Bake Sale for World Hunger
We first made contact with the woman after the Bake Sale for World Hunger. There was a fair turnout at our stand. All of Susan's scones sold, and the confetti cookies. A tupperware of brownies got left over but that's because Sam ignored the sign-up sheet and brought duplicates. Only Max's treats were totally gone; the neighborhood adults were so impressed that a boy had really made chocolate chip cookies by himself. Most of my lemon cookies were left, their shiny shells sweating in the sun. The gang could have just eaten the cookies as we folded up our hand-painted sign, but Ruth and Timothy put their allowance coins in the glass jar so that I could feel like I was part of the cause.
The woman sat in the vacant lot above the creek, six houses down from ours. We passed by her every day, but it felt wrong to march past with my mostly-full box of unwanted cookies. Our neighborhood had never had a homeless person. They got disappeared. So to us, she seemed rare, her cracked heels and foggy eyes prophetic, like she'd chosen our empty lot. We laid down a cookie between her feet. I assumed she would snatch it—we'd never seen her eat—but it lay there like a bright yellow coin in the brown grass. At first I was impressed, then offended. I pulled out another cookie, crinkling the parchment, and smacked it loudly. "It's not bad." I said.
"It was the best out of everything," Ruth said.
"Can I have one?" asked Thomas.
Soon, everyone was eating the cookies over the woman, but she just nodded at the sky with a faint smile on her face.
That night at the dinner table, we told about our days. Thomas gave me a warning look, but usually Daddy made me feel better when the other kids were mean. So I told him about how the woman didn't eat my cookie.
"You think bread just appears on the table?" He straightened his suit sleeve, the same faded, pilled navy of airplane seats. "Who bought the ingredients for those cookies?"
"Mom?" I guessed. She had taken me to the store to get the ingredients, and paid for them, but she shook her head at me.
"I go to work every day to get food for you, not for some lady on the street who doesn't want it."
"But she does want it, I know she does."
"If you don't want the food I bring home, I'm happy to retire." He sat back on the wooden chair. My mom shoved the green beans out of his elbow's path. "I don't particularly like working all day. But at least I do it. Because if you want to eat, you have to work." His liquid anger hardened into solid lines on his face. He leaned towards Thomas. "That's the truth of life." Thomas nodded. "Remember that."
The next day, the gang threw strips of bread at the woman from paper sacks on their way to feed the ducks at the pond. Technically, the pond belonged to the suburban mansion at the bottom of the neighborhood, but they didn't keep fences, so we considered it public. A crust hit the woman on the ear and I told the others to stop it.
"She's probably hungry," whined Thomas.
"We're doing a good thing," said Timothy.
"It's not nice." I pulled the bag out of my older brother's hand. Tim began to suck on a strip of bread.
By the time the storm was forecast, we were friends with her. We'd realized she didn't have teeth, and she probably didn't want to gum the cookie in front of us. She never talked, but she nodded in our directions and squeezed our hands. She had blue tattoos, planets and stars and constellations, dripping off her arms. You had to spread them out between your hands like dough to read them straight. "You're like a treasure map," Danny had told her. She used to tell us what would happen to us. Once we held her arm up to the stars with a flashlight, trying to match the pattern.
That day, the last dry day, we took her an umbrella. It felt worse than doing nothing at all but we didn't live in a place where you took homeless people inside, they were supposed to go to the better place that none of us had seen, but some of the kids who went with their mothers to volunteer there said it was a huge storerooms full of bins of toothpaste, tissues, mittens, and infinite racks of hanging clothes like a department store for the poor. She wouldn't open the umbrella so we did it for her and propped it between her legs so it leaned on her neck like a vine and stuck out over her head.
In the days before the rain, I stayed inside except to deliver the umbrella. The sky looked like someone had skinned a sheep and laid the fleece over the sun. I hovered near the lamps and the aura of the TV screen. The coins in our jar turned dull. I hated not being able to see the sky. Our planet could be tumbling through the solar system, and we wouldn't know. If we died now, it would last forever.
