The Lice Summer :
Shanley Erin Kane
IN JULY, WHICH was hot and hot-wet too, Mila spread herself like strawberry preserves on her mother’s lap with her limbs drippy and sloppy from the sun, from afternoon plates of flat white grocery store sheet cake with too much Sara Lee frosting. All the pink buttercream stuck into her gums, into the hole in her jaw where she had spit out her second to last baby tooth in a bloody salty mess and where nothing had grown in its place. Fingerfuls of the marzipan peaks she’d robbed off the starchy bubbly dough made her blood run skinny and fast.
Her head was as slow and melty as the rest of her, from staying on the mattress too late in the mornings. Summer-sleeping made her viscous and slow- strawberry preserves, yes, but strawberry preserves with seeds, with tangles of chlorophyll weighing it down. Pieces of Mila, belly still with its baby-bloat, and knobby wrists still sharp and jerky, fell out around her mother, who made a slightly imperfect corral. Those pieces of Mila sometimes brushed the wood porch that opened up into the soot prairie. They tempted slivers, her roaming pieces- sometimes she would have to wait until her daddy got home so he could hold her between his knees, her palm or thigh or foot stretched as taunt as dehydrated animal sinew in his construction-beefy hands. Then he would pluck off the ridging shard of paint or pine with a pair of momma’s tweezers.
Though it had been two years since they burned the prairie it still smelled of charcoal, and you could not walk across it without choking. Ever since the miner’s strike everyone was real careful about ashes, about ash-sickness, and ash-cancer- the kind they all died from. Mila’s momma’s best friend was a nurse and she swore they coughed up so much of the burnt carbon residue in their last weeks that if it didn’t get covered in so much snot and blood on the way out, the town would have enough to cover Ash Wednesday for years to come. Everyone could get crossed twice. So Mila was not allowed to go into the burned peat, not even where the grass was beginning to come in, and momma checked the bottoms of her bare feet when she came in from playing alone to make sure she had not gone.
Lying on her mother all afternoon she felt like a bear pelt, one of the ones in the hunting magazines her daddy kept on the Formica coffee table. The animals did not look dead, just angry. Sometimes on her mother she would let her mouth hang open and bare her teeth, pretending they were long and pointed incisors, that her dress was rough shaggy pelt and not ironed pea-blossom print. Her mother would rub the back of her head, dividing long brunette rows with bony fingers. Mila held her mouth open until her jaw quivered and drool slid down her face.
She would sometimes play in the yard right before the burning line, black and swollen. Most days, though, she had no energy for it, and simply draped on her mother. It was the nights that made her joints so sweetly lethargic, as runny as whiskey sauce over bread pudding at the fourth of July town picnic; the nights almost hotter than the days. Still, she fell asleep easily, despite the heavy air which perched on her 10-year-old chest, kneaded her collarbones, the top of her esophagus; purring until she went under. It was those nights that left her spreading and so pleasantly, spinningly weak during the days. She slept saturated in all her own sweat and sleep-drooling and child-dreaming for so many of the morning hours that she was almost high when she got up, almost stoned- inebriated on a sopping skin, a sopping sweating little-girl skin that stayed drenched all night and into the morning, urged on in the rows of light that rolled and squirmed between the white wooden blinds. She slept in that skin the way you sleep in a camping bag, in a sack; and the morning light heated her in perfect bands, mathematically spaced sun-bandages. Her day-languidness came from them, and also from breathing through all her damp hair so many dark hours- ragged and desperate sucking from underneath its salty net when it fell in her face and like apnea patients, she did not wake.
Such sleeping meant Mila spent the summer draped on her momma, her momma with the cool, blue-veined thighs jerked out of her sundress for the breeze by her third cup of gin and lime juice, floating thin and acidy on the top of the martini glass, split like oil and water- the martini glass her momma pressed into the plate of dirty salt left out because the only ants around here were black sugar ants. Kitchen ants. Lemon meringue ants. Ants so that you could leave out your vinegar but never your molasses. The rugged sodium caught dust and the chalk coming off the window panes getting slammed shut so much against the gnat clouds which settled into the onion braids if momma didn’t set the locks by three, which is when they seemed to come.
