Fiction by Lisa Thornton

Girl, 9, Speaks

Sally McIntyre, age 9, of Dalton, Massachusetts one time peed her pants when her 15-year-old sister locked her in the toolshed in the backyard for the afternoon. McIntyre’s mother furrowed her brow and spoke sternly to the girl when she was finally released from her imprisonment and showed up at the back door with a wet stain in her crotch growing larger and larger and spreading down both of her beige pantlegs. McIntyre knew better than to argue or attempt to defend herself. It was her fault she had failed to keep it together despite adverse circumstances. 

On school days, the third grader ran from the white geese that chased her up the hill from the bus stop. She stood between 10-year-old Logan Spence of further up the street and the geese as he swung his backpack at them because she didn’t think it was fair for the geese to get injured for following some internal message they had been born with to chase children and bite them with their hard golden beaks. 

The living things McIntyre did not protect were the slugs in the willow across the stream. Those insects (if they even were insects, they were so bulbous and full, so shiny and sticky and plump as if they were animals, how could they be classified as insects, if they were she disagreed) she held in very low regard and did not intervene when her sister nicked the salt shaker from the table and shimmied up the trunk to the lowest big branch where the colony of slimy bags of pus lived and shook the condiment on them until they shriveled and flipped inside out, their tiny wet organs on the outside and their incessant pulling along through trails of slime ceased. 

McIntyre kept a journal of the aspects of her life she wanted to keep track of or reconsider or investigate later. Jeremy Trapper’s fake leg, the lisp of Louisa’s little sister, how long a baby bird could survive after it fell out of the nest before it went still and cold. The journal once had a lock and even a tiny key to fit it, but the mechanism had long ago broken and was now just a small metal box along the edge of the cover where the two halves of the book met when closed. But McIntyre liked the broken device and didn’t try to remove it even though she probably could have wrenched it off with her short, nail-bitten fingers because the brokenness of it made the journal seem to her not a secret, not a tome of thoughts she didn’t want anyone to read but an outward expression of what she was inside, like one of the turned-out slugs with her wet parts on the outside, free for anyone to view, if they wanted. If they felt like taking the time. 

One Saturday morning, McIntyre’s mother was reading in the rocking chair by the front window and did not look up when Sally stood in front of her with her boots on. Sally listened at her sister’s bedroom door and heard Mick Jagger’s gravelly voice looping around and around on the turntable. Sally tucked her journal in the front of her pants and crawled through the underbrush under the power lines behind the house where the neighborhood stopped and the real world began. To the pond with the long cattails lining the south end and a lip of soft grass at the edge. The journal was full up. She sat on the grassy lip of the pond and tore out her notions one by one. The bed sometimes feels like wood, and I am lying hard on it, like when I am lying on the diving board at the pool. Mrs. Fairchild seemed very far away today, like if I reached out, I could not touch her. How can there not be an edge to outer space? What is the power that makes a blackbird be able to balance on the end of a long piece of yellow grass without bending it?  

Sally carefully floated the ripped-out thoughts on the cool water, like she’d seen in a TV documentary once of people in India who placed tiny candles in green flower petals and pushed them out onto the Ganges. She watched the blue college ruled lines get darker and bleed onto the white parts of the paper. Sally McIntyre took her clothes off down to her underwear and stepped into the pond, which was covered now with the insides of her, strips of paper capping the top of the water like the thin layer on top of a crème brulee. She did the breaststroke out to the center, her thoughts brushing her cheeks and clinging to her shoulders and forearms. She floated on her back as her swim instructor had taught her, breathing deeply to fill her lungs with air and thrusting her chest out. She arched her spine, laid her arms out straight, and let her ears slip under the water while her eyes, nose, and mouth stayed in the oxygen and the dry. The sky was a pale blue above. This way, Sally McIntyre heard her own voice. The pond spoke softly and confidently with a lush warble as it read each of her slips of paper aloud, small fish sucking the backs of her legs and the long, wet weeds growing up from the mud at the bottom of the pond undulating in the almost current and tickling the skin on her heels.