Sinners Circle (13 page)

My eye is watering so bad I can
hardly see anything, I shake my head and look down the path—some guy and his
two dogs are coming this way. I back up some more, my feet shuffling the
pebbles and dirt.
“Who, what?”

I stop blinking, Sophie takes
down her hood. The guy with the dogs calls out, “Miss, are you OK?” just as she
pulls me into her arms and holds her face in my hair. The guy looks
embarrassed, tucks his head and says, “Night,” as he jogs by, the dogs keeping
quiet.

“Amanda, I was thinking about
you. I couldn’t sleep.”

I pat her back.
“Me too.”

She pulls out of my arms, her
eyes wet and shining she looks into mine. “Have you been crying?”

“Have you?”

She bows her head then looks up
at me again. My heart pounds so hard against my lungs I have to almost stop
breathing as I watch her perfect lips admit, “A little. Yes.”

“Why?” I loop my fingers through
hers and start walking slowly towards the bridge.

She sighs. “I don’t know. Just a
lot of things are going wrong in my life right now. It feels like no matter
what I’m doing, I’m doing it wrong.” She laughs and wipes her eyes. “Oh God,
here I go. I don’t even know you and here I am spilling my guts like the nuts I
work with.”

I squeeze her hand.

We drift in the dark, slow and
nowhere. She leans her head against me in the gathering silence as we wander in
and out of shadows cupping each other’s hands. In the immure shade of a tree
big enough to press her against, she hooks a finger in a belt loop on my pants.
I move close enough that our noses cross, our eyelashes brush together and I
can feel her heart beating through her breast into mine.

I press my forehead against hers.
“Hello, Sophie.”

If ever there was love, something
powerful enough to fill the holes in your heart and soul so quickly, so fully
without warning or sign, I’ve never known this. But right now, as she presses
her lips to mine in a simple gesture I’ve done a thousand times before tonight,
it’s like I’ve never been touched in all my life. This feeling it goes straight
to my blood, it makes my knees hurt; it makes it hard to stand up.

Our lips break apart and I move
my hands away from her and against the tree, I squeeze the bark. She kisses me and
I feel her mouth smiling against mine as she whispers, “Hello, Amanda.”

She kisses my fingertips and I
take her back to the house and into my bed. Watching Sophie undress and move on
top of me, moan beneath me, sigh beside me, I am completely amazed at my total
lack of desire to hurt her. Her hair falling around me, her breath coming in
and out as little panting sounds, she makes me feel like a reverse vampire, an
opposite stomper. Because, in this moment I can’t help the wanting, the
pounding desire to somehow transfer as much of myself, my blood, bones and
organs, I don’t want them anymore if they are just mine. I want to put them
inside of her.

As she falls asleep, cradled in
my arms, I’m overcome with a powerful need to keep her protected and safe. Watching
her dream, I’m consumed entirely by how important it is to me that she
live
, and I’m frightened by the realization that I would do
anything to keep her alive.

But as I turn away from the
shadows of my room, as I lower that cotton quilt and peer down at Sophie, I am
filled with a sense of peace I have never known. I kiss the crown of her head,
squeeze her to my chest and whisper to no one, “I’m keeping this forever.”

I
wake up with the sun and Sophie in my eyes. She kneels on top of me, milky
thighs on either side of my body and kisses my mouth.
“Poor
baby.
You’ve got a shiner.”

“Do I?”

She nods like a puppy. “It’s sexy
though. I like my girls to look a little beat up.”

My body snaps forward at the
mention of other women, I stroke her hair, running my hands down her back as we
kiss.
“Me too.”

She laughs and pinches my chin,
tracing a finger down each thin scar. “How’d you get this?”

I kiss the crook of her arm and
wiggle my face away from her finger, “Cat scratch.
When I was
a baby.”

“Oh God.”

I rub my chin and lay back down.
“Yeah, wasn’t a good
thing.
”

“Do you have anything for
breakfast?”