There were no pretty insects in those hot Wisconsin summers. This was the third year of them, the freakish heat months which the weather man said was El Nino, tsunami, tectonic plates, something. It was the third year of her momma dipping the martini glass into the dirty salt which was not rock salt, but table salt- Morton’s fine-ground, blue-canned with cheap paper covering the metal funnel that popped out of the lid. Mila always liked to listen to the spacious humming rim of the glass as it was spun on the plate soon as the sun got high enough.
Back on the porch momma licked the salt off first, so the glass smelled like evaporating spit in her face while she slurped off all the lime. Mila’s mother had taste buds so strong she never gagged on the liquor, not even by the sixth glass, when gin usually gets to making people thirsty for something else; and she was sloppy with her tongue most times, so the salt fell down and tickled the hairs on Mila’s neck, bare with her long brown locks flipped over to the side. Later her father would kiss her neck when he came home at 7:30, before he even sat down for dinner, even if he’d been roofing all day. He would think, from the salt taste, that she had run around all day, like little girls will do when there’s a good enough sun.
By two her momma was usually on her second glass, and Mila’s neck covered in fine saline powder. Mila always waited patiently for the third glass, when her momma’s hands would begin to run over her- idly, the way one touches a cat, and the way a cat wishes to be touched. Today she arched her spine as if begging them down. She watched the ants march and scratched her scalp, which itched lately- probably the new shampoo momma used on her over the sink. She said Mila was too old for that baby stuff, that baby stuff which did not sting her eyes and which smelled like strawberry shortcakes without cream, the way they made it for her daddy, who had high cholesterol.
Mila flicked the smelly dandruff from her nails to pass the time, and the third glass came soon enough. Momma pushed Mila off her gently but soon came swaying back out onto the porch, and Mila climbed back onto her when she had settled, positioned her limbs and straightened her spine. By that time of afternoon the salt line on the clear crystal cup was uneven. From her place below her mother’s soft poochy chin Mila heard the first gulp, which was of salt- and the second, which was of lime. Underneath her, the pickled belly hummed and whined, finally going silent with the third sip, which was all of booze. She counted to six. Six swallows. “Momma, will you scratch my head. Would you scratch my head momma it itches.”
The hands were given willingly, and Mila stared at all the gray petrified acres of the burnt prairie, trying to make her eyes water so that it would shimmer prettily like ice. Her mother started at her hairline, hands dipping into the freckled eggshell forehead, palms and knuckles finding the itches instinctively. “Oh Mila, we must wash your hair tonight!” she fluted. Mila grimaced. Hair washing- her strands hanging into the drain catch which would still smell like stewed tomatoes and steel-cut oatmeal, white bubbles bursting in her nose, rough bristles catching her earlobes. But that was Later. She sighed. For now she could just lay underneath the hands. Her parts felt melted, collected in pools; growing heavier and spreading more and more with each pass of the nails on her skull’s whining sharp curves.
She felt almost like sleeping again, with the hands plowing the itches so that they nearly abated. The hands were like lullabies, and she began to get woozy on their notes. But then the rhythm stopped, the hands abruptly lifted. Her scalp felt chilled in the places they had been. She opened her eyes, muscles ridging up instinctively. “Mila, Mila,” said her momma, in a scolding light voice, “So much dead skin!” Mila blinked- her golden green eyes had begun to crust from pre-sleep tears. Her eyelashes ripped a little, and she watched little pieces of glittering dandruff fall around her. She listened to her mother’s voice, which by this time of the afternoon was the most beautiful thing that she had ever heard- long and weeping consonants and dripping vowels; sentences slow-melting, showing all the signs of the heat.
She waited patiently for the hands to return, bending her face forward so that the cape of her skull would tilt up invitingly. But they did not come back. Maybe momma had forgotten, as she did sometimes. “Momma,” said Mila. There was nothing.
