviated the pressure imbalance. At the time it seemed like the perfectly obvious thing to do. Afterwards we were quite shocked that . . . '" "Let's go," you say, "we gotta go!" "Let's get dressed," I say, "we gotta get dressed first!" We all, all of us, we are all dressed and going out the front door, they can't keep up with us, Mother can't slow us down shouting, "How morbid can you get?!" and everyone is dressed and run out the doors, all the doors, all the doors are left wide open, we're all so fast and running racing to get the best seats. "We're all running," we start laughing singing screaming, "but there aren't any seats!" The heat becomes standing or sitting a few feet away from the fireplace on a warm cold night and the whole street and the houses and trees and people are flickering and bright on the front half when the lights are turned off. The flames in the fireplace aren't even babyfied, they're gnat-sized. No one can even be near the Purple House now it's gotten so orange hot like the setting sun decided to set right here, and all the other colors and the sound it makes is cannons booming and giant redwoods breaking in a tornado. The fire is so huge, it waves at everyone and makes rude noises, we decide that God must be actually just like that. It has to be true. Everyone really wants to go up and walk into the Purple House, see what it looks like. Mother says it's a lie, we're lying, we're a couple of confirmed liars, we compulsively speak falsely. She says she talked around with the others in the crowd and they all knew without a doubt that it was true, it was a known fact, the fact of the matter is that the Purple House people were known to be out-of-town right now. But you poke your elbow as I'm kicking the side of your foot. We saw it at the same time, we both saw it no matter what Mother says. The baby, the baby! the burning baby. We saw the burning baby, we saw it fall, falling the burning baby on fire falling, not like a piece of plank, not a patch of shingles, a small chair, not a potted plant and not a puppy, no toy or doll or plastic jug. The burning baby falling is a burning baby falling. We saw it, we saw it hit, it hit the ground and bounced once, we saw it and no one else except the one person who saw it and stole it before we went back, could go back to get it, find it, look at it first thing in the morning, before breakfast, before anyone else was up including the sun. Even with the sun we couldn't. It wasn't there, nowhere, we kicked through the whole smoldering heap and even without the sun we knew someone else had already stolen it. They stole the burning baby! They stole it to put it in a museum. The burning baby, falling. The burning baby falling. The burning baby falling, the burning baby falling. "Do you remember," you tell me, "the burning baby was a falling star up closer." "And also a Pizza round and red and white and spinning." The burning baby was so important and now it is gone. None of the other burned things matter at all. We go to the store, we had to go to the store, we needed matches so we ride our bikes to the convenience store to get the matches. Mother doesn't smoke and the only matches she keeps in the entire house are the special foot long fireplace ones that she keeps count of, and if Daddy smoke he never does it around Mother or in the house at all. Sometimes when he comes home happy late he stinks of cigars and cigarettes, but it's confused with the smell of drinks and mints and thick handfuls of fresh aftershave on his scratchy cheeks, but all he ever has is his old lighter that's always needed a new flint and is desert dry besides. When we go through all the pockets of his dirty clothes looking for matches we didn't find any matches but we did find the $5 to go to the store and buy matches. We figure it out that probably they won't sell us the books at the counter for cigarettes, "Probably the checkout clerk will be some grouchy old man," I say then you say, "Or somebody's mother, a mother," putting your hands on your hips like Mother, "like Mother, 'The only thing children need matches for is getting into trouble!'." At the store we buy some lighter fluid, aluminum foil and a whole box of matchbooks. Standing at the counter we start talking to each other about how we were supposed to be grilling out but how Daddy had forgotten everything except the charcoal but the checkout person was a nice pretty happy young woman and all she says is, "You boys sure your Daddy meant for you all to get a whole big box of matches? Maybe he just wants a couple of books? We keep them loose up here, you know, a nickel apiece." and you went so fast I almost started laughing, "That's what Daddy wanted but Mother was so mad we didn't have a single match in the house she said to get a whole box so we'll never run out ever again," and then did when she started first. "But where will we get a baby?" we shouted to each other as we cycled back to our neighborhood, "Where will we ever get a baby?" "Hey," I exclaimed as we waited for some cars at a busy intersection we never told Mother we ever crossed, "Hey! how about a baby doll?" "Well . . . yeh, why not? That's a great idea." We decided to ride around in some other neighborhood while we though about how would we get a baby doll. You came up with the idea to just ride around a neighborhood where no one knew us, "and just keep our eyes peeled for girls," "girls and dolls," "the houses that have girls will have dolls," "look for a bunch of girls playing out front," "and if they have dolls we can just take one and ride away," "unless there are a lot of girls