The Battered Suitcase July 2008

  And as suddenly as she had appeared, Chris uttered a profanity and jumped off the train. Ticket inspectors were heading into our carriage and the cigarette butt was still burning on the floor. Nobody said a word.

  ~

  I thought of her as I walked home that afternoon. Christina. Christina the punk. She told me that addressing her by her full name was punishable by death and I believed her. That day, there was an intangible feeling of something changing in my life, of an event biding its time until it would be analysed years later, when I'd look back and scream, "There! That moment! That's when it fucked up!"

  ~

  The train became our ritual. Every Saturday morning, she would be in the same carriage with something to show me. Chris stole everything she owned. She said that she didn't want to be just another consumer. I reminded her several times that purchasing and consuming were two different things. Even if she refrained from giving the companies her cash, she was still reinforcing the social importance of "owning stuff." At these times, she would smile in a strange way and pat my head, calling me her "Dear Little Jodie." I found it patronising but oddly pleasing.

  She'd ask me to try pot with her, or to come to a party with her and her violent friends. I was more scared of how they would react to me than how I would feel about them. So it became just us two, content in each other's company. To my mother's horror she slept over every other weekend. Chris's radical image was a contrast to my straight-laced, well-mannered friends of the past, but I think she was secretly pleased that I had found someone with whom to share my thoughts, the ones she couldn't pretend to understand.

  Chris and I would raid the liquor cabinet and drink vodka in my bedroom, listening to Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney. "Music to fuck to," she'd wink. All the while she hinted at some deep river of unhappiness lying dormant underneath her tough exterior but I never pried and she never confided.

  "Oh Jo, this is love, better than those fucking record industry cunts can define it," she told me once as I brought her a coffee for her hangover. I said nothing; I was scared of what would happen if I opened my mouth. She inhaled chemicals to escape what she had no control over, what she wouldn't tell me no matter how drunk we were. I stayed in school and pretended not to care that she was my only friend, that nobody had even grazed against me in a way that mattered for so long. Then one night, she asked me to run away with her.

  It never even occurred to me to say no.

  ~

  The train that we caught out of town was the same one on which we met, but the irony was lost in the thrill of the moment. After the first few hours, however, the novelty of leaving home died. My cash bought us a cheap motel room and a few joints.

  Marijuana. Choking on the sweet smoke and sitting on our dirty mattress, I tried to clear my mind like she'd told me to. "Are you scared?" I asked her as she took a hit.

  "Not even close." Her eyelids lowered. "Just roll with it. Hey... we'll look out for each other," she said, speaking slowly. Or was she? "We're going to be so happy together, Jodie!"

  I hardly knew what she was saying. My thoughts were becoming too loud inside my head and my skin was numb, so I made my way to the bathroom. I took off my clothes and lay in the bathtub, cocooned within the dark ring of other people's filth. I don't know how long I was there before Chris walked in to use the toilet. "I cannot feel the difference between the air and the water," I whispered. My voice sounded foreign, sad and profound all at once. I liked the feel of the words in my mouth.

  Chris laughed at me as she took another drag and pulled her tartan pants up. "That's because there's no water in the tub, you loser."

  For some reason this was insanely funny. Laughter echoed in my ears, as I sat in the empty bath, acknowledging the cold beneath my bare skin. Chris sank to the floor beside me in a fit of uncharacteristic giggles, and this made the situation even funnier. But the laughter stopped when she leant forward, eyes closed, for the kiss.

  Her cold lip ring barely brushed my mouth when I pushed her away. "Chris! What the hell!"

  She laughed again, with a hint of uncertainty. "Jodie... come on... it's okay. You're allowed to do this."

  I leant over the edge of the tub and grabbed my clothes, dressing hurriedly and avoiding eye contact. My hands were shaking.

  "I mean, I know you never said you felt the same way, but... " she stopped, looking as confused as I felt. I had put as much distance as I could between us in the small room. Suddenly her fist slammed into the wall. "You didn't have to, damn it!"