But then: “Mila,” and the voice was sharp and not dripping at all; it was the way it was in the very beginning of the morning- clipped and high. A voice like livewire and deep fat fryers. “Mila, stand up. Mila, you stand. You stand up right now.” Mila scrambled- her dripping body fell clumsily off, her knee hitting the deck, its cap ringing. She got to her feet, stacking the pieces of her legs up slowly and imprecisely, unsteadily- as if she were unpracticed in it.
“You look Mila.” Her mother held out her fingers accusingly, and Mila tried to blink but her eyes stayed slitted like a cat’s with all the bright shrieking light. Her vision had gone black when she stood and was only beginning to clear- she’d moved too quickly for the heat. “Do you see Mila?” came the demanding, coercive popping of her mother’s vocal chords.
Mila could not see anything, but she peered harder, wanting to please her mother. “Under my nails girl!!” snapped the voice, too loud for a sunny afternoon, for Mila’s summer-sensitive narcoleptic ears. Mila winced, brought her face closer. There, underneath the long pink-painted nails, was something squirming. “Oh momma, it is just an ant momma,” said Mila, relieved, but also scared, for ants were an everyday thing out here so far away from the town which sprayed all its sidewalks with pesticides. Her eyes darted nervously, not understanding why her mother was so upset over something so very common. “You just caught an ant, momma,” Mila ventured softly, grinning stupidly, her mouth hanging. Her hands drooped, palms open and reaching towards her mother, pacifying and imploring.
“No, you dirty girl,” her momma spat, her jaw jerking shut, the teeth clicking. The words were astringent. Mila’s shoulders rippled involuntarily while her momma shook her fingers like leaves, “That is a lice. From your head Mila. A lice.”
Mila wanted to come closer, to peer at the tiny black dot of live insect abdomen that her mother waved, but something about the way the hands moved, as if in seizure, as if they were the heads of snakes, made her hang back warily. She rocked back on her heels, tilting her torso towards the screen door of the house, through which the scent of melted cinnamon candles swept out. Her mother reached a long skinny arm over to the porch railing, whose hunter green paint was flawlessly coated on the top, but knotted in thick plasticky drips underneath. She twisted the finger with the louse bedded on it into the top of the paint, and Mila imagined it smearing, staining- like putting out a cigarette when you’re just going to light up another. Then the rest of the fingers withdrew into their Oil of Olay-ed palm, all but the insecticidal pointer, its three knuckles white from the strain- it stayed quarantined in the air. Mila stared sullenly at her mother’s feet, which were puffy and bubbled out from her house slippers, huge and sickly next to ankles red and thin as copper wire. She did not lift her eyes but knew by the sound of the swallow, the type of swallow that lasted an eternity, that the salt-doused glass was empty. When she finally raised her sore lids again her mother’s were closed, her head back, her forehead curving and the hollows in her neck stretched huge and scary. For a moment Mila thought she may be sleeping. “Momma,” she almost whispered, her voice parched and crackling. “Why don’t you go play in your room for a bit,” came back the slithering voice, the beautiful voice, that sounded like harps and shiny glass baubles, “Momma’s tired now.”
For three days Mila must have heard “Momma’s tired now” a thousand times over- each and every time she tried to slip onto the porch, hoping that her mother had forgotten her banishment from it; every time she pressed her face to the door and waited to be invited into the lap where she had spent so many days. But her mother would just slit open reptilian cloudy eyes, stare at the freckled child-skin pudging through the tiny holes in the screen, and lean back again- hands folded by her navel, clear nutty suntan oil overturned by her feet. Even offering to get the next cup for her, to mix the proportions perfectly the way she had learned when momma had had the operation and was on bed rest- two long glugs of the gin bottle, two air bubbles tickling up the sides; two splashes from the bottle that said From the Groves of Mexico, short twists of your palm- even that only elicited the same moaning phrase: “Why don’t you go play, somewhere.”
