Brandon Cook Writer

A short story I wrote a few months ago. Didn’t quite come out as I intended, but I still like the original idea.

“I won’t go climbing up on the counter,” Grace said when the doctor left the room. “And I’m sorry I knocked the kettle over. I’ll stay out of the kitchen forever for as long as I live.”

“Oh, rabbit.” Mother gave her hand a squeeze. It’s only now, with the doctor gone, that Grace had the chance to really look at her mother. Her eyes were creased and wide, like they were when she and Daddy had their arguments. “Just tell me—when you knocked the water on your arm—love, didn’t it burn? Didn’t it hurt?”

Grace furrowed her brow, knowing somehow that honesty will destroy something fragile but essential between them. “It was supposed to, wasn’t it?”

Later, when the doctor reentered to talk Grace and her mother through their altered reality, Grace would understand that it was meant to hurt. That she had a disorder of the nervous, rare in the extreme, and that there was a reason she did not feel like others: that the slightest cut or damage or injury meant death. That it was a miracle she’d already made it to four years old, but that, and this in measured tones, most children with her condition rarely made it past fifteen, much less ever entered adulthood.

Grace waited until he left: “What’s all that mean, Mommy?”

“It means you won’t have any pain, rabbit.”

She didn’t need long to learn to resent the painless reality. This thing pain, which she did not have and yet was the most real thing about her, according to the doctors and nurses. Pain, not the red freckles on her arms which Mom called gumdrops. Not her sandy blonde hair smelling of that morning’s Loreal shampoo. Not the way her eyes changed from brown to green like mood rings. A hard tack word with an authority, a solidity and respect like a doctor’s well-oiled mustache, pain possessed a culture, a terrain all its own.

            “What is it, even?”

            “Hurt. Discomfort. Danger.”

            “But what is it?”

“I can’t say, rabbit. It just is.”

Strange to be prisoner to a reality that didn’t even exist, but Grace educated herself, learning pain the way you learned a foreign country by looking at maps. Storybook pain was taken in stride: witches stuffed into ovens, boys diced and pieced together like Lego sets, children devoured, starved, burned, or cut with nary a whimper. Doctor pain was the opposite: pinpricks and swabs resulting in tears and cries. Movie pain was gashes and gore: realities Grace’s body identified with. Stabbing your hand with a pencil. Sticking your arm with sewing needles. Slamming your foot in the doorway. Mom screamed, scolded, wept, and swept her off to the hospital. Grace took notes. Put your hands in front of your face if you trip. Avoid things with steam. Never, ever run. Pain was rupture in reality, a doorway into a chemistry of fear, anxiety, death. For Grace, the doctor said, showing her a series of blurry scans which she understood to be her fractured bone, a superhighway to death. “Pain is your body’s police officer,” he explained. “Pain keeps us safe.”

Safe was the erecting of walls, the application of child locks, the bendy rubber prongs of forks, the reason Mother no longer stocked scissors, sewing needles, knives, or spades. Safe was the reason corners were bandaged, why Grace attended school online, in her bedroom, passing the rest of her long hours with Grimm, Andersen, Lewis, Afansayev: the great catalogers of childhood traumas. Was why she avoided the sun like a witch’s kisses, paced her rooms in long pants and sweaters. Safe devised whole sunless universes where a girl might go out without fear of her body rebelling against her; heavens of round edges, milky fabrics, scarless bodies, sunless climes.

She took daily walks in Monroe Park, absurdly bundled in even the best of seasons.

“But what’s light got to do with pain?” she’d asked, unthirstily sipping from an ever-present water-bottle.

“It’s brain signals, rabbit. You don’t get messages abouts sweating or heat like other kids.”

“Or feeling.”

“It just means we have to pay more attention than other people. We can do that.”

Mother knew what she was talking about. She’d studied criminal justice in school: desiccated bodies were par for the course. As for exercise, most activities were out owning to dangers, but if Grace behaved herself very well, she’d be shuttled from errand to errand, bound in scarves and dark glasses. She resembled the Monster from Mars and dutifully acted the part, frog-marching, her arms outstretched, screaming “Brains! Brains!” until Mother slapped her on the head.

“You’re not a monster.”

“Then why does everyone pretend I’m a ghost?”

“Mr. Sharpe played checkers with you when he came over.”

“Everyone else who’s not your boyfriend. Kids, I mean.”