and they're bigger than us," "and if they don't have their dolls then maybe we should sneak around and see if they left them in the backyard," and we ride down a street and see three bunches of girls playing out front, slowing down to stare good, but not staring direct, seeing every detail but making it look like we're just riding by looking around. The only group actually playing with dolls is almost perfect, they're just two little girls playing with their baby dolls right out by the curb, but then their two mothers are sitting right there on the porch, and the next bunch are three big girls, big enough to beat us up and not play with dolls anymore anyway. "They've probably graduated to the big Barbie make-up head." "Just look, they've graduated to their own big heads." Pedaling up to the third close enough to see we knew it wasn't going to be the third strike, it was going to be a home-run, you said it first, you smiled then grinned then said, "This is going to be a run-home." "Pie," I said, "A great big piece of chocolate pie with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles and ice cream and chocolate sauce, nuts and cherries." "The whole pie, fresh from the oven, hot and cooling in an open window." "I smell it." "I can taste it." "I'm already pooping it." They're four pretty frilly girls wearing birthday party dresses and they're not playing with their baby dolls but plain as day are parked a couple of baby doll carriages at the back of the driveway, so hugging we pump down the street and take the corner and find the closest big evergreen bushes to ditch our bikes. We cut down a driveway and start sneaking between the back yards. We've gotten confused about how many houses down it was, we thought it was three, but now we're passing five and a couple dogs are starting to bark at us and suddenly the baby doll carriages are right there, we sneak back to a small bush, squat down and freeze. We sneak peeps. The girls didn't see us and the dogs are starting to shut up. But the carriages aren't right there, they're way up over there. We look back studying the bushes and trees and going back around it would be easy to get into the girls' backyard without being see, but either way, from their backyard or this it would be impossible to get to the baby doll carriages, they were too far out in the open either way, either way, it's too far to run because fastness that far everyone notices, and it's also too far to do the sneak slow and stop quick way. The girls keep on doing some sort of crazy daisy chain circle spinning dance so that there's always one of them with a clear view of the back of the driveway area. "What we should do," you whisper, sputter in my ear, "is one of us should go back to the bikes then ride back down the street teasing the girls." Instantly I start rehearsing back, "Hey everybody! Look! It's a bunch of dumb girls doing a stupid dance. Hey you stupid girls, do you know how stupid you are? Boy are you a bunch of dumb girls, do you know how stupid you are? I guarantee you you are the dumbest bunch of girls I've ever met. You know why you're so stupid? I'll tell you dumb girls how stupid you are. You're not only stupid, but you're dumb, too. Stupid dumb! The dumbest of the stupidest and the stupidest of the dumbest. You girls are dumb plain stupid, how can you all be so dumb stupid? Dumb stupid, and dumbs are the big concrete things they build to plug up rivers and make lakes and you, you girls, you know how dumb stupid you are? You are so dumb stupid, you girls, you all, all of you, you girls are so dumb stupid, you girls you," that you've already stolen a baby doll or all the baby dolls and've gotten back to your bike and on it and here you come riding down the street, to me and stopping, pull a baby doll out from under your shirt and wave it at them while we spit gravel and split, but no! we don't have to! look! "They aren't even in them," I hiss, "no, look," I point, "they're still having tea." "Ooohhhh, you're right, they're still have a tea party." Safe from sight in the backyard. "Stupid girls." "They must have sent them off to play so they could have some serious conversations." "And drinks." "They're drinking Tea Thymes--a pinch of thyme and a teaspoon of tea thrown atop scotch." "A grand slam." "Four of them." "Drunk as skunks." We're in the backyard and at the tiny table in seconds. Instantly we want one baby doll only, it's the only one. One doll is too small, one doll is too old like a girl and one is too horrible and stiff and ugly and cold and cheap and all plastic. The one is a perfect fat and golden burning baby doll. You shove it under you shirt and we sneak our way back to the bikes, past the barking dogs, we speed on home glorious. After dinner we were bad and got sent to our room to make the burning baby doll, so we stole the scissors to cut off the heads of the whole box of matches, roll them up tight in wadded foil balls like big gumballs which we cut slits in the baby doll and stuff inside, one big one right in the middle. We need a fuse . . . we decide to try our firecrackers, we have exactly a dozen duds we found by the dirt piles at a new house last summer that we keep in a tiny box shoved up inside a hole we had made in the bottom of the box springs to hide things we never want Mother to find, we take them out and unwrap them on the desk. After an hour we've finally managed to tie together all the fuse stubs, but the knots are big and sloppy and the whole fuse is barely two inches long, it barely sticks out of the baby doll's belly. "Light this," I say, "and it'll just blow up in our