Too tired to skip rope and hands too flimsy to draw neatly in one of the coloring books momma sometimes got her from the grocery store- she took to sitting in her father’s closet, which smelled like his musky stinging aftershave even though all the clothes in there were clean, and should smell just the way her closet smelled- like fabric softener and dyed cotton. Her head itched all the time now- she sat in the closet and scratched her scalp in long, slow rakes from her hairline to below her earlobes. She scratched for as long as she could before she could not feel anything of her head at all, the nerves overworked and dulled. Then she just sat in the dark behind his workpants and counted the threads on the denim seams until momma called for her to set the table.
Each time after her hands had made the long journey through her curls she peered underneath her nails. Most times she found at least one, and more times she found their little sticking white bulbs. Sometimes the eggs would stay lodged underneath until she had dragged her two front teeth across them, still bumpy from years underneath pink gum. She spit them out onto the floor and rubbed her tongue on the rough of one of his painting shirts, stains the washing machine couldn’t get out. She was not sure if a thing like a baby lice could hatch and live in a place like a girl’s belly, so she always made sure her cheeks were empty of them. The lice she flipped onto the overturned sole of one of her daddy’s loafers; twisted them the same way she had seen her mother. Her heart jumped a bit whenever she scratched and her nails came up clean. But always the next time she would catch one, squirming and bucking, flat as paper.
By dinner the third night she had scratched her scalp into a red inflamed basin. She stared sullenly down at her plate- frozen fish, breadcrumbs mealy and stale, white flakes splitting apart like puzzle pieces on the fork. She chased the peas around the moat of store-bought mashed potatoes and melted cheddar, inscribing imaginary circles and half-listening to her father drone on about the Union; to her mother’s fake pearls clicking when she nodded to show that she was listening, to them tinkling like bells on the engraved stem of her wine glass. Absently Mila pulled her hand to her head, to the one patch which did not feel as burned as the prairie, but which itched like poison ivy. She remembered two seconds too late her vow not to scratch in front of her mother- her hopes that the whole thing would be forgotten if she did not scratch, that she would be let back onto the porch if she did not scratch- she tried to snap her hand down as quickly as she could, but missed her lap. The fragile spidery spread of the back of her hand smacked against the wood hard enough to make her peas bounce.
She began to cry at once, the hiccupy sort of cry which is the only sort of crying you can do on a full belly- Mila had snuck a Snickers from the drawer right before her mother had popped the vegetables into the shiny microwave, her belly demanding something more buttery, more rich and sugary than unsauced seafood and starch. She could still taste the caramel, and she cried harder that the candy was gone. Her father, who had not yet showered and smelled like sawdust and sharp metal hammers, was at her side in an instant, and began petting her hair, kissing her hand, blowing in her ears with his well-water breath- he did not drink since his old man died of liver cirrhosis.
“Oh Mila, Mila, what’s wrong my little girl,” he cooed, asking in the way that adults ask even when they have seen exactly what is wrong, when they have watched it become wrong. “My hand hurts Papa,” she sobbed, holding it out the way you give bread to a beggar, hoping they won’t brush you when they go to snatch it, “And they won’t go away!”
He clucked sympathetically, held her face in his hands. Mila’s mother winced, even though she had seen him wash up with the industrial soap in the laundry room. “Who won’t go away honey?” he asked, peering into her eyes which always amazed him in how they looked like his wife’s and not at all like his.
“The lice Papa!! The lice!! They won’t go away they won’t go away.” Having named it, the tears grew stronger. She rocked against the carved vertical bars of the chair that he had made himself when momma fell over one of the old ones from the Amish Furniture and it had snapped.
“What lice?” he asked gently, each word the same as the next.
“In my hair they won’t go away.” She let her head swing down obediently into his huge rough brown hands- two of his fingers could swallow the whole left hemisphere of her skull, without even stretching. She grew still as a rock, waiting- a waiting that is sure of proving something. “Jesus Christ,” she finally heard him breathe, quietly which was the only way he ever cussed, “Jesus Christ.” She let out her last sob, the sob that comes when the crying is done but the lungs have not caught up. It rippled her chest, amputated and stuttering. He patted her dully, almost irritably. “It’s OK Mila, you’ll be fine.” He stood. “She has lice Marjorie?”