Kids dodged to the opposite sides of streets, halls, paths, just to pretend the preteen monster mummy did not exist. But she saw them alright. From the barred window of her first-floor bedroom, she saw kids on roller skates, kids on ropes, kids clambering up playground towers. Hurling themselves head-first down well-greased slides. Pummeling one another with all the mad invincibility of youth: running, tagging, clambering, hurling, throwing, bursting with energy.

How wonderful, she thought, a princess in a castle of peas where every pea’s a bomb, to be able to hurt. To not be safe. Safe was a guest who moved into her room and changes everything around, invaded all the spaces: “That’s mine. That’s mine. That’s mine, too.” If Grace were Queen of the World, she’d stuff Safe in the closet and throw the key down the deepest well to nowhere.

“But everyone goes,” Grace pleaded. “Everyone.”

Fifteen now, and as she was fresh off the victory of her second miracle of surviving this long, Grace was hungry to start life. In certain sleepless nights, daring to hope she too might make it through her teens or even, Heaven Forbid, join the adults, she’d concluded that she needed to know something of the world, make some allies who weren’t all mustached doctors, hard-faced nurses, Moms, or Moms’ online boyfriends. In short, she needed to try school.

Her bargaining power was strong: survival had bought some purchase. Though she’d never said it, Mother wanted her out of the house, at least to slacken some of the tautness out of her life. Maybe she’d even go on a date. Mike Sharpe had disappeared, ghosting her with excuses about being in Cincinnati on business. “I’ll let you know when I’m back, Sandra.” At least there were others. Last month, she’d put on a skirt and perfume, called in a nurse, given Grace a billion contact numbers, and disappeared for an hour before flying back: “I just had a premonition something had happened!” Grace and the nurse hadn’t even have sketched the frame of their jigsaw puzzle.

“You don’t know what can happen there.”

“Exactly. I might learn something.”

“You can learn right here,” Mother fired back. “You’ve done Mrs. Preacher’s class online. I guarantee you know as much as anyone else.”

“I meant I might learn something about other people.”

“You might not want to know what other people are like, rabbit,’ Mom sighed.

“If you mean that other people are bad, then it’s even more important I learn that now rather than get screwed later on!” she said, aware that her “later on” was no more than hopeful thinking. “You just don’t want me seeing anybody who’s not you.”

Mother pursed her lips and turned back to her computer, swallowing whatever she really wanted to say. “We’ll ask the doctors. But the first sign of trouble, I’ll yank you out of there so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

Six agonizing months of promised consultations later, and the matter could no longer be so easily avoided. Grace was already living on the borrowed time of a miracle; the idea of giving her away to a pack of school brats scratched even more worry lines into the corners of Sandra’s eyes. She, who had borne her afflictions easily: a disabled daughter, a runaway husband, the tedium of endless indoor days of a freelance copywriter, now found herself with fidgeting fingers and distracted eyes. She tuned unconsciously in the disaster section of the news: wars, famines, assaults, murders. Nights that the glasses of Chablis didn’t send her immediately to sleep, she reminisced about her childhood: yellow-braided, sunburned in a blue and white polka-dot bathing suit still wet from the pool, romping through sprinklers and falling off bikes and skinning her knees. A normal childhood, stupid and harmless.

Thinking about that girl might have once made her nostalgic. Now it annoyed her, knowing its sequel. That she’d gone to college thinking she’d turn out a forensic analyst and had ended knocked up by an ex-boyfriend who’d bailed within the first year of fatherhood. That she did freelance editing work and spent many restless nights with glasses of Chablis, wondering if things would go on like this forever, just her and Grace, and the crime scene of her daughters’ body. Sandra Hamilton who was still youngish, only mid-30s, and pretty if you didn’t count the worry lines. Would she ever see again any of the half dozen men she’d dated? Would she always have to attend to Grace, who was so unlike little girls with her sores and protruding ligaments, her widows’ weeds, and yet so like a little girl, defiant and pouty and afraid of the dark and as capable as any other little girl of exploding into helpless giggles? Which would she attend to? The object of pain and doctors, or the girl behind the black clothes?

She called First Crest Middle School and booked her daughter’s first day of school. Only the second week second semester, so there would be little problem fitting her in. The call done, she considered the French label on the wine bottle and sighed. It would be a three-glass kind of night, and God knew how much she’d need before the end of the first week.

School was a forest to lose herself in: a million details all screaming for Grace’s interest.  No sooner was she taken through the Pledge of Allegiance then Grace was whipped into attention to sit through math, science, Language Arts. She intoned carefully the litany pi are squared; named the author of “Tom Sawyer;” was told off in Home Ec for improperly stitching a sock. In Art, she was given a sheet of black paper and a nickel and told to scrub away until the paper revealed her house.

