Park
by Erin Pringle
I am ten and a half. My parents aren’t divorced. My grandparents live across the street. Grandmother keeps peppermint patties in her housecoat pocket and sneaks me one when I hug her. Grandfather offers me ice cream cones. I never say yes. Ice cream goes straight to my hips. Mom says when I am an adult and my grandfather is dead, I will regret never eating the ice cream. I like to visit the graveyard and subtract the year of death from the year of birth on the tombstones. My favorite is for a girl my age who died in 1878. Her name is Ruby.
I haven’t any siblings and I don’t wish for any. My parents don’t give me too much or too little. They are good and I tell them so every night after they tuck me in but before they turn off my bedside lamp. Once they’re gone, I turn the lamp on so Ruby won’t climb into my window and kill me for living. If Mom is lonely, she sits on my bed and looks out the window. The graveyard is not far from our house. Sometimes, I pretend I’m Ruby and Ruby is sleeping beside me. There’s little room for her to lay on her back, but Ruby doesn’t complain about pancaking against the wall because at least she’s not in dirt anymore. But she can’t grow up. Growing up hasn’t been so bad up to now. When I’m sad for no reason, I pull my hair until the sadness stops. I can finally feel my breasts coming in—please, mister.
I live in a nice neighborhood with oak trees and flowers climbing lattices. Blue periwinkle spreads across our backyard. In the summers, fathers light fireworks up and down the street that burn colors into the sidewalks. I wish we had a dog to walk, but I also wish for a beautiful tombstone under a tree so people will visit and talk to me, so my wishes are fine to leave as wishes. Ruby had wishes. She won’t be my age next year. Unless I die before my birthday.
I have nightmares. In one, I fall backwards into an ocean and sink and sink and all I see is water and my hair floating out in front of me like periwinkle. If I wake before the sharks swallow me, I run to the bathroom and hold my head under the tub faucet until my head burns and my ears ache. The sharks will swallow me tonight. Do you ever know what you’ll dream of before you fall asleep, mister? I mean, really know?
No one will ever ask me to pose for paintings. Women posed for my father. The paintings are in the basement stacked and facing the far wall. He doesn’t paint anymore. They’re probably worth money. I could sell them and leave the money for you in the graveyard. By Ruby’s stone. Sometimes, I lay down by her and tell her what the clouds look like. No one visits her but me.
I’ll only be in the newspaper if I die or have a baby. One birthday someone might put a much younger picture of me in the community news as a surprise. Hopefully, a picture taken of me alive tomorrow. If this happens, I will write you a thank you card. This bathing suit is the color of my grandmother’s turquoise ring.
My parents and I go to church and forgive our trespasses and those who trespass against us. I pray for Ruby. I can pray for you. During the sermon, I count the wood planks in the ceiling. I lose count around eighty. I should have listened. Jesus loves children. All the children. But I don’t feel like a child anymore. Maybe Ruby didn’t either.
Nothing grand will probably happen in my future. I will teach first grade. I will marry a good man. I will not love a man who is an artist and who doesn’t love me. I will not sit on my daughter’s bed and look out her window and forget she’s there because I’m waiting for a good man in a neighborhood of oak trees. If my husband dies before me, I will bless my lucky stars that I had him the years I did. I won’t visit his grave every day or just memorial day. Fake or fresh flowers blow away or die. I will stay strong for our children, if we have any. But, mister, now I don’t think I want children. They will cough up blood or want to swim in the hot summers, and what if I don’t want to drop them off at the public pool every day just because that’s what all the other mothers do? But if a day comes when I leave my daughter for just an hour because I have to find my husband who’s gone fishing or wherever he goes after he’s been in the basement looking at paintings that aren’t of me, I will tell her not to take peppermint patties. I will tell her not to walk around the swimming pool fence to a brown buick. She’ll never feel the cold air cling to her turquoise bathing suit. Until the man forces her to talk about herself.
Erin Pringle's fiction has been published in Drunk Duck, Indiana English, Lake Effect, and Quarter After Eight. Her fiction has won honorable mentions in both the 2002 and 2003 Stony Brook University Fiction Contests. She is a former winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a recent graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Texas State University where she was awarded the Rose Fellowship.