“Well, it seems so, doesn’t it,” Mila’s mother said in her honey-voice, a bit of Chardonnay dribbling from the side of her mouth, her words a little damp and bubbly.
“Did you know?” Mila could not see her father’s face, but he sounded weary and slow with his mouth.
“Well, she’s been saying she’s been itching…”
“You,” he said, and his voice was perfectly flat, empty of tone, “Do something about it.”
“The store’s closed now dear,” she said, as if they were still discussing the Union.
“Then tomorrow. You go tomorrow.” He lifted his plate and she heard the last of his fish hit the fins of the garbage disposal. She felt relieved- dishes were her chore, like dusting the piano and changing the birdbath. Maybe tonight she’d be off.
The next day they went to the store where once she had drank too much of the lemonade they were selling in the parking lot and peed by the frozen macaroni. Her mother had made her sit in the trunk with no seat belt so that she wouldn’t get the seats wet and ammonia-soaking. Even though it had been a long time ago, many years, and even though Mr. Avery had since sold the store to some fancy out-of-town company, the same one that put up the movie theater, every time her momma made her come grocery shopping on Fridays or to pick up daddy’s cholesterol pills she shuffled in her slip-ons and blushed, cold-sweated and picked her braids or the elastic waistband of her jeans.
She tried to hold back fat tears as her mother marched her through the florescent and humming aisles, the noises of the refrigerators and of the huge board-like lights in the tiled ceiling, the vocal-stripped pop tunes oozing from the ratty speakers- one of the only things the new company hadn’t replaced. She counted the lines between the linoleum slabs as her mother twisted her wrist to get her to keep up while the cart filled with every old wives’ tale ever heard about head lice. Soon long skinny opaque jars of cheap vinegar rubbed the sides of mayonnaise tubs in the cart, the economy size. That, and carrot juice, and another jug of gin, all bent the corners of the flimsy cardboard boxes from the pharmacy section, put up right against the cheap stockings- boxes that said “Rid” and that said “Only One Application Needed!” Her mother had tipped five off the yellow shelves.
On the ride home Mila stared at all the cows out of the window on County 9, leaning her head and its ache up to rest against the hot gnat-splattered glass of her passenger seat and twisting the seatbelt between her hands, holding her nose. The manure and corn smell wasn’t so bad then.
She had to sleep that night with her hair huge and swollen with white paste and caught underneath a spotted shower cap whose band itched in a halo around her head. When she curled her fingers up underneath it to scratch, they came away stinking of chemicals and she would have to get up and wash her hands, tiptoeing into her bathroom, because her mother had told her that it would blind her if she got it in her eyes. “No more staring at that prairie all summer long. No more TV. No more comic strips,” she had said. It was the first night in her whole life that Mila had not slept; that her bed was not a place of instant darkness and long nothingness.
The chemicals began to burn only several hours before Mila would see for the first time in her life the sunrise, and be frightened by how flimsy and gray the light was so early. She was surprised that morning sun did not seem to be the kind of sun that could burn you- she had thought that was all the sun knew to do in the summer: be violent and lecherous. The shower cap rustled every time she moved, and she tried to hold still so the noise wouldn’t wake her parents. Mila was not exactly sure what happened to you if you did not sleep through the night: if you would get fever and swell up, or if your eyes would come out of your head, or if you would be so tired all of the day you could do nothing but sit in a catatonia; or if nothing happened at all, and she would go to breakfast- a slab of bread and jam, a glass of pulpless O.J.- just like every morning.
