Nicky grew silent. I pictured him in emptiness, his mind sucked into the witch’s void.
“I know you sleep curled in a ball near the bottom of your bed so the witch-mother can’t find you.”
The possibility of frightening my brother until he cracked spurred me on. I stopped the story only when I had convinced myself the witch-mother’s eyes were glowing red outside my own door as she stood, drawn by her daughter’s words, head tilted, waiting for me to get the story wrong.
In the quiet after my stories, I saw cobwebs forming in the night sky where the ceiling should have been. Spiders crawled over the webs, some hanging from threads. The longer I looked, the more the spiders multiplied and soon I saw them dropping on my covers, felt them creeping on my skin and pricking me. I scratched, leaving long red ridges on my cheeks and neck and arms.
In the morning the witch-mother was gone and Sylvia sat smoking at the kitchen table. The welts escaped her detection but Jenny Taylor pointed them out on the bus. Eventually I turned the bedroom light on when I went to sleep. No one seemed to mind.
That spring, Sylvia’s eyes assumed a new position: up and to the left. Over and over, I was fooled, turning to look where they pointed only to find she was staring at a clay mask on the wall or the painted rung of a chair.
I avoided any space Sylvia’s eyes might rest, in case my mother saw something she didn’t want to and that something was me.
Nicky couldn’t tolerate Sylvia’s eyes not resting on him. Nicky wanted to be noticed.
He experimented. When he wore his tiny red stretch bathing suit to school, Sylvia didn’t bat an eye. He wore Sam’s boxers or his own pajama bottoms with a belt looped around his waist. He wore the same T-shirt for days on end. He went shirtless. He didn’t comb his hair so it become a matted helmet. Each morning, Sylvia sat looking at a potted baby’s tears on the windowsill, sucking on her cigarette and letting the smoke trail out her nostrils.
One day Nicky came downstairs with his nails, his knuckles and part of his neck painted with pink polish. The time I had painted his nails was already fading from my memory. I had removed the polish right away then so no one had seen it. This time Nicky had made sure that no one would miss it.
I was in the kitchen when Nicky came in. These days, if we wanted breakfast we had to get it ourselves. Nicky made toast, covering it with chunks of peanut butter, then tossing the knife into the sink with a clatter.
“Shit,” said Nicky, louder than he needed to. Sylvia didn’t flinch. Nicky sat and tapped his fingers on the table but Sylvia stayed facing the window, the heater on her cigarette burning until it was over an inch long, then dropping. I glared at Nicky. He wasn’t supposed to wear polish on his own. I stood beside Sylvia at the edge of her vision and pushed the ashtray so the ashes would fall into it.
At school I was dying to say something, to use those freakish pink nails as a way of getting Nicky back for using my polish in the first place. Nicky walked around with his chin out and a big grin and somehow it was okay. I didn’t know how he did it. He didn’t have a good memory like mine and his grades were average but there was something about my brother — maybe something he’d said — that made the other boys want his approval. Maybe he’d blamed it on me. Making fun of him would make things worse.
Sam didn’t see the nails until dinner time. Though more and more Sylvia’s dinners came from a can, that night she served up a meatloaf, loosely-packed ground beef swimming in a yellow sauce. The table was set with no tablecloth or napkins, and the forks and knives were on the same side of the plate. Sam got out the milk and ketchup.
Despite the liquid, my first bite crunched.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
Sylvia looked around with a smile, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
“Soup. Tomato soup and mushroom.”
“Are there onions?”
“Onions. Corn flakes. Mustard. Whatever was around. Maybe even some peanut butter.”
My throat rose but I kept my mouth closed. Sylvia had slumped and didn’t notice. The meat separated into a golden slosh.
“It’s delicious. Right, kids?” Sam said, exaggerating his chewing and nodding toward Nicky and me.
“Right, Dad,” I said, taking a big swallow of milk. I calculated how long I had to wait before I could safely get up and take a mouthful to the bathroom to deposit in the toilet.
Nicky nodded but didn’t answer.
“Thank you,” Sylvia said into her plate.
Nicky kept his hands on his lap, curling his fingers around his fork when he had to use it but when Nicky lifted his milk, Sam saw the nails.
Sam laid his utensils down, first the knife and then the fork, and stared, his face growing red. I counted my chews, four per mouthful, so as not to attract his attention.
The stares had the reverse effect on Nicky; soon he had both hands up on the table, fingertips outstretched, preening and fussing, admiring the job he’d done. By now some of the polish had chipped off, so the nails were more of a mess. He waved them under my nose until I had to hold chunks of lip and cheek skin between my teeth to stop the giggles. Nicky curled his fingers inward and blew.
Sam watched, eyes narrowing, then reached across the table, grabbed Nicky’s fingers and squeezed. He gripped harder and harder, his eyes on the nails as if he expected them to fly off and parts of Nicky — the bad parts — to stream out. Nicky squinted at Sam and refused to budge or make a noise, even as his fingers turned pink, then a lurid blue-red, then white, the way my fingers did at school when I tried to make them fall off by wrapping elastic bands around them. They never did but I wasn’t certain Nicky’s wouldn’t now.
“You!”
Sam slammed Nicky’s hand down onto his plate, spraying me with meatloaf juice. I held back a yelp. Sylvia pulled out a cigarette and lit up, eyes directed at the fridge radio, waiting. Nicky smirked, only his red ears betraying his fear.
Sam stood.
“You’re grounded until I say so. And your sister,” he jerked his head in my direction, “can clean you up. I never want to see those nails again. You look like a fairy.”
Sam’s neck throbbed. His lips moved but no words came out. He walked into the mud room, pulled on his jacket and yanked open the back door.
Five minutes later, Nicky got up and left, too.
I snuck away to my room. Later that night, Nicky sat on the toilet seat while I dipped toilet paper into nail polish remover and scrubbed his fingernails until the skin around them was raw. We didn’t speak; like Sylvia, he could barely look at me.
3 Storms
The last week of June, the week after school let out, was a week of thunderstorms. In the beginning the rain came first, the lightning stretching across the sky then snaking in on itself. By the end of the week, the clouds were stopped up, the water brewing inside, their countenances so dark, I imagined they contained more than water: bits of fur and roadkill; cat paws, raccoon tails, rabbit teeth, even whole groundhogs; birds’ legs and beaks; human fingernails, earlobes, wrists and kneecaps; fragments of half-digested carrion: proof of the consuming powers of the storm, or perhaps the ingredients of the malice forthcoming. The brawling clouds had powers, I believed — the yellow veins of electricity and the ear-splitting cracks evidence of some great rage waiting to be spat out at the unsuspecting and the unprepared.
The mornings descended like a wall. At first daylight, I awoke in a frustrated