My mind wanders to the human
contents of my fridge. I think there’s a calf in there, and as Sophie presses
her legs against me I drag my fingernails down to her knee. I don’t hear her
yell “Ouch!” until she slaps me hard and I have to blink a billion sun spots
out of my eyes as the rays come in through the window.

“Amanda?”

“Sorry. I was just thinking about
you.”

She laughs and kisses my neck.
“You want some eggs?”

She bounces off the bed and runs
for the fridge. “I’m pretty good at making an omelet, I can show...”

I rip a sheet off the bed and
snap it around her as she reaches for the fridge door. I pull her back into my
room and push her onto my bed. She looks scared. “Holy shit...”

I pull on a tank top and pair of
underwear. She lies there, covering her body with her hands. “How did you do
that?”

I scratch my
stomach,
it turns and rumbles, growling into my ears. I’m
hungry,
I want to eat the rest of the leg in my fridge. Sophie points at the sheet
around her. “You don’t
look
that
strong...”

I smile and crawl on top of her.
“You don’t look at tough either.” I wink and pinch her lip. “I want to take
you
out for breakfast. Get dressed.”

The whole time we’re in the
restaurant Sophie talks about her dad. She tells me how as a doctor he worked
long hours but they were always poor because he gambled away all their money. It’s
not that I don’t care, it’s just hard sitting here, having to eat pancakes and
drink orange juice, real normal people food and have a real normal conversation
with real genuine responses and feedback. When you eat nothing but drugs and
people for years on end, pancake syrup will feel like poison, you can literally
feel it pooling sticky in your stomach, dripping into your guts and coating
your bowels in disfavor. Whipping cream will make you feel like you are dying,
and bacon, it tastes like mud and pigs. I’m watching the saggy waitress carry
cups of steaming coffee to people with more body fat than muscle. I’m fishing
out my ice cubes and clicking them together in unison as that lanky waitress
takes wide strides, balancing beverages with her rootless steps. I imagine her
bones being broken open on the edges of rocks and tearing the breasts from her
chest, pulling her heart right out of a
ribless
torso, while it pumps in panic in the palm of my hand.

“And I don’t think I could ever be the same.”
Sophie looks out the window, sighs and pushes her plate away. She’s barely
taken a bite. I feel the clench in my bowels, vomit beginning to rise.

“What?”

She shakes her head, slides one
of the ice cubes I am clicking together into her hand and crunches it in her mouth.
“I know right?” She swallows the shattered ice and I’m almost driven insane
when I see the waitress walk by, knees almost touching. I tap the last cube on
the table, but she vanishes from sight. “I mean what the fuck is wrong with me?
God...”

“Everything
happens for a reason,” Marcy speaks, big chunks of green pickle mashing between
her teeth. “You have to understand that
God has a plan for each of us. Amanda, do you believe in fate?”

I turn off the tap, grab a dry
dishtowel and throw it over my shoulder. I stare into the water, the thousands
of tiny soap bubbles slowly bursting one by one. “I do and I don’t.”

Marcy fishes a big pickle out of
the jar between her legs.
“How’s that?”
She crunches
hard into it, juice spilling all down her wrist to the elbow; her home manicure
wrapped around what looks like the big warty frog dick.

I fish a fork out of the bottom
of the sink and slowly rub it with a wash cloth. “I think, yeah we are put here
but it isn’t due to any divine fore-planning. I think we are sort of just
chaos. I think we are born because it is our nature as a species to breed. We
are raised by people who are also here due to circumstance, but it’s silly and
self centered to think that our actions have a greater meaning and purpose. I
think all people are born the way they are and that can’t nor should be
changed. We try to, that’s the whole purpose of pharmaceuticals isn’t it? To
change things
about ourselves
that
others or ourselves don’t like.
Depending on the
results, we change for, what we perceive, as the better. I think this is why
there are so many problems. People get to thinking too much; too much vanity in
the world, and now we are bred into narcissism. I think this is destroying us. I
think us just being us
is
fate. Our
actions are just a reflection of what we are meant to be, but our actions and
behaviors in themselves, that isn’t fate at all, that’s just
us
.”

