1.
Aunt Terry says, “One day this backpack could save your life.” It’s Christmas Eve. Aunt Terry and her boyfriend, Vic, are drinking Crown and coke from Spudz MacKenzie coffee mugs. Vic taps his finger against my skull like he’s testing a melon for ripeness. “Any smiles in there?” he says. I don’t smile, but Aunt Terry does—a sad smile, I think. Mom glares. She called Vic a snake on the drive over. Aunt Terry says, “Let’s say your house is on fire.” The backpack, the color of dirt, is Aunt Terry’s Christmas birthday gift to me. I will be ten tomorrow, and I feel cheated in too many ways to count. “Let’s say all you can carry out of the house has to fit in this backpack. What would you put in it?” Aunt Terry’s words slur, resembling the messy loops of her cursive on the gift’s tag. I shrug, but when Aunt Terry and Vic go to the kitchen to refill their mugs, the first thing I put in that backpack is a glittery compact I fish from her purse. That night, I smash that mirror with a hammer and sprinkle the shards on my windowsill. In the morning, they throw flames.
2.
This lake isn’t just a people lake, Mom and Aunt Terry say; it’s an alligator lake, too. I think they’re messing with me. A red slide empties into the lake, and children both larger and smaller than me squeal as they descend. I practice my strokes: butterfly, breaststroke, crawl. “Swimming Saves Lives,” reads a bumper sticker in the parking area. Later, his gaunt face shadowed by a cowboy hat so fat and sleek that he seems a mere hat stand, Terry’s boyfriend, Rocky, points and shouts, “Gator!” From this distance, the gator looks like a floating turd. Children and parents scream. Everyone except Aunt Terry gets out of the water. Aunt Terry grins from her inner tube, green-lacquered toes gleaming. “I’m not scared of no gator,” she says. Rocky laughs, tosses her another koozied can of beer. Mom pleads, then curses. I picture Aunt Terry and the gator floating side by side, hand in clawed foot. I picture the gator biting Aunt Terry clean in half like a potato chip.
3.
Aunt Terry sets off to hike the Appalachian trail with a guy named Moe whom she met in a line dancing class. After four days on the trail, Aunt Terry and Moe get into an argument, and he abandons her. Aunt Terry walks along on her own for a few days, but after an encounter with a rattlesnake, she hightails it off the trail, declares she’s had enough wilderness. She begs Mom to drive all the way from Texas to come get her. Mom does, but first she says, “You were planning to walk for four months anyhow. Home is just a different direction.” That night, I dream there are snakes in my bed. They are thin and slinky. They are thick and ridgy. They are dry. They are slick. They are black. They are rainbow-colored. They are silent. They rattle and hiss. They are cool as creek stones. They are hot as coals. But all of them smell like feet.
4.
Mom finds something glistening between the feathery stalks of carrots in her garden. “Damn hawks,” she says. “Even they expect me to clean up after them.” Aunt Terry is asleep on our sofa, having been up all night crying about a man named Wally. I worry she’s woken up, I worry she hears. I pluck the seeds of the dried-up marigolds and sprinkle them all over the garden. Dull glitter. When Mom scoops up the offending object with a plastic bag fitted around her hand like a glove, she declares it a liver. “How do you know it’s a liver?” I say. “Don’t you think so?” she says, holding the organ before me. It’s hardly bigger than a wad of chewing gum. I realize I’ve never really pictured my insides. Or maybe it’s that I’ve thought of myself as solid and consistent, like a potato.
5.
Terry’s boyfriend, Marvin, goes to jail, and no one will tell me what for. I overhear Mom say to Dad, “Thank goodness she doesn’t have children.” That night, I dream I’m pregnant. Jeff Goldblum is my husband, and we are taking an infant CPR class, like the classes my mother teaches in a windowless room in a beige building, except in my dream, the instructor is a bear of a man with massive arms. He looms over Jeff, who is characteristically delicate with the silicone baby, just as you would expect. The instructor says, “Don’t be so gentle.” He says, “Is that all you’ve got?” He says, “Are you going to let your baby die because you’re too afraid to do what’s hard? Save your baby, man! Save your baby!” Eventually, Jeff Goldblum punches the baby’s chest until it cleaves in two. The baby’s chest opens like a box of tissues, like a vagina. I wake before I can see what’s inside.
6.
I’ve dropped that brown backpack in the dark living room, and Mom is yelling at me to hurry up: this is how my forehead smacks the hard edge of the coffee table, how I develop the scar that decades later my child will refer to as my “shark bite.” Now, instead of to dinner, we go to the hospital, which is like the inside of a refrigerator—bright, cold, and ripe. A nurse gives me a roll of cherry Life Savers. When I see Aunt Terry next, she is boyfriendless, talking about how she’s taking time to “work on” herself, at which Mom rolls her eyes. Terry puts her finger to my forehead, where an opening in my skin has been cinched tight by black thread, and says, “Scars make you tough. They’re reminders of what you’ve survived.” I wonder what story I’ll tell when people ask what exactly I’ve survived. ◆
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