She lay in her twin bed with rigid toes that kept cramping until she heard the noises of her father getting ready for work. By then she had to keep moving her head on the towel-wrapped pillow every few minutes- the bald globe of the sun which looked from such a distance and from such a sleeplessness like an orb of blown Christmas glass, fresh from the coal pits, was hunting her eyes- trying to burn them, stalking her up slat after slat of the blinds. When it found her, she reacted slowly, as if drugged. Her sightline- of the parchment calligraphy of her name above the dresser, the bowl of dusty potpourri on the sill- was full of dancing light-threads and blind spots by the time she scooted up her rear to push her head closer to the oak headboard. She knew that the sun was a thing that you should never look at directly- but somehow, in this morning, that sun was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen, looking at it straight-on.
Her father’s sounds were few and passed quickly: the lid of the trash can whining; him throwing away the coffee grounds that made mornings smell like a spice market. After another long silence there were the sounds of her mother: hands screeching down the lacquered wood of the staircase; the Motrin shivering in its plastic bottle, its white lid Mila could not unscrew without help; the rubber buffers of the refrigerator door worn down so it creaked. When she heard the dishes clinking their newly soaped edges in the cabinets she swung her legs out of bed, the way she would have if the night had been the same as any other. But it had not been, and her body knew it: she blacked out the moment she lifted her torso, had to hold out her hands like a tightrope walker to find balance. Vertigo. When it went out of her, slowly, coiling in her fingertips and toes for one final dizzy moment; when it was gone, she quickly found the headache that had taken its place.
She went downstairs and ate her Raisin Bran, going back twice for more milk. The cereal tasted tough and mealy, and her mouth so weak that finally she just let it soak, until all the flakes became soggy and warmed. “Not hungry?” her momma asked, looking over her teacup which steamed her face with chamomile and reddened it in pretty textured blotches. Mila shook her head miserably into the bowl. “I’m hungry,” she insisted, waiting for the brown shards to stick to the sides. “We’ll cut your hair today,” said her momma, as if that was what they had been talking about. Mila watched the cereal pieces split into little brown specks, muddying the 2 percent.
When the Rid was finally rinsed out of her, she sat in the kitchen in the chair which stood rickety, placed on top of a towel. Her momma used the same scissors she split up leeks and the tops of long-stemmed strawberries with, the kind she only bought on sale. “There,” her momma said, leaning back against the counter with her martini glass resting by her elbow when it was done, “You like it?” Mila nodded, even though there was no mirror for her to see herself in. The hair on the floor did not look the way it did at the barber shop, piled up in little haystacks. It laid flat on the towel, one of the ones Daddy used to clean the tires of his car. Later, when her momma went outside, saying, “Let momma get some sun honey, I’m getting pasty in here with you like this,” she went up to her parents’ bathroom, walking past the bed- momma didn’t make it until right before daddy got home. To herself, in the mirror, she looked like a boy. She stared for a moment and then went outside on the porch to her mother, went over to lay on her, belly-first as she always did. “Not today, Mila,” said her momma.
That was how things were, for a time. She would wake up and they would rinse out the Rid over the sink after she had forced down the soggy bran flakes which tasted like her hair smelled no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar she heaped on top. Over the sink Mila would close her eyes tight so she would not go blind even though what she really wanted was to watch the white foam collect in the drain. The sixth morning, after there were no more boxes of Rid and her hair had become as brittle and thin as the hay which fell off the bales onto the road at husking time; the sixth morning there was only the soggy cereal. Then they went out onto the porch, and her mother said, “Not today, Mila.” And then, after a bit, when the sweat began to trickle down her mother’s drumstick temples and the sun was practically screeching down, thin and angry- they went back to the kitchen, and her mother to the refrigerator. The sides did not stay cold enough to crisp the label that said “Hellmann’s.” It was damp, and paper machied her fingers with blue ink print.
