Alex J. Martin lives in Northern England and writes on a laptop made of compacted cigarette ash. You can visit him at: http://alxjmartin.wordpress.com/

Children with Tiny Wings (December 20, 2009. Issue 12.)

But now he sleeps without end.
Now the moss and the grass
Open with sure fingers
The flower of his skull.

—from Federico García Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias

It was my father, mostly, and how his eyes would follow her from the room. How he’d wink at me when she snuggled up to him, rubbing her filial kisses into his stubble and breathing through a pubescent smile the fumes of dribbled gin. She squeezed her hands between her white thighs while we watched Two-Lane Blacktop or Easy Rider again and my father would promise to take us out on Route 66 some weekend soon. We’d be caterpillars in that car, he said, while we drove over macadam and crag until we could drive no more. Until we reached the end of all beauty and could emerge from that twisted Chevy like butterflies.

“Or moths,” she’d say. He’d tickle her breathless for punishment, his fingers dancing around her underwear while she giggled and fought. She was five years older than me and I was told to not join in. She would squeal and blush, almost seizing with laughter, more and more of it until a kicking leg would catch his glass and the fun spilled all over our carpet. I was always amazed at how specific and physical a ceiling that was for him, and only ever a little gleeful when he shouted at her for it.

I doubted our existence at school. We weren’t spoken to. I would spend recreation clinging to the palms stitched onto her dress hem. Those years are mostly undistinguishable. Faces repeat themselves in my memory as if there are for sure a finite number of actors in this world playing those who had cut tangents beside my life. I’ve worked for a car-washer the image of a boy who, with his friends, tried to set fire to me. I can see them holding smoking coals in discarded tongs and pliers and chasing me into the trees behind the science block. I found underwear back there and a used condom tied like a knot around a bottle, a small cum bow-tie for the beer. They didn’t find or chase me again, though I’d often worry they would.

We had to wait when we got home. We’d do our homework in the yard. Dead grass collected in the spines of our copy books and sometimes we’d spend hours reading by streetlight and waiting for our father to wake up. The last January before we left my sister’s lips were blue by the time he let us in and she got a key after that. We learnt to be quiet and to cook him breakfast with our dinner. The rest doesn’t come to me too easily. Maybe we had a dog called Pixie, but after a few days she ran away. She would never bark though we were all pretty sure she could understand English, or something like that.

*

We left in August. My father said he was just in the mood, he took us out of class. Most of the furniture was gone from our house. He told us to put what of our things we wanted and needed into a small bag and made it clear I’d be sitting in the back. In town we bought new clothes, haircuts, lunch and toilet roll so we could do everything by the side of the most famous road in the world. I remember watching through the rear window the city shrink. I thought it was like a grandmother that’s seen so many things it simply rocks in its chair by the sea and though I remember this thought I don’t think I ever met one of my grandparents. The road beneath us moaned as it could, through potholes and cracks and its epic sweep through the Californian dust. I counted telegraph poles and my sister counted hitchhikers. Our father said we’d pick one up, soon as we got a safe distance from the city.

He drove us past the same cemetery four times, telling jokes to my sister. He said it was the dead centre of town and tickled her with his gear-stick hand. She didn’t laugh. We pulled over. After an eternity of silence he told us to go to the toilet and radio static crept like the murmur of snakes while we peed over the knuckles of an ash tree. Afterwards we sat in the car for hours, watching the sun settle like a wound. He lit a cigarette and we breathed the smoke, the reek of boredom. Maybe we slept there because we were driving when I woke up.

We hit New Mexico and we picked up a pregnant woman when it began to rain. She was standing beside the road in a wet wedding dress and we could see through it to the dark slips of her nipples. She sat beside me and smiled and thanked my father for picking her up. He drove on and she complimented and entertained us, brushed my hair with her hands and dirty nails. A cousin’s friend had proposed to her on the phone from Oklahoma and she had spent all her money on getting the dress, she said. I fell asleep with my head in her lap and tried to remember growing inside of my mother. The pregnant woman said when she had her boy she’d want him to be just like me. My father barely spoke to her, maybe only did so once, to politely decline her invitation to the wedding. After she’d gone he tried to drive us to Kansas in three hours, but we were pulled over.

I remember how the policeman waddled, his pants too low. Arms lumpy with muscles and veins snaking between those bulges like the roots of a tree would penetrate the rock of some ancient temple, ever thickening and slowly tearing the stone apart. The cop had a Ruger in his hand, a forty-four. It looked like a toy. He tapped it off the glass.

“License and registration,” he said, “And slowly.”

My father handed his wallet to the cop, took the registration out from under the sunshield.

“You’re a way out from California,” he looked at the license to gauge my father’s name, then added it. My father nodded, kept staring straight ahead.

“Taking the kids out to Michigan. Doing the route sixty-six thing.”

“You got family out there?” the cop tucked away his gun.

“All the family is right here.”

“No mother?”

My father didn’t blink. “She died giving birth to the boy.”

The cop looked at me, bowed his head like a monk might. “Sorry to hear that, son.”

I told him it wasn’t my fault. The cop shook his head at me and apologised. He explained to me that no one was saying it was. My father sighed, nodded as if he was listening while the cop mumbled. When we were let go my sister climbed into the back of the car and hugged me. About a mile down the road my father told her to sit in the front again. I remember no noise, just the sound of the tyres on the road and the wind blowing in through our windows. When we crossed the border to Kansas my father turned on the radio and caught some Sunday sermon, then quickly turned it off again and pulled us in to an eatery. The place stank of fried blood and the air there was so thick with grease I could have scratched it. We ate burgers, drank cokes. Eventually my father said he was running out of gas money and we drove down to a small farm that had some jobs advertised beside the corkboard.

*

Parts of my father’s head and neck decorated my sister’s blouse. Slivers of window-glass studded my face without hurting and his warm blood and matter were covering everything even before the sound came, a small distant crack that would have meant nothing if it wasn’t for the mess. The parts of my father steamed into the morning as if each even miniscule bit contained some of his soul and it was escaping in whispers into the world. I remember his open and lidless throat like a flower or volcano and the smell like it had been in the diner and the ruddy fog that running down the inside of the windshield like dribbled rust.

A man came over the fence in waterproof trousers, rifle in hand. Another man followed him, tall and rodent looking, the moon of his face sniffing at us and swinging side to side.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Fuck,” the man with the rifle agreed.

They took us out of the car. I led my sister by the hem of her old dress, her not seeing where she was going with the heels of her hands dug into her eyes, and the men escorted us like criminals over a field and to a house from where we couldn’t see our father in the Chevy. They offered us food but we’d just eaten and they told us to drink a little whiskey and relax. Then they were leaving the food on the table for us and the television was over there and they’re locking the door but just for our safety. I watched my sister, silent and filthy with our father’s viscera. After a while of watching us the men left and locked the door.

*

They burnt our father on a Sunday, in one of their fields. I remember the car frame glowing like a neon coffin and how the wheels poured out over the grass and their smoke made my sister’s hair shrivel and knot until the farmer dragged her away. Our new mother gathered us between her huge, sad and hanging breasts and mumbled some prayer.

My sister couldn’t stop crying. The sobs poured out of her like blood would from a wound and our new mother held her hand over my sister’s mouth to try and stifle them. We watched the car burn for hours, maybe a little stunned by the tongues of bright orange against the blue sky. My sister said it smelled fierce and they took us in, put us to bed.

We were let loose to roam the farm in winter and never found that spot they burned it in or even wherever they’d buried the cinders. Our new father didn’t like films, had no opinion of road trips. We joined a church. Aged. Whispered away nights about our lost life.