faces, right in our hands." "Yea, we want the burning baby, not the burning boys." "Think it would work better to just take a long piece of thin twine and roll it around in the gunpowder?" "Work better than this." What we did was wait until everyone else in the world was asleep, but we knew we wouldn't be able to stay away that long, and using the alarm clock would probably wake up Mother, so right before bed we each drank three glasses of water to make sure on of us would have to wake up in the middle of the night about to pee in bed. We woke up at the same time both about to die from pee. We could barely make it getting dressed and getting our stuff, slow tiptoeing downstairs and sneaking out the back door, we barely made it and immediately outside we peed on Mother's flower bed. Even though it was pitch black outside and even all the dogs were asleep we had to be spies, creeping from tree to tree. We felt safe only in the ruins of the Purple House. What was left standing looked like trees turned into skeletons. Suddenly we understood that somewhere we would find the burning baby, the burning baby hadn't been stolen after all, the burning baby was hiding from all the thieves, and the burning baby doll would not only look like the burning baby, it would find the burning baby. When the burning baby doll fell, it would fall right on top of the burning baby, where the burning baby was, we sensed this for sure without knowing why. We found a board to use as a seesaw and piled some charred bricks for the fulcrum, placed the baby doll on the down end and baptized her with lighter fluid, away from the fuse, then took the can for safety far away over by a big section of wall that fallen down without burning up. I climbed on top of what was left of the fireplace, you lit the fuse and I jumped down on the up end of the board and the baby doll soared way up in the air, exploding in flames, the burning baby doll like a comet, exactly like the burning baby, falling the burning baby heading straight for the burning baby, everything was whole, nothing was ½, the burning baby must have been hiding under the wood pile right by the lighter fluid, the burning baby falling and landing and we ran ran ran ran ran ran home, behind us the crackles and booms of the Purple House afire as bright as before. We were back in bed for ten minutes before the sirens started. We closed our eyes scrunched up tight until they hurt, made our heads ache, our eyes were sharp hot balls of foil filled with exploding match heads, but we didn't stop. If anyone ever found out, we were dead. Fire, match and fire, fire! Nothing that happens can be hidden, we grew certain of that. Fire! "We didn't get caught," I said to you, "but that doesn't mean we didn't do it." "I know, and it doesn't matter what else happens, it won't make the burning baby never happened." We spent almost every day hanging out at the lot, every day for over a month, until the burn smell sank deep into the ground forever and weeds were springing up all over ashy and the lot was an ancient ruin, until they chased us off and brought in a bulldozer to start building another house. They built a new house on top of the Purple House, but still fire! the burning baby on fire. Fire! Fire we know forever is even more scary, but a scariness strong as a magnet, somehow perfect, that makes us one giant shiver while we're hugging each other as tightly as possible. Fire is our friend, a very big friend. And when we see the fancy box of stick matches on the sidewalk we do stop and pick it up and keep it. When we check to see inside, there is one match, all alone, a single royal match, tipped with gold. It's such a perfect no-½, we're sure it must be some kind of sign, but neither of us can figure it out. We have to keep it. While I'm lookout, you shove the box down between the pee-hole flaps in your underwear, where it'll be safe and secret. "It's a magic match!" you declare. "It is." At home we immediately go upstairs to our room and hide it up in the box springs. Later when we're in the backyard, we're running through the sprinkler, Mother is lying in her patio lounger and Daddy is at the back of the driveway tinkering with the lawn mower and he asks us to go fetch him a particular screwdriver. We play stupid and get the one from the kitchen drawer. "Sorry guys, that's not the one I meant. I need the red-handled one, you know, it's down on my workbench." We scream, "No-o-o!" but Mother shouts at us, "Don't be such big babies: there's absolutely nothing to be frightened of, except your irrational imaginations. And that's nothing, understand? nothing, nothing at all, so go get your father his screwdriver." But Daddy's workbench is down in the basement! and worse than just in the basement, it's in the darkest corner against the wall to the furnace room, where the most ferocious monsters live. The basement is darkness even with all the lights turned on. Standing still, down there, in the basement all alone or with you or you with me with the lights on, the darkness is just hiding, in the corners, up at the ceilings, in the shadows of everything, lurking in the lint behind the washer and dryer, concentrated in the black of the furnace room with door hole but no door. Just to leave, to turn out the lights, you have to then run through the darkness, escape before it gets you or you have a heart attack. Since it's not winter and the furnace won't suddenly start moaning and we have the magic match we decide to go investigate while we're down there getting the red-handled screwdriver. We run upstairs and grab the matchbox, then head