I am addicted to liquid eyeliner. I let the black roll over my lids making damp outlines and false perceptions. Knowing I will capture their focus this way, I paint around the corners of my vision, and encase my eyes for others. They become boring oily landscapes edged by the saving grace of elaborate frames. But in the warm months I try to wean myself off of the face paint. For a few weeks, I allow my eyes to recede into my face. And so up here I go without. Up here in the summertime, my buried eyes stay low and quiet.
With painted eyes, I once watched my baby sister stick dozens of pins into her pale arms. Tiny springs of life fluid decanted as she pulled them out. I could only sit there waiting to see if there would be any strings attached to the bloody pins. There were none, and I collected all the tacks, needles, safety pins in the house and shoved them into the trunk of my car before slinking down south for the fall. I left only the spools of thread, lonely forgotten gifts for my sister to find. That would be the last time I let my sister drain herself in front of me.
I think of her discovering the treasure chest of colored fibers as I wait for my cereal to go soggy. My heels are conscious of the linoleum film that glides like an oil slick through the narrow kitchen of our cabin. I think how like butcher paper it is on rolls in some dripping warehouse somewhere, reflecting a line of florescent lighting, as it is unwound in sticky strands off the reels. It will be shipped around to the more careless decorators of the east coast and stuck with some irreversible glue to the crumbling foundations beneath. I swirl my breakfast around in the bowl and glance out the window.
My gramma's frothy figure is pacing on the dock; she pads back and forth like a child on a Christmas morning in her nightgown. The bottle of gin that we carted up here is in the cabinet unopened, but I have pulled my hazy gramma up the steps to their bedroom every night since our arrival. I try to hold her up by her substanceless arms as she ascends the stairs, my fingers like iron clamps. She trips over nothing.
Tonight, she will not plead with me and she will not cry, but she will ask me to sleep next to her. I will, letting the dust and the years of the room lay its layers down on me. Sad paint-by-number clown pictures will meld their faces into my gramma's and my grandfather will seep out of the fraying bed sheets late in the night. I won't be able to sleep, but will stay because I cannot let the oldest thread in my life wake up in an empty bed.
I look out the panes again and watch as she traces blanks between the boards with her feet. The glass of water in her hand wobbles with every step. She has been refusing food, holding in her breath and drinking the water left over from her dead husband's oxygen machine on a daily basis. She drinks it this morning again.
The phone rings with my baby sister in downer mode. She is caking fleshy liquid onto her serving platter face, and tells me that her latest, with chalkboard teeth and jeweled ears wants to take her away. I do not wonder where they will go. Upon my silence, she then tells me that there is something else, and I can feel the anxiety trickling out of her like piss on elementary legs during afternoon recess. It's them, she says, meaning parents. Ours. They are making her take a drug test. And she wishes I could come with her, to hold her hand, to hold the cup, to hold her neck as it rolls back and she goes white at the prick of a needle. I tell her I would, only I am here with Gramma who is walking the damp planks of the sinking dock and drinking recycled air. "What?" she asks in a moment of clarity enough to misunderstand. "Nothing," I whisper into the receiver. "Just make sure you get it in the cup."
When her voice clicks off I'm left with an image of her at ten. Perspiration sheds itself down her neck, and watermelon juices seep out of the curve of her lips, as she devours a bulky wedge of the summertime fruit. Her bare legs and feet dangle over the ledge of our open window, swinging back and forth. She spits the seeds at the boys below, gawking up at her cotton underwear. With watermelon in her mouth, she cackles, dribbling juices onto her checkered skirt. The pack below hollers and whistles up at her, as she holds her Rapunzel pose with crude elegance and nonchalance. Ignoring their juvenile pleas and eager hands, she bites into the last remnants of the fruit and finishes off the pink meat. She wipes her mouth with the back of her arm, and chews the last bits with an open mouth. With a playful smirk and a flick of her wrist, she flings the rind down to the boys below. She imagines how, like dogs, they will fight over the last thing she touched as she pulls her legs into a crouch and climbs gingerly back in through the window.