“You can scrub the black away to show a design,” the teacher said. “You’ve hardly scrubbed away anything at all.”

“Because that’s what it looks like.”

She was read names from registers, and later heard them calling breathlessly in the hallways, voices pitched high and fast with excitement: Karen Anna Will Peter Mickey Kyle Samantha! She was peppered with questions, but at lunch, only Samantha Gobbles offered to sit with her.

“Your scarf: is that a religious thing or something?” she asked. Her hair was so black it was purple, and she wore high-top blue jeans with patterns stitched all over them, and checkered converse shoes, and has not once, ever, had to cover her arms, which were sun kissed, splotchy in spots as treacle. Her notebooks were covered with anime sketchings.

“It’s the sun,” Grace said.

“You allergic to UV rays? They peel my uncle like an onion.”

“I don’t feel heat,”

“You’re making that up.”

“It’s a disorder in my nervous system. My brain doesn’t receive the pain signals like other kids. It affects like one in a hundred and fifty million people.” Samantha was studying her face closely for any detection of lies. “Actually, more than that.”

“You live in that dark house. In the neighborhood by the park.”

“Fourth and Walnut,” Grace said, proud to be recognized.

“I’m Fifth and Henderson— I skate the lake in that park when it’s cold enough. Jesus! They said there’s a girl in there never been outside before. I mean like, to school and stuff.”

“I’m out now, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Samantha realized she’d been gaping and closed her mouth. “Did they keep you chained up in there like the others say?”

“No, I just don’t leave too often because of all the things that want to kill me.” Grace laughed: Sam didn’t. “I don’t feel temperature like normal kids, but I’ll go out to the grocery store and sometimes to the park, although I don’t really run around.”

“What about nighttime, when everyone’s asleep, you know. Ever sneak out then?”

“Why?”

“To be out! Why else? Cameron lets me drive his car and I only just got my permit. If I was you, I’d run and jump around and do all kinds of crazy shit. If somebody kept me locked inside, I’d kill myself.”

“Who’s Cameron?”

“He buys me whatever I want. See my necklace? The agate’s real.”

“What’s agate?”

“It’s expensive as hell is what it is. Why are you smiling? You don’t believe me?”

“I’m not smiling!” All of a sudden, they were both giggling.

“Alright, painless girl. But prove it. I shared something with you. Now you have to do the same. That’s the deal.”

“We’re not making a deal!”

“Are now. Here, do something with this.” A needle from Home Ec. “Go on. Nobody’s watching.”

“You’re insane.”

“So you were just making it up.”

Sam reached for the needle but Grace shielded it. Defy Mother or lose the only friend she’d ever made? Would ever make?

“Was not.”

“Then do it. Otherwise you’re a bare-faced liar.”

“You’re weird wanting to see this, you know.”

Sam grinned. Grace grinned, shrugged, and buried the pen into her palm at precisely the moment the home ec teacher passed their table.

“I hate you!”

A week later, yanked out of school as per Mother’s promise, and ripe with rage, Grace’s outbursts shook the seedy, wood-paneled walls of their tiny home. She bowled over furniture, smashed glasses, tore her headscarf, scattered trash, slammed doors. “Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate you!”

“Rabbit, when you get older, you’ll und—”

“Shut up!”

She made sure to slam her bedroom loud enough that the house shook.

Mom’s calm, nullifying face: the reminder that every day, while life passed outside, she’d remain casted, braced, trapped behind walls of human care. The fact that she had never climbed a tree, ridden a bicycle, driven a car, held a boy’s hand, pared a carrot, boiled water, had a sleepover, made a real friend; that every night she’d go to bed being reminded of what a fragile thing she was. One wrong step—ZAP! KABLOOEY!

Halfway through her third glass of Chablis, Sandra discovered an astonishing thing. She was praying: O Lord, just one night without worry. Just one night for myself. Is that too much to ask? Is it the right thing to ask? O, God.

The glass was gone. Another, then.

The prayers came thick, desperate and jumbled. How Long, God? What is it to ask for just a little bit of time to herself. Time she didn’t have to—she stops herself from going any further—the thought that ghosts into her head, that if only, if she could only, if she were only—

No! Stop the goddam pity!

She poured another glass. Screw it, she thought, taking the bottle to her copyediting desk. Small consolations: correcting other peoples’ small errors was, in some way, like correcting her own. Tonight: a fifteen-thousand-word memoir by a woman born without hands or legs. The text mocked her: see how small your problems and pains are to the rest of the world?

