Chris Duncan

​“Dude’s dead,” Lolly said from the backseat.
​Prissy bit Mavis’s right index finger, which Mavis reflexively stuck in her mouth.
Blood tastes like copper pennies.
​“Hush, Lolly! Now, you hush,” Granny Trout said.
​Mavis got in the backseat next to Lolly, her dumb-brilliant little sister. Their father was dead?
​“Holy shit,” Granny Trout said, and she didn’t cuss.
​

​They took off, laughing it up, and tears welled, but Mavis fought them off. Her stomach growled. She could look at a glass of water and gain five pounds. That’s the way it had always been with her. She very well might get the half-retarded guy who worked at Klink’s to make her a twelve inch ham-cap. She sped up her waddling and saw a tiny red light in the sky over Nod Mountain. It was probably Fred, her uncle, her dead mama’s brother, a Holbrook not a Nod. He was always the first to take off in his or her ultralight, an airplane more akin to lawnmower than anything else. Uncle Fred ain’t never gone get dead, Mavis thought, smiling, wishing that his gift (curse?) had been her mom’s too.

Big Jeannie couldn’t deal with her boneheaded daddy, not right now. She flipped him the bird and began walking toward the envelope, which seemed to glow, radiating a whiteish light tinged with exploding and disappearing, tiny, blue sparks. Woodburn’s plywood door slammed shut behind her. She heard a lawnmower buzzing above her. She looked up and took in the odd amalgam of pterodactyl/ hang-glider/ and go-cart from which dangled…a man or women, Big Jeannie couldn’t tell. She envied him or her, cutting a swath through the hot air. Surely it was cooler up there. But then it was  closer to the sun and she halfway expected a melting mess to tumble toward the ground like an Icarus flunky. The ultralight’s bright purple wings contrasted sharply with cloudless light blue sky. Big Jeannie almost decided to be a bird and fly adjacent to the contraption when she head a crack beneath her right foot. She’d stepped on the envelope. 

Raymond disappeared inside Woodburn. Big Jeannie’s neck throbbed. I really hate my life, she thought,  and she willed herself away and floated ten feet in the air, above herself, and she examined the poor, fat girl below. She had a way of doing that, disassociating herself and floating away. For example, she could be sitting alongside her father while he drove along interstate, listening to his Tony Robbins CDs, and they’d pass a billboard and Big Jeannie could instantly be standing thirty five feet above the road on a narrow platform behind the Stuckey’s sign. She could see a dark, green, narrow ladder leading to the thorny ground, around which cows grazed and the interstate traffic zoomed passed with the clarity of painted streaks. She could be right there, was there–but not really. She could blink and she’d be back in her car with Raymond and Riley and Tony Robbin’s echoing speil: How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I’m committed to?

I’d gladly trade places with Riley, Big Jeannie thought, referring to her wheel-chair bound younger brother.