We Were All Supposed to be Sleeping

by Lydia Gwyn

 

And they—my mother and father—let me go among strangers into a building where hearts could be only red or pink, where girls were all nurses, boys all presidents, and you had to plan out when to pee.

In this building, a boy named Junior with eyes like a basset hound pulled me over to the side of the room where the gray partition divided the two kindergarten classes. He told me my mother was dead. “They found her car on the side of the road,” he said. “In a ditch,” he said. “The teacher will tell you later.” I knew this wasn’t true. Junior was a liar. But I cried anyway. I folded my hands over my face and saw my mother’s crushed glasses, her bloody eyes.

In this building, each child held a section of parachute and we flapped it at once, snapping its stripes of red and white and sending hollow, plastic balls into the gymnasium ceiling. The wind from our work blew into my face loosening my hair from its clips. I wanted to let my section go and sneak beneath the parachute, where the light was soft and amber.

In this building, I’d run my finger down the grout between the cinderblocks of the pistachio halls. My finger was a woman turning the corners of a city, a woman I imagined myself one day—tall and dark-haired like my mother—alone in a city.

In this building, a girl with a name that sounded like sweet-dream stood in the doorway each morning and cried for her father to come pick her up. Her face looked like winter with a licked ring of raw skin around her mouth. So many mornings the teachers would coax her inside step-by-step with a roll of red and silver star stickers.

In this building, I didn’t speak much because I said all the wrong things all the time. My words sparked laughter or arguments. “Humans aren’t animals!” a boy countered me one day at lunch. Other children spoke musical words, sleigh-belled words, while my words were like bodies falling from buildings. So mostly I was quiet, except once when the same boy from lunch licked the sole of my sneaker at a time when we were all supposed to be asleep on the classroom floor, and I felt compelled to tell him I’d stepped on a dead bird in the road that morning.

Outside this building, I got to feel the hands of other children every day when we spun in rings on the playground or played Red Rover. There were girls with soft hands, girls with warm hands. No girls with hands as dry and rough as mine. It took a while, but I made friends with the girl with the softest, plumpest hands. Her name was Jill and everything about her was round and smooth and pretty. We’d sit in the grass designing dresses in our heads. Her dresses were always gold to match her gold Corvette.

Outside this building, boys in zippered jumpsuits breakdanced on the sidewalks. Their bodies moved like ribbons twirled on a stick, sure as invertebrates.

Outside this building, kids got lost in the grapevine, so we weren’t allowed to go there at recess, though the hollowed earth of the dead creek bed called to us. White clover covered the playground, and honeybees fuzzed with pollen made wobbly landings on each flower.

And at the end of the day we all went home to Hawaiian Punch and public television and whippings when we were bad. The moon shone through our bedroom windows at night and I was the kind of child who turned toward it and beamed my wishes directly into its craters.

 

Lydia Gwyn’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in F(r)iction, New World Writing, the Florida Review, JMWW, Entropy, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Her book of flash fiction, Tiny Doors, is available from Another New Calligraphy. She lives with her family in East Tennessee.

 

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