  "Jesus, Chris!" I cried at the violent sound. She looked at me with narrowed eyes. Her eyeliner had smudged and created dark sinister shadows beneath her lashes.

  "I can't handle this," I murmured suddenly, walking out of the room.

  I heard the sound of her heavy boots stumbling after me.

  "You know what?! Fuck you!" she screamed, half-stoned and all angry. "Just piss off home, Princess, if you're too delicate for this."

  I kept my back to her, forcing myself not to cry. I was still in a state of confusion, my brain racing to make sense of the situation. This is happening. This is happening. I could still feel her lips on mine.

  "Chris... " There was a long silence and a flicker of fear ignited in my clouded mind. I could hear nothing but a faint buzz. "Christina? Are you still there?"

  "Don't you ever call me that!" Her words seemed to come from far away but there was no mistaking the rage and pain in her voice.

  I didn't want to give her the satisfaction of hurting me, but I knew that I had hurt her. Wordlessly, I collected my belongings and left the motel room.

  "Jodie, wait, come back," she mumbled after me from the doorway. I didn't look back.

  ~

  My mother hadn't noticed my absence and I collapsed into bed. Despite my exhaustion, I was wide awake. The marijuana had worn off almost completely but something large and frightening was emerging in my chest. Something unwelcome, something I wasn't prepared for was glowing its way from my chest to my throat and spilling hot tears from underneath my eyelids. I knew that if I didn't act upon it, if I denied these feelings to myself, I would lose that warmth forever.

  But I chose to do nothing. I don't catch the train anymore.

  Australian-born Stephanie Davies now resides in Guildford, UK. Her inspiration, Lewis Carroll, is buried somewhere outside. Stephanie writes fiction and poetry reflective of her eighteen short years in this world. She hopes to learn the tricks of the trade when university begins in September.

  Lord of the Trash

  Sarah MacManus

  "Well, look at it this way, kid, you'll be the only one in the whole school that knows what the spoon at the top of the plate is for."

  Sam scowled at me and then turned back to look out the car window at the endless miles of well - nothing - to his mind. Endless miles of unidentifiable plants, all in disconcertingly straight rows, broken only occasionally with similar fields of cows. The cows were only slightly more interesting - he'd probably never seen one before.

  Sam is my brother - my half brother really. He was my father's last bid at immortality. My father made several bids at immortality while he was still alive, and it took the patience of four wives. I'm still not sure he ever achieved it. Certainly not in the flesh - the whole reason I was driving Sam through the cornfields was because when my father died, his fourth wife didn't want to deal with him and promptly put him on a plane. I was Sam's last living relative.

  I wasn't sure my father was going to achieve immortality through Sam or me, either. Not judging by events thus far. At 32 and still single, it didn't look like I'd be adding to the gene pool any time soon, and my time was running out, so it looked like it was going to be up to Sam.

  Picking Sam up at the airport left me with doubts to this end. What 17-year-old boy owns a suit that fits that well? It was unnatural. His hair was carefully groomed and did weird, wispy things over his eyebrows. It appeared to be intentional.

  I hadn't seen Sam s
ince he was 6. Every couple of years, I would remember that it was his birthday and send a card with some money in. Christmas, too, sometimes, if I was talking to my father that year. But it's a bit hard to maintain enthusiasm for a relationship that you never really had.

  Sam was my father's son by his third wife - long past the time that the indignant bitterness had worn off of his divorce from my mother. In fact, they'd become quite the chums toward the end. Sam was just sort of lost in the juggle of marriages and divorces. I was in high school when Sam was born and completely uninterested. I barely glanced at the announcement card with the picture of the bloated, alien creature in the picture before handing it back to my mother. She had seemed amused by it at the time.

  It was sad. I liked Sam's mother. Her name was Lillian, and she was sweet and unassuming on top and hard as nails below. I'd only met her once, at the wedding, and she had winked at me at the reception. It was one of those sly winks shared between women gapped by generations that says "Just watch me, honey - I'll show you how it's done." But when Sam was only 4, Lillian was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she hadn't survived. Her funeral two years later was the first and only time I'd ever met Sam. Come to think of it, the only time I ever saw Sam was when one of his parents died. I hoped he wasn't going to hold it against me.