She takes another bite of her
pickle. “Have you lost your mind?”

I press the fork into my thumb
hard enough to leave a deep impression,
then
I drop it
on the towel next to the sink. “I think we’ve all lost our minds.”

“Well,” She turns her wheel chair
towards the
Last Supper
, a fresh one.
She’s started over. “
I
believe
everything happens for a reason and that God is up there watching us and
watching
over
us.
Keeping
us safe and away from the evil in this city.”
She points a paint brush
towards the TV. “You tell me you aren’t blessed, your mother whispering in
God’s ear keeping you safe in such an awful place as this. So close to that
dreadful park full of ungodly people and human monsters.” She points at the TV
again. “Seen the news lately?”

“Well... sort of.”

“Women are going missing left
right and center. Police narrowed the search to right over there.” Her paint
brush aims out the window towards the park. “Right over there in the park.
Joggers.
Some ugly man is snatching women.”

I squeeze two underwater handfuls
of cutlery. “Have they found any bodies?”

She fishes around in the jar
between her legs, pulls out a giant toad cock and chews away half.
“Nope.
Not one.”

“No bones or anything?”

She keeps chewing.
“Nope.
Nothing.”

“Then how do they know the girls
are even dead?”

“Dead?
Who said anything about dead? If
you ask me, it’s the Mexicans. I think they’re coming in over the border at
night time and stealing white women and selling them into the sex trade. I’m
not sure, but I’ve got a pretty good feeling about it.” Toad dick grinding in
her teeth she hisses in a whisper, “Sometimes, Francis comes to me at night.
Sometimes, I can hear her tell me things. And I
do
—I
listen
, and Amanda,
she is
proud
of you. She says there’s
a man in your life
who
will change
everything
. She told me this.
You’ll see
.” She winks and bites off
another mouthful of frog sausage.

If
I squint hard enough, the light doesn’t seem so orange. It turns almost
completely yellow. If I close my eyes completely, there’s only red, my eye lids
burning bright in front of my eyes. Looking at all this light, all this flame and being so close to it, it
feels like thousands of thin syringes poking into my face and drawing out every
trace of oxygen and moisture. Standing here right now, I can literally feel the
air being sucked out from between my teeth. My mouth a dry hole, an entrance
for black smoke to come tunneling in and burn all the way down my throat,
filling my lungs with the same kind of feeling you get when you’re angry but
too much of a coward to fight back and say what you really want to. I’d swallow
but my mouth, the dry hole in my
face,
it’s just
cobwebbed with strings of dry spit sticking to the back of my tongue, the roof
of my mouth. My teeth don’t taste like anything except bone and old metal
fillings. So I keep closing and opening my eyes trying to get that boiled egg
feeling out of them. I look down at my feet, the toe of my sneaker. I look down
at an entire class of nine year old girls clustered together grinning under a
‘school for ballet’ banner, their curled tutus and pink shoes evaporate
instantly, as the banner bubbles into purple then white, nobody says anything,
they just stare up at me, nervous and blushing, feeling awkward and pretty in
all that stage makeup caked onto their tiny faces. I close my eyes for just a
second, stare into the red, when I open them again the little ballerinas are
gone, and they’re just a crisp piece of black paper already breaking apart.

Sophie squeezes my arm. “Pass me
my dad.”

I bend down, grab a handful of
photographs out of a brittle paper bag and hand them to Sophie. She shuffles
through a few then tosses them onto the porch.
Flames licking
through floor boards, burning up right in front of us.
Bright orange
conflagration pouring through second story laundry vents, blue heat melting
framed stained glass mounted neatly inside round gable decorative windows. The photographs I handed to Sophie, they’re
swallowed instantly. All those moments, the ones some distant relative or close
family member felt were meaningful, that meant enough to uncap a lens for, the
fishing trip back when mullets were cool, the new truck, ice skating with
grandma before she needed pelvic surgery, all those moments, they’re floating
skyward now, burned into tiny bits of ash, dissolving into nothing before they
can even touch the ground.