The preservatives of the mayonnaise gave out easily in her parents’ bathroom, where they went to do what momma called “fixin you,” and where there was no air conditioning. Normally Mila liked the hotness of the bathroom: its incredible bright whiteness, and its clouds of perfumes and daddy’s roundel of shaving soap. But now that she came here so often, and only to be “rid of them squirmy disease-carryin things,” the bathroom seemed different. Now she bent her head over the sink and felt the tip of her nose turn red and then purple as the blood slunk out of her brain to plaster the inner walls of her face. On the blood-rush and the smell of the eggs in the mayonnaise, which began to turn before long, Mila quickly felt the way she did when they drove to town on a full tank of gas- dizzy and woozy, like she was breathing and seeing and smelling through sponges or bubble wrap. To bear it she counted the flecks of mayonnaise that loosened and spilled lazily down her strands, heat-rotting and splattering like mouth-foamy toothpaste around the silver drain. Before a quarter of an hour had passed, Mila was beginning to float.
Her mother behind her wore gloves, latex and powdery. They squealed and yanked on Mila’s hair. The yellowy paste dribbled into the corners of her mouth, where she slurped it up bit by bit, even though so much rich salty rancid condiment was enough to make her think that she would never eat again, not even ice cream. But she was bored, and at 10, still had an automatic and whoring tongue- she sucked and shuddered.
Now and again her mother would stop rubbing the mayonnaise into her daughter’s battered locks and would pluck out a louse, if it was fat enough to see without her reading glasses. She would hold it up to the light to see that it was dead, that it did not squirm for cover underneath her fingernails, or shake its tiny black legs to get off its flat back. Mila held her breath while she waited for the verdict- the little gray body to be lined up with the rest of them on the side of the sink, whole neat rows of them stone-dead. Mila could count them, if she rolled her eyes up so that her head dull-throbbed. It passed the time.
And time passed. July turned into August, and to a prowling angry heat without breezes. The sunrise and the sunset both tore the sky into huge strips of orange and purple skillet. Mila could not remember exactly when the lice were gone- when her mother had thrown away the last empty jar of vinegar, when she forgot to itch. In her mind the lice had tapered away instead of ending- the hours in the bathroom getting shorter and shorter until they were none. But still Mila’s mother chased her from her lap like she had everyday since that first day, that first day of the lice summer.
Exiled, Mila took to sitting at the burning line while her mother basked. Looking back at the house from where the black loamy soot met the fertilizer green of the yard, her mother was very small. Mila’s shoulders had first burned and then peeled off in huge thin sheets of yellowish torn skin when she had begun to sit there through all the day, but soon they were thick and resilient, chestnut-brown. She would sit there and think about how, in a way, the prairie was clean- clean because it had been sublimely ruined. How things if you burn them enough will be clean. She thought about how her scalp was like the prairie, and snaked her hands up to the only trace of the filth which stayed inscribed on her- crusty scabs that pussed a little sometimes, abraded spreads which nested near her ears and the part of her hair; chemical burns that had not yet gone away, though she could feel them getting smaller and smaller, getting swallowed up into the same ground they had been charmed from.
She thought about the scabs, and about two years ago when they had burned the prairie and she and her mother had stood in the very top room of the old house with the fan in the window so they would not catch fumes or smell like smoke later. They had stood in cotton sundresses that the air dappled and flung limply at their matching skins- her mother’s dress lapped around her matchstick ankles and Mila’s scraped at the dry chalky ridges of her knees. Mila’s hand had been small and blistered from the school’s monkey bars, and disappeared inside her mother’s palms as they had looked out through the spinning dusty blades of the AC box, which split their vision of the prairie, of the strange men who looked like beetles from their height, and of the flames sputtering and licking up the sky, trying to eat it whole with every piece they made clean, with all that they ruined.
Now, two years later, the ground was still glittery and dark and barren. And in August, which was hot, Mila sat by the burn line and sometimes dipped her palms in it. There by the prairie she let her limbs go sloppy like strawberry preserves, the way they’d been on her mother’s lap. Maybe next summer, she thought, as she tried to make her eyes water so that the prairie would shine and dance like ice. Next summer.
Shanley Erin Kane was born and raised in the backwoods of Minnesota and spent her summers on its lakes. Despite transplanting to the big city to pursue writing, her work contains more references to farms than subways. Liberal use of the term "hunky-dory" also reveals her as a Chicagoan impostor.
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