  I went to Lillian's funeral. I didn't go to my father's. Make of that what you will. And now I've talked far more about my father than I ever intended, because this story isn't about him. It's just about what he left behind - one perennially subdued woman with dirty blond hair and a love/hate relationship with the Department of Defense, and one rather skeptical teenaged boy with at least one good suit and a painfully arranged hair style.

  "There really isn't much to do around the house," I told him, navigating the curved roads around the fields. "I don't mean, you know, things to do. I mean work." Sam blinked at me like he'd never heard the word before. "I mean, it's just a small house, not much of a yard. There's a lot of farms out here, but I just have a little place on the edge of town."

  He scowled at me again, as though I were speaking a foreign language, and I have to admit for a moment I was tempted to speak louder, just in case it helped.

  "I just don't want you thinking you have to milk cows or anything."

  He smiled. "Angela told me you were in the Army. I figured I'd be cleaning guns or washing tanks or something."

  I stared at him, almost causing a rather closer cow encounter than was comfortable. My eyes shot back to the road before I found myself the inadvertent owner of a lot of fresh beef.

  "Yeah, I'm in the Army."

  "That's funny, Dana." he said, staring at the cows. "You don't look like a baby killer."

  "I'm not," I sighed. Great, I thought, one of those.

  "Me either," he said, a little too flatly for my liking. "I prefer to wait 'til they're in preschool. More meat on them, that way."

  He winked at me.

  ~

  Sam settled in pretty quickly for a pampered city kid. He hauled all his own luggage out of the car, made no comment about the less-than-luxurious accommodations I'd scrambled out of the spare room three days earlier when I'd been notified of his impending arrival. He didn't even say anything about the air mattress that would serve for his bed and the milk crate that would play nightstand in his domestic arrangements until I could have real furniture delivered.

  He shrugged out of his suit coat and carefully hung it on a nail in the paneling and shooed me off while he changed into something more suitable for the country.

  The thing about the Army is that they can pretty much send you anywhere, and you can't argue. They tend to take advantage of the relationship. That love/hate thing I was talking about earlier. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, as much as anyone can love a job - but I hate the Army. I'm a nurse in the Army, and I'm not sure what I'd be doing if I weren't. There's just something a little too perverse about an educated mind that makes it possible to swallow the idea of being hired to fix people who've been sent out to get damaged intentionally. I'm just not sure where in my personal philosophy to place that awkward and nagging concept that says that if we stopped sending them out to get damaged, we could forgo the whole patching them up thing.

  This time, the Army had sent me to some isolated base in the middle of the US, surrounded by cornfields and cowfields. It wasn't even in the middle of nowhere - it was on the outskirts of nowhere. I figured I could manage. After all, I'd managed elsewhere, Korea, Saudi. I'd shaken out the duffel, put on my cap, pinned on the old caduceus and managed. And I managed here too, renting a small house off base made of plywood and corrugated metal in a scrubby yard full of weeds, an old oak tree, and an abandoned pig trough. I'd always thought about planting flowers in it, but even that seemed too much an effort for this place. I was just killing time, hoping to end up with a better assignment somewhere - anywhere.

  Sam settled in quickly and carefully. The boy did everything carefully. He picked his way through the house, placing his feet with some thought, examining my meager belongings, the worn carpet, the broken window blinds, the second-hand furniture. He took serious pains to store his various concoctions in the bathroom, next to my half-spilled shampoo and soap bottles. He didn't appear to be afraid to offend, but he did seem to be conscious on not imposing his existence on my life.

  The next day, I took him into the local high school to register him. I walked beside him through the dusty, concrete halls to the principal's office, noting the looks on the faces of the local girls with some amusement. I could tell they were quite impressed. A mop bucket may have been in order. Sam had dressed, well, carefully, for his first day in the new school. That was my little brother - six feet tall, shaggy, blonde hair that took two hours to look like he'd just rolled out of bed, with bedroom eyes and lashes that any woman would kill for. I had found myself forced to question his choice of dress that morning.

