The kitchen curtains were boiling in hot water. It was the only way his mother knew to kill the grease that clung to them from the meals prepared in the big purple pots on the stove. The curtains, his Aunt Joan’s, were yellow with little brown dots woven into them. These dots, when he looked at them closely, were peppered with smaller white dots inside of them made of the weft. He had tried counting them all one day, but gave up when his eyes would not allow him to see between the folds of yellow fabric where he knew many of the dots were hiding.

But he did not care about the dots this Sunday. This Sunday, for the first Sunday, he cared about the table. The huge table made of wood that sat in the middle of his aunt’s kitchen. It was half of a half of a larger table. The other halves were in Carolina with another Aunt and a grandfather. There were no scratches on the table of any kind. And when he put his nose against the wood, he could smell nothing on it but the lingering sweetness of baby oil. There were knots in the wood, dark as closed eyes, twisting and winding in a way that the curtains would when his aunt opened a window, allowing the fresh air that came off the Hudson to give life to her plants. Letting his eyes wander, he noticed that his hands were resting in a very light rectangle. He looked around the table and noticed seven more rectangles. One of these was directly across from him where his sister sat, her eyes busy, watching their aunt take off her Sunday shoes.

He didn’t know why his sister was so interested in their aunt’s shoes. She had worn them many Sundays prior. They were black shoes with little black roses that buttoned just above short, rounded heels. They were opened-toed. And he could see the seam of his aunt’s stockings, in the same coffee color his mother wore, squeezing themselves out of the toe-boxes, like earthworms excavating their way through dirt. His aunt always re-buttoned them after taking them off, re-stuffing them with yellowed balls of newspaper that had propped up the leather for many years. She picked up her shoes by the heels, then stood.

“You headin’ in your bedroom?” his mother asked. “Hand me the vinegar by your foot before you go.”

“The one right here?”

“No,” his mother said, lighting a cigarette, “the one up your ass.” His aunt waited until his mother took her first drag. She let the cigarette jive in her mouth, kicking it to a corner with her tongue before she spoke again, “I thought I told you to buy more vinegar? This your windows – not mine. I only use white vinegar – white, Joan. What the Hell you want me to do with red vinegar? That big ass bottle there on the floor,” his mother looked down at it with a cut of her dark blue eyes, “that were a waste of money.”

“All they had was red vinegar.”

“What you think God give you legs for?” His mother took another puff from her cigarette. “Take your ass to another supermarket … make no damn sense, fill up your fridgerator with everything except what I send you for.” She flicked the ashes into the sink then unscrewed the cap to the vinegar. A huge dollop of it went into the boiling pot of curtains. Followed by another that ran down the eggplant colored pot, causing it to hiss like a radiator. “Shit.” His mother quickly turned, looking down into the sink. “I put the ashes from my cigarette right on the damn placemats.” She turned on the faucet, holding each placemat under the running water with her big right hand. “And nobody ain’t say a word!” She shook each one, letting the water fly around in the souring air of the large white kitchen. “They fine,” she said, clearing a space on the countertop for them, wiping each one dry with a dishtowel. “I need to hurry and finish before it get dark, Sol ain’t comin’ to pick up me and the kids tonight.”

“He stayin’ at the laundromat?”

“I told you already he had to stay home,” his mother said. “I hope he had the sense to put dinner on the stove, it’s already cook. That’s askin’ too much, when the other night I got home, he had let the kids split a soda. A big bottle. He know better. Good for ‘em – every time they burp they burn they damn noses, they little stomach hurts … I told him, you give it to ‘em you stay up with them all night.”

“Time changed, you don’t have to hurry home.”

“I want to get home before it get too dark. I’m goin’ to hang these curtains up wet. It’s hot enough in here for them to dry.”

He watched his mother drag her forearm across her forehead and the sides of her face, taking it over an uncountable number of freckles and moles that looked like tiny drops of oil in sand. She picked up the placemats, then made her way to the table, putting one down in the light rectangular space where his hands had just been. And there, staring up at him, or looking somewhere that he could not see, was the face of Jesus and his twelve disciples. His aunt had long ago made sure that he and his sister knew all their names, repeatedly pointing to a painted face beneath the plastic of the placemat with a polished nail, and if their mouths were full, waiting for them to swallow before answering. This was a picture from The Good Book. And his aunt had told him more about The Good Book than that woman who ran the Sunday school and had three sons in jail or the preacher that called out to his congregation to never put coins in the collection plate. What he knew, he knew well. What he did not know, the aunt had a Watchtower at the ready for him to take home from a stack on an end table next to a large potted plant in the living room. What he liked most about the painting of The Last Supper on the placemat was the jug. It was a big jug that to him had a funny shape. When he would tell his sister about the jug, she wouldn’t listen to him. She would say, “So,” in the same flat voice that hid the single digits of her age. It was the same flat voice she used when she wanted to order him around, a voice that he feared.