When the rain began, we met at the top of the neighborhood. The sidewalk chalk wound in oozing streams that ran together and overlapped like sinews. We painted patterns on each other with mud. Ben held a frog until we said he'd get warts, and then he threw it at Natalie so she fell back and splashed up water. We could go down in the drain now, the one under the bridge, because the water would pick up the snakes that usually lived in there and drag them out. They let us go play when it rained, like suddenly there were no kidnappers or guns or homework. It was like a snow day, but it probably came about twice more a year.
I'd never seen a worm since I was eight, but now they came pouring out, laying dark like cracks in the sidewalk. I bent over one and watched it scrunch itself in and out like an accordion. I squished my shoulders and scrunched my butt and sucked in, hoping to grow taller when I released the air. Ben pushed me from behind and I tripped and had to high knee over the worms not to explode them. That reminded me.
"We should cut it!"
"Huh?"
"You know." I knelt beside the worm. "If you cut it, it'll grow into two worms."
"What if you're wrong?" He flicked out his pocket knife and waggled the tip in my belly button.
"It's a science fact." I wanted to see the miracle of the worm healing itself and chugging away reborn.
"She wouldn't know." Thomas appeared behind me. "She's just a girl."
"Charlie told me it would work." I wished Charlie were here. He'd trained the cat that shared the vacant lot with the woman by setting out saucers of milk. When she had babies, he'd taken them and growed them up to be nice, indoor cats.
When Ben heard Charlie's name, he shrugged and squatted by the worm. "Here goes nothing," he said.
His knife came down perfectly in one of the grooves. I thought the worm would be like jelly, but I heard a splintering sound. The worm writhed, but Ben pressed down with both hands. When Ben finished, one half of it thrashed into the air, pounding itself on the sidewalk and twirling like a ballet ribbon. The other began to creep forward. Behind it flamed a dark trail of blood that the rain quickly thinned and swept in a wave under my sneakers. While the bleeding stump dragged itself back the way it had come, returning to the mud, its tail continued to beat itself against the pavement.
"Why isn't it working?" I was crying but I hoped Ben wouldn't tell because we were both soaking wet. The clouds were thickening from silver to black. The silver thing stilled and a rose colored halo hovered around it in the puddle. I wanted to throw up. "Charlie said it would work, I swear. I thought it would heal, and, and I thought we would make a new one."
"The tail part doesn't have the heart or the brains, dummy," said Ben. "It couldn't grow those."
"It's just a worm." Thomas pulled me under his arm and steered me towards the rest of the gang at the creekbed.
The creek was high and black, catching the sun like molten metal. Our faces reflected silver and black, blurred and stretched by the currents that carried milk cartons and plastic water bottles downstream, filling with water to drown briefly before resurfacing and buffeting over and against one another.
On the fifteenth day of the storm, we looked out the window to see the woman riding upside down on our umbrella like Aladdin on his carpet or a witch on a broom.
When the storm ended the town went to pick up the trash. It had all swept to the end of the river in a giant junk heap, a silver lining—the adults said—for the cleanup crew. But when everyone arrived at the heap, a pile too tall for us to climb, a monument the size of the New York Christmas Tree on TV, everyone just rolled a bottle with their toe or tugged an orange sweatshirt streaked with dirt and crushed leaves. Tommy tried to climb it, but the pile sucked him in. We had to pull him out with the skeleton of a bicycle wheel. There was nowhere else for it to go, really. Even if we took it to the landfill, it was too much to burn. They decided to leave it as a monument. To remember the storm by.
"She should've gone to the place," I said.
"Heavenly Days." Charlie looked at the sky and crossed himself crooked. None of us was Catholic.
"No. The shelter."
"That's the name." He crumpled the water bottle in his fist. When he held it out, though, the creases rounded, the neck untwisted with a snap as if something were breathing life into it. I yelped.
Dad came up and touched the tear on my cheek. "What's wrong?"
"There's so much trash." I hiccuped.
"I know." He looked both glumly and wistfully up at the pile. "It'll outlive us all."