“My brother.
Pass me my brother.” My hand slips inside the paper bag. Peewee
hockey games, Christmas morning, awkward squats on the Easter Bunny’s lap, a
three year old with his elbows dripping with ice cream screaming his head off
at Disneyland, they all come out of the wilting paper. When Sophie yanks them
away from me, the class photos, the piano lessons, the kids eating snowballs
and kicking at each others’ frozen forts, they
slit
open tiny stretches of skin in between my fingers.

I’m sucking my knuckle, my tongue
twisting those dry strings of spit that cling and won’t let go of the roof of
my mouth, dragging braids of goo over skin coated in soot and ash while Sophie
throws photographs of her brother into the air. We stand in silence until Sophie
muffles a cry, covers her eyes with blackened fingers as the photos flutter
into the flames. She falls backwards onto the grass, ass first. Her head
tilting back, she looks up at the sky. I sit down beside her, curl my fingers
through the long strands of strawberry blonde hair laying flat against her
pique knit jacket. If it wasn’t for the massive black clouds of smoke billowing
above our heads, we could see
all
the
stars. She’s staring up, lips moving but all the pops and cracks of the wood
burning swallow every sound around us. I nod when her mouth stops moving,
staring into the fire.

Sophie sighs and leans on my
shoulder. Her words coming in waves, in busted fragments when the noise of the
house falling apart doesn’t overpower them. “Amanda, I just...so empty I
feel...crazy.” I just keep nodding, using my forehead to blink and kiss the
crown of her hair as the splintering planks on the porch pop without rhythm.
She shivers against my shoulder and when I reach my arm around to stroke her
cheek, I feel a trail of tears winding down from her eyes, rolling past her
nose, disappearing through the part in her lips.

I wind a thin strand of her hair
between two of my fingers, lean in and tickle my mouth with it. “You’re so
beautiful when you’re falling apart.”

She turns to me her mouth forming
a ‘what?’, but I don’t hear anything, just the walls inside the house
collapsing through the floor.

All around us are acres of grass
seed and dirt pounded flat. You could scream bloody murder and nobody could
hear you. You’re too far away, the fire is too loud. I poured a good ten
gallons of gas in the place before Sophie showed up. Before Sophie showed up, I
cut the phone cords and tossed the “SOLD” sign inside the garage. When Sophie
got here all the lights were out because before Sophie showed up I pulled all
the fuses from the breaker box in the basement.

I lean in close enough so my lips
are giving little kisses every time they move against her ear. “I love you.”

She looks at me with those big
green eyes of hers, they well with tears and spill down cheeks smooth as dirty
glass. “Hun, I’ve been saving up...”

I put a strand of her hair to my
cheek as she nods a little toward the house. “I’ve been
saving
for years.
For this place.
Two jobs...”

A big knot in the floor boards
pops, crackling. She wipes her tears, dragging a sleeve across her face, the ash
on the back of her hand smearing black muck across her cheek. “I just hate it
so much. My dad, he was such a...” More walls are crashing down, windows
cracking,
breaking
as flames punch through the panes,
sprinkling the dirt lawn with shards of black glass.
“...my
sister too.
Both of them, we couldn’t tell anybody. And my mom, well, my
mom
...” She wipes wads of snot and
tears into the crook of her arm. “She
knew
what he was doing. She knew why we were really crying after bath time. But she
didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t care...When we were teenagers and my
sisters asked her about boys and stuff, she looked at us all cold like and
said, ‘What do you need me to tell you? You already know what to do.’ I
just...I swore one day, I’d come and I’d... I’d burn this house down.”

She snuggles into my shoulder and
I know she’s got her eyes closed because I can feel her eyelashes flutter shut
against my neck. She whispers and this time I can hear her, “I thought for sure
this place would be bought up. I was so afraid that it would be taken away from
me before I got a chance.”