That fear had settled into him yesterday when his sister ordered him to get a crate that was inside the alcove under the first floor stairs of their building. After he was given the order, he stood looking at her, hoping that she would come with him. The building hallway was dark and constantly full of junkies or homeless people that called the many fire-gutted apartments home. But his sister said she would not come with him. She barked the orders again, pinching his arm with every word before pushing him out their front door.

He felt the burn from the pinches as he slowly crept down the stairs by himself. On the second landing, he decided he was going to hold his nose under the alcove, knowing that junkies, homeless people, and anyone else used it for a bathroom. Coming to the first flight, and turning to the left on the last stair, he kicked at the crate, trying to use his foot as a hook. Kicking harder at the crate, he became angry and could no longer feel the pain from the pinches on his arm. But the anger went away, much like the pain he had felt when he marched back up the stairs, holding the crate in his hands, unaware of the urine staining his shirt.

His sister took the crate from him, placed it in front of their closed door and used it to reach the highest lock before jiggling the doorknob like their mother and telling him to hurry downstairs.

It was a sunny day, the kind of sunny day that his mother did not like. He did not know why. But he liked the sun and the way it sometimes sat in every room of the abandoned buildings around him and how it reflected kindly through the bars onto the plate glass door of the corner store. If the sun were a real person, he thought he knew it well enough that he would ask it to play.

When he played, he was only allowed to play with his sister inside their apartment. But today was different, and he knew it was different. His sister had promised him that they were going to play with other children. He had never played with children from his block before. His mother had said these children were as, “Wild and loud as monkeys without the goddamn trees.” And as they headed up the street to where they were, he stuck so impossibly close to his sister’s side out of fear that she could not push him away.

The other children collected around them. It was quickly decided, by someone that he could not look in the eye, that they would be “It.” Thankfully, they were “It.” And he and his sister could run in and out all the abandoned cars together and search all the hallways together and press their tiny fingers into the thin-skinned flesh of the children that had been playing in the blue light of the morning when he first heard their voices from his bedroom window as he lay in bed, still feeling the strength of his mother’s presence, even though she had gone to work at the laundromat long before the sun had risen.

“If we could lock the door we could go outside,” his sister had told him. “I got my keys. We could go play.” He didn’t want to go outside. But he did want to play with his sister. She was a year older than him and in first grade. And the keys, given to her in case of an emergency, made her more than just older in his eyes, they made her his entire world. Maybe, if she saw him playing well, she would want to play with him more often when he asked and not when their mother told her she had to.

He couldn’t get in and out of the abandoned cars as fast as his sister could. Her long limbs were something that he did not get from their father. They took her so far away from him that his body would stop and he would want to cry. He could feel the tears warming behind his eyes. But he could not cry. Crying would make his sister call him a baby. He learned that if he could not keep up, he could go another way. He could go around the cars. But he was told this was cheating. And for cheating, he was now, “It,” alone, having to count to twenty with his eyes closed without his sister beside him.

He was “It” alone for the rest of the games they played. He wanted to stop playing. But he had become good at sliding through the abandoned cars, careful not to touch the sharp jagged things that he saw. A girl, bigger than him and bigger than his sister, had decided it was time to play something else. They all sat on the stoop in a giant clump of sweat, trying to answer what was being asked over and over again, “What you want to play now?” He didn’t have any ideas. And if he did, he wouldn’t talk to any of the other children about them. The other children’s faces were faces that he did not know very well. And he only talked to faces he knew. Once his mother had told him to speak to a man with a giant Afro and a large boombox set on his shoulder. He refused, watching the huge speakers on the boombox pulsate like the eyes of a massive fly as the man kissed his mother on the cheek. After kissing his mother, the man gave his sister a dollar. The man gave him a dollar too. But that was only after his mother had pried him off her thigh and told him to wave.

His listening to the answers of what game they were going to play next was interrupted when he saw that his shoelace was untied. He knew how to tie it, but he could never tie it good enough that it would not come loose again. He showed his sister the undone laces. She took his foot, propping it up in her lap. He leaned in just missing the clip of a giant yellow leg going over his head. A big man, a grown man, had stepped over him, his right foot landing hard on the concrete.

He looked at the man. He was shirtless, standing in nothing but his underwear and house shoes, exchanging handgrips, knuckles, and pounds with men that passed by. The smell of sleep was stuck to him. And he kept putting his index finger in the corners of his eyes, bowing his head, trying to knock the tiny rocks from them onto the ground.

He had never been so close to this man before. He was one of the men his mother had told him and his sister to stay away from. He had seen this man buy ice cream for other children but his mother would not allow him or his sister to have any. He had also seen this man laugh and throw blue balls to the boys back and forth across the street, giving chase to them when they escaped hands, taking them to the fire hydrant to clean everything from the gutter off them.