oh, ever, so, very, slow, oh, so, slowly, down the open grey-painted stairs into the basement. The basement with all the lights on looks like some sort of underground torture chamber. The dungeon. Fear glistens from every surface. The only taste is cobwebs in your mouth. The shiny whites of the washer and dryer seem empty, wiped off, waiting for more blood to pool across the tops and drip down the sides. The dirt and stains where the linoleum tile stops and the bare concrete begins is ominous, a clue to something. I ask you, "What is it?" and you answer, "What does it mean?" We both each have the feeling that this time we are alone in the basement, the furnace room is empty except for the furnace, but that doesn't mean we are safe for good. Anything can happen in the basement, we know that truer than the Lord's Prayer. I pick up the red-handled screwdriver for a weapon and we approach the furnace room to find out once and for all what's in there, what goes on in there. Even with all the lights in the basement on the furnace room is still mostly dark, there's no light to ever turn on in there. We have no idea what we will find back in there, behind the furnace, back in the corner by the wall. You suggest, "Maybe the floor will be covered with all their leftovers and poop." I think, but hope not, "What if there's a big hole in the wall that leads down to their caves?" We sneak in and crouch down, creeping for hours down the long side of the furnace to the corner turning towards the corner. There's the tiny door that you can open and see the tiny blue flame. In the blackness of the blackest corner, we are, trembling. It's so dark our eyes are pitch black, but we know we are looking at each other, we can feel our faces close together, I'm turned and your mirror and you're turned my mirror, just an inch or two and my skin crawls feeling your skin right there in the dark, and you light the match for us, the striking releases the smells exotic like spices of precious metals imported from Hell, the tip flares up brighter than the sun, and your face is I know like mine, shivering and cratered with shadows like the moon. The flame settles down and all we see is the bluish metal of the furnace and the concrete walls and floor as fresh as the day after they were poured. There is nothing, and as the match burns down we just stare at each other. Right as the match dies out there's a cough, then groan from within the furnace. It's too hot for the furnace to be on. My spine is a shivering eel, electric wires made out of jelly. In the black we are glow-in-the-dark ghosts, shudder, big pits under our eyes. I feel a few drops of pee leak out and wet my thigh. We run and barely stop to turn out the lights. Luckily we remember the red-handled screwdriver but in a few days Daddy finds the dropped burnt match. Mother examines it then gives us our beatings. The worst thing is knowing that if Mother and Daddy care so much about the around the furnace, then the monsters must be real. For some reason that one little good match was a greatgreat BIG DEAL, just for one match the two of us were in the doghouse, even we don't have a doghouse, we don't need a doghouse, no house has a doghouse unless they have a dog or a dog that died and we've never had a dog, though we must be the dogs now because Daddy said, "Well boys, you're on your own now, you're in the doghouse with your mother now for good." At first we thought Daddy was going to build a doghouse and we'd have to live in it with Mother from now on. Mother just keeps saying, "You matching set of imbeciles, you could have burned down the whole damn house!" and though she doesn't say another damn house we feel like that's what she really means, as though we were the ones to burn down the Purple House the first time not them. But we didn't, and there's no way that she can know for sure that we did burn it down the second time which doesn't even count or matter much since it was already almost all burned down already from the first time when they burned it down. If she did, we wouldn't be in the doghouse, we'd be in the graveyard, or the orphanage if we're lucky, maybe in jail with the murderers for the burning baby. Instead, we're just in the doghouse, which isn't being grounded, it's being no allowed to play anywhere inside the house ever again, except our room that she doesn't say is okay but if we're quiet and shut the door they won't know. At the end Mother says, "And to prove to you two that I'm not the horrible evil ugly old witch that you think I am, if it's raining or something, you can play in the garage, but watch out!" That night in bed I ask you, "How come she always says that with her bad things that she almost expects it of me but with you she's always surprised, you know, I'm surprised at you Mark, I'm terribly disappointed.?" "I don't know. She must be crazy if she can't tell. There's barely any difference between us. If she can tell any big deal, what is it? she made it up, she's a liar, she invented it all but why? that means she must be crazy or something, don't you think?" "Don't I think? I know." We start giggling like crazy until we hear her shout, "Hey!" But with just the outside there is never anything to do. If you play the Purple Bus all the time you end up falling down and then you turn purple and you never ever get up again, they'll have to pick you up and then drop you down in some hole somewhere else. It's as worse and boring as having to stay inside a whole week in April because it never stops pouring down rain, hard ugly cold rain.

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