But now she just sits there among piles of rinds with her reality on fire, burning in the wrong hues. I want someone to suck the hallucinogens right out of her. Unlike her latest syringe of a boyfriend, who keeps ejaculating acid into her over and over again. I have often wondered if he even touches her from the waist up. My fingertips go cold on the edge of my cereal bowl, as I see Gramma walk up to the cabin with an empty glass. She will come in to twirl my boyish hair around her fingers and refill her cup. I want to tell her to stop drinking unused life. I want to beg her to drink in her own, to breath deeply and feel it resonate in her lungs. I only bite my lip and she asks me if I will put air into her raft.
Attending to her request in the afternoon, I sit on the bench, blowing up the silver float for my grandmother so that she may loaf on the plastic cushioning and dip her feet into the water, making eddies with the wrinkled tip of her toes. She stands next to me and tries to part my hair as my lips go pale. This is all she wants to do today, she says referring to the float. This is all she wants to do. But as she says this, the sound of car wheels unravels itself into our stagnant day.
It is her vegetable oil son-in-law and my Uncle, who used to sneak up behind me and squeeze the extra layer of flesh on my thighs, asking, "What is this?" in mock excitement. I still sit with my hands between my legs when he is around. We can hear his lubricated dress shoes as he clacks down the shambled stairs. Knocking the hummingbird feeder out of his way with a Shakespeare swoop, he approaches to greet us. He kisses us both, wrinkled and cracked, on the face, and then moves right into new business. Says he wants to sell the place, maybe revamp the cabin and attach a nice Jacuzzi to the side. I wait for him to ask Gramma for her flaky approval. He doesn't. Instead, he takes down measurements, and scribbles figures on the property, consumes a glass of stale tea with us for compensation and kicks the fractured canoe. I hold my naked and raging eyes back, taking up slack on the reigns and let him go with the figures, with the measurements, with the dust of the chipped canoe still on his shoes. We both let him go; milked of words and knowing he might cash in our haven of secret and wallowing pain.
This night Gramma and I go walking beneath the moon's underbelly. We stagger over the stretching ferns with our child woman feet, slicing our heels open on the rocky clearings. Later, we ease our wounded soles into the nighttime water, stepping in and shimmying it up our hips like an expensive and earned evening gown. We let the waters twirl around our heads like streamers in Chinese New Year celebrations. We let it vanish us and then we emerge again like wild amoeba goddesses from some ritual in a landlocked sea. We pull thick sweaters over our stretched and glistening skins and huddle close sucking in each other's cloud of breath. She is wishing for fulfillment. I am pondering evaporation.
We left our silent anger from Uncle's visit on the rock-crusted shore, but I can still feel my grandfather's provoked temper clinging to the pine branches above us. He steams through the foliage and bark. His presence shouts in muted tones, demanding we stop the exploitation of the only life he has left after death. And I know the shape rage takes on his rough face, even though I saw it only once when I was young.
It was on the day I had decided to impose a mass genocide on the bullfrog population of our little lake. I worked all day hunting them down. Something in a child's veins can read the rhythm of water bound amphibians. I was minutely in tune to this gift, sliding my keen palms around them with vile grace. But there is also something in their slippery existence that occasionally allows children to take them prisoner, and I sloshed captured frogs into the bucket one by one. Until there were more than twenty. I pulled them out of the bucket, one at a time like newly bathed babies out of a sink bath. Tainted wetness shed from their immaculate bodies as I carried them to the execution block. Pressing them close to the bare wood of our dock, I brought a stone down hard upon them, pinching the vitality out of their squelchy frames. I did not stop until their eyes tumbled out from the force and I was satisfied with the amount of raw existence that lay detached and drying on the planks. I had only just killed the last one when he found me. In a fit of fury, he kicked the bucket over, the bullfrog-scented water spilling and mingling with the new blood.
He could do nothing but stand over me and seethe as I smeared the shimmering guts around with the sole of my pink flip-flop. After minutes I offered up the bloody rock to him with sweaty palms and frog grit beneath my fingernails. He took the rock and drowned it. Then he grabbed my neck and led me down to where the water lapped onto the rotting wood, plunged my hands in, smoothing over them, scrubbing off their malignancy with his own calluses. He lifted his dripping fingertips up to my cheeks crusted with frog insides and held them there, letting the excess shed itself onto my decrepit stance, making falls over my shoulder blades. He placed his eyes into mine, and let out a deep sigh. I released with him, dropping my violent quest onto the faded planks. I looked down at the withering remnants of my destruction, and knew he would breathe low and soft for me on the day that he died.