Something very loud popped. It popped again very fast. It popped again and filled the street with screams and running bodies. It kept popping and people kept running and screaming and disappearing off the street.

The boy had disappeared off the street too. He was in a building hallway. Its heavy iron door closed, not letting in light. A woman had him in her arms. And he had wedged as much of his head as he could into her chest, letting tears run down his face, and spit fall freely from his mouth like water.

In time, the woman put him down and wiped his face clean with the roughness of her hand. She put in his hand the hand of his sister. He looked at her to find that she was also having her tears dried. “Yo’ mother know you two out here?” the woman asked. He knew the sound of her voice, and once his eyes dried he knew her face. “She upstairs? I’m goin’ t’take you two to her. You two shouldn’t be out here.”

They were the last ones to leave the building’s hallway. It had been thick with people and as they passed they had looked at him in a way that made his heart feel as if it did not belong to him. The block was crowded again. And there was a body. And blood around that body filled the cracks in the concrete that lay underneath it. They passed the body quietly.  Looking up the block, his building seemed incredibly far away.

“We not suppose t’be outside,” his sister said.

“You two goin’ t’get it,” the woman said, “yo’ mother don’t play. She think you two upstairs in that house, sleepin’ or somethin’.”

“She’s not home,” his sister said. “She at the laundromat.”

“I only saw your mother leave,” the woman said. “Yo’ daddy, Sol, he ain’t home.”

“No,” his sister said. “He went to the laundromat first. But he comin’ back.”

They entered their building and the darkness of the first floor. They went up the stairs with the woman carrying him. The crate was gone from in front of their door. She took the keys from his sister and let them inside, telling them to stay put while she went to find their mother. They sat inside the apartment in unnerved silence, waiting for the inevitable sound of their mother’s labored footsteps to climb the stairs to their front door.

The sound of his mother’s footsteps always sounded as if they were about to break off at the ankles from overuse. They sounded that way now as she walked back to Aunt Joan’s stove, turning off the pot of boiling curtains, placing it in the kitchen sink.

“I have to go,” his mother said, wringing the curtains with enough force to draw the yellow color from them and spiraling down the drain, “It’s gettin’ too dark.”

“It ain’t that dark.”

“You deaf? You know how long it take me to walk here, by the time I get home it will be dark. Hurry up, I’m leavin’.”

His aunt left the room. The boy could feel his mother’s eyes on him. He also felt when they left his body and moved onto his sister’s. He didn’t dare look up. He listened to the soft crackle of his aunt opening her purse in another room and the sound of his mother taking a puff from her cigarette. His aunt came back into the kitchen.

“I only got fifteen,” the aunt said.

“You did this shit on purpose,” his mother said, banging her hand down hard on the table, causing the children to jump in their seats. “You know you did this shit on purpose. I clean yo’ house every fuckin’ weekend, Joan, every weekend. What you think I clean it for –my health?” His mother snatched the money from her. She picked up her white handbag from off the floor underneath the kitchen sink, flinging it over her shoulder in a motion that found her hand pulling the zipper open with the same hand clutching the singles and two fives. “You know how much I need that fuckin’ money.”

“I don’t got it right now.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Their mother snapped her fingers and the children slipped out of their chairs, hurrying to stand to the left and right of her. “I ask you to go and give me twenty for the month – you know damn well what happen.” She took hold of their hands. “I’m lucky these two still alive. Thank God Sol left the laundry early.” His mother threw the money down on the floor as if it would break. “I’ll put my own fuckin’ lock on my fuckin’ front door – you don’t have to give me nothin’. Your day’ll come … because you know what I need it for, because this one,” their mother raised her sister’s arm high enough that she was on her toes, “were dumb enough to give a fuckin’ crackhead her keys!”

The boy looked down at the money as it lay in a knot on the kitchen floor. It sat close enough for him to touch, to protect, if he were to step on it, or if his sister were to. Her foot was closer to it than was his own. He could hear the deep pull of his mother’s voice above his head, and the voice of his aunt. And he could also hear himself, thinking about moving, and wanting to move became something more than just a thought to him. He wanted to inch his foot towards the money as slowly as the water sliding down the side of the kitchen sink from the curtains his mother left hanging over its lip. But he knew he could not move. He also knew his sister could not move as well. And since they could not move, he thought about the money in a different way, he thought would it look the same when he saw it there next Sunday.

 

 

Paul H. Segar, a celebrity stylist/fashion designer, was born and raised in New York City. He received a B.A. in English Literature from City College of New York and has won several awards in recognition of his writing, including the Ross Alexander Playwriting Prize & the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in creative writing. His work has previously appeared in Fiction magazine.