  "You know, Sam, boys don't dress like that here," I said, eyeing his skinny jeans and suit jacket. "Do you have anything a little more... lived in? Something that fits a bit looser?"

  "It doesn't matter," he said shrugging a long, pink silk scarf around his neck. I began to fear for his safety.

  "Seriously, Sam, those jeans are so tight, we can all tell you're Catholic. That may be all the rage back in Chicago, but, you know, around here..."

  "I said it doesn't matter, Dana. Either way, I'm going to be a freak, so I may as well start out being my own kind of freak. Right?" He looked at me with big, green eyes that should have held more wonder than cynicism, but what could I say?

  "As it is," he smiled, "it may be a good thing you're a nurse, eh?" He threw his arm around me and kissed the top of my head.

  But the local girls were impressed, if only by the addition of the pink scarf or perhaps by his complete lack of interest in them. I remembered those days - nothing more attractive on the face of the earth than a boy that has absolutely no use for you.

  ~

  We spent evenings over sandwiches or take out food. I'm not much of a cook, to be honest. Sam carefully cleaned up afterwards. Sometimes we'd watch television together, but more often, he'd lock himself in his room with his laptop, and I wouldn't see him again 'til the next day, when I'd watch as the back of his latest fashion disaster rushed down the road to catch the bus, battered bookcase in hand. It was the only panic I'd ever seen in the boy. He seemed to go completely unmolested at school. I'm not sure if that was owed to his considerable height or because my little brother was simply too unflappable to be worth bullying.

  A week or so after he moved in, I gave him a new chore and spent some time explaining it to him.

  "Sam, it's time for you to learn how to take out the trash."

  He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. "Is this something we do differently in Kansas?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact, we do."

  I showed him the large, galvanized rubber trashcans, and, more specifically, I showed him the special locking b
ars to keep the raccoons out of the trash.

  "You see, if you don't lock the trash cans, they'll open them up and drag the garbage all over the yard or all over the street, and then we'll have to spend half the morning picking it up."

  "Wild raccoons?" his eyes were wide. I wondered if I noted just a hint of fear.

  "Well, yes, Sam, there's hardly any other type, is there?" He looked at me, dubious. "Sometimes they even learn how to open the locks."

  "You have to lock up your TRASH?" he asked, incredulous.

  Sam then took over locking up the trash. In fact, it became a bit of a windmill for him to tilt. The first week was a disaster. He'd carefully placed all the tied bags in the cans and twisted some rope through the handles to hold the lids on. He didn't seem to be able to figure out how to use the locks I'd bought. The raccoons quickly learned to untie the ropes. Rather than spending an extra fifteen minutes making sure his hair was a perfect mess, he spent it picking up cereal boxes and Styrofoam containers and grapefruit peels out of the ruts in the dirt on the side of the house.

  He didn't complain - not once. In fact, he seemed bound and determined to get it right, to keep those trash cans closed, come hell, high water, or mutant ninja raccoons with opposable thumbs and a deep-seated knowledge of physics. Twist wires were the next step, then hanger wire. He wasn't about to ask me again how to use the locks, I could tell. I'd watch from the kitchen window as he'd pick them up, twist the metal bars back and forth, peering at them, trying to unravel their mystery. As he was with everything, he was incredibly patient - whether it was fixing his hair, dressing for school, washing dishes or locking the trashcans. My brother was the most deliberate person I'd ever met. Despite his caution and deliberation, the raccoons always managed to undo his ropes and cords and pick through our garbage like old ladies at a flea market, leaving wrappers and greasy papers all over the yard.

  We quickly fell into a routine. I went to work, and he went to school. We shared a meal in the evening, a few words, sometimes a news program, and then parted ways. Some mornings, I'd climb into my ugly, economy car with the soundtrack of his profanity and his rants against raccoons floating over the hedge. He had quite an interesting vocabulary for one so young. It made me laugh, and I'd gun the engine, as if to punctuate the last "fuck" drifting through the chilly, autumn morning air.