Sophie reaches past me to the
paper bag, looks inside pulls out a picture of her dad flexing his arms in
front of a monster truck. “When he died two years ago, none of us went. My
brother, yeah, but mom being gone and all, it was just Devon and a couple of
dad’s work buddies at the funeral.” She flicks the picture onto the porch. The
monster truck, it curls up and dies just like all the little ballerinas. “He
didn’t even leave us anything.”

I nod. “Oh.”

She
lays
back on my shoulder.
“Yeah.”

“Who paid for the funeral then?”

“The state I think.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, they cremated him.”

“What did they do with his
ashes?”

I feel her shrug, her eyelashes
flicking shut. “I don’t know.”

It takes ten seconds to come
fully awake, thirteen to lose over a pint of blood once the Carotid artery has
been severed, and thirty seconds for a full grown man to bleed out, leaving
plenty of time to get down the hall and slip into the bedroom with the bunk
beds cradling thing one and thing two.

Sophie’s eyelashes flip open,
tickling my neck. I smile and turn to kiss her. “I didn’t want you to have to
wait to buy this place. Or have some jerk move in with his family, you’d never
get it then.”

She holds up my hand, kisses my
knuckles and points off into the distance. “I wonder why
there’s
all those machines over there.”
There’s
all kinds of
construction equipment parked neatly by a pile of masonry stones.

I shrug and try cracking my neck again, “I’m
not sure. Fixing the place up maybe?”

Sophie yawns and puts her head
back on my shoulder.

We just sit there on the patch of
grass, watching the blaze consume the frame of the house, bending it down to
nothing more than a sagging structure of soot and embers. I keep my eyes closed,
staring into the red, swallowing little clouds of smoke and feeling Sophie
blink against my neck. After a couple minutes she stands up, crunching the
empty paper bag inside both palms, and throws it underhand onto the charred
porch. I stretch my legs a bit as she holds out a hand, “Come on
hun
, we
gotta
get going before
the construction people come by or someone sees this and calls the cops or
something.”

I loop my fingers through hers,
kiss her cheek and wave some smoke out of my eyes as we walk away from the
searing light, into the dark. She runs a hand through my hair, a ringed finger
snagging a tangle when her fingertips pass through the ends at my shoulders.
“Your hair is so black, Amanda...” She laughs and slaps my butt. “Hun, if I
didn’t know you and saw you out here at night, I’d think you were a ghost. We
should go to a tanning place sometime.”

I laugh, tickle her waist and
smack her butt back. “Thanks.”

As we walk away into the dark,
the light slowly receding behind us, fading dimmer and dimmer on our backs I
wonder if the plastic jerry cans I left in the living room will melt entirely.
I’m wondering if it was a good idea to not leave them on the rug, but on the
wooden floor by the bookshelves. I wonder how far the dad got from his
bed,
I picture him staggering to the light switch and wish I
could have seen the total look of horror on his face when he realized the power
was out, I wonder if he could hear me going into his sons’ room. I laugh a
little when I think of him turning to pick up a phone, trying to call
nine-one-one but hearing no dial tone just before going into the Big Black and
falling face first onto the carpet. What a way to die.

“What’s so funny?” Sophie smiles
into my eyes.

“Oh I was just thinking about what a jerk
dad’s are.”

She giggles a little and kisses
my cheek. “I don’t need that kind of pain in my life anymore. I don’t even want
to think about it. He was so horrible. But now, now I have you. And I know you
could never hurt me. You could never hurt anyone like he could.”

Before I was even out the door,
when I saw Sophie come jogging down the path to the house, the place was
already engulfed in flames. If she hadn’t been running towards me, the sound of
her feet pounding on the hard dirt, she would have heard the screams. She would
have heard the sound of those little boys burning apart in their beds just
screeching and screeching wrapped inside flaming quilts and oiled rope. But I
closed the door to that burning house and stepped off the porch and wrapped my
arms around her and made sure that paper bag of hers was crinkling in her ears
when I held her close and kissed her.

Now, walking down this dark
road,
stars blazing overhead, Sophie kisses my cheek again
and blushes when she tells me, “You’re a really beautiful person, Amanda.”