Five thousand words in, an email notification popped up. Mike Sharpe. She squinted, scanning pieces of text like cypher. She read it three times, and then she leaned back and laughed. She was halfway to deleting the message but changed her mind last minute and wrote the words “love to,” before deleting them. She stood up, paced, sipped her Chablis, sat back down, dashed and sent the message before she could stop herself.

Grace took up “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:” Edmund was approaching the Witches’ castle to inquire after his Turkish Delight, discovering that the place was surrounded by a sea of creatures made of stone. Which was infinitely preferable to being made of glass, she thought, looking up.

Witches and talking animals and magic wardrobes that transport you away—how stupid and dull it all was when there was a bus that ferried you to a place completely different from anywhere else you could ever imagine.

And as she’d done every night that week, she relived her day at school. Echoing corridors and bells and kids laughing and the smells of dry erase marker, whiteboard, the teacher’s perfume. No Narnia or enchanted wood for her, but a normal day at school, with normal kids, normal teachers, and her name read off the register the same as any other. Grace Hamilton.

“Grace? Are you there?”

She perked her ears up, put the book down, and went to the window. And saw a face. Dark hair. Patched jeans. Big muffling coat. Samantha Gobbles. “Fourth and Henderson!” she cried. “I knew I’d find you!”

            Grace stumbled from her window. Falling into Narnia was all very well when it was part of the story. “Keep your voice down.”

“I’m busting you out. Come on.”

“To go where?”

Sam held up a pair of ice skates. “They’re an old pair but they should work fine for a newbie. Come on. We’ll walk.”

            Trees globed with snow like wedding cakes. Playground forts decked in ice. Grace was bundled in three jackets, with two scarves and two pairs of gloves. Scrunched in the ice skates she could barely move, but that didn’t bother Sam.

            “Skating’s a cinch once you get the rhythm. Then you just go, go.” Strapping on her skates, Sam showed Grace how it was done, executing a pristine figure eight over the frozen surface. Grace attempted the same, sluggishly, teetering, but with comparable skill. Gliding over a frozen cauldron of death. Not something she’d have seen herself doing even two weeks ago.

They skated the better part of an hour and then, their hair glistening with sweat and giddy with exercise, they took themselves to a nearby gazebo. Sam took out a little pocket mirror and gingerly touched the edge of her mouth, which was bruised and swollen as though something had bit it.

            “You’re lucky you can’t feel anything,” she said. “I’m gonna have a fat lip all month.”

            “What happened?”

            “Cameron.”

            “Is he,” Grace searched for the right relation and said unsure, “is he your boyfriend?”

            “My Mom’s. My future stepfather.”

“Oh. I don’t know my father.”

“Lucky. Cameron’s alright but he—I don’t know. We played poker together and he let me win a lot. Did your dad ever ask you to play poker?”

“I don’t think so. But poker doesn’t sound so bad.”

Sam shrugged. “When I win it’s fine, but when I lose, he makes me take off my shirt and pants.”

“What does he do?”

“Mostly nothing. Looks, mainly. But I get this feeling from him like—” Sam shrugged and threw a stone onto the surface of ice.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Forget it. Hey Grace?”

            “Still here.”

            “You want to run away? It’s not hard.”

“Soon as I’ve got a million dollars.”

            “I bet I could get us two thousand easy. That’s enough for plane tickets anywhere. Or we can take the car and just go. I can work as a waitress and you—what can you do?”

“Join the freak show. I betcha peopled’ pay good money to stick pins into my arm.”

“Freak show it is. Let’s do it tomorrow. We’ll write our parents cards to let them know not to find us. In ten years maybe we’ll come back and visit.”

 “Doctors said I’d die before I turned twenty-one.”

            “If you are going to die, don’t you want to see something before?”

            Grace sat up. Her legs had fallen asleep and she was beginning to feel tired. The wonder of the night was beginning to wear off. “Can we go back?”

            “Ready when you are.” A quiet walk, each nursed their thoughts. Before long the house came into view. Sam faced Grace. “So, tomorrow?”

            “To join the freakshow? No problem,” Grace laughed, well within the joke, and hugging Sam goodbye, she climbed back through the door, discharged herself of her black clothing, and massaged her trembling knees. Fifteen-year-old girl allergic to the sun and pain, a runaway. And go where? To see what? Grace had seen. A thousand fantasy worlds; half from her own making. Mother’s geraniums and the run of sprinkler water trickling down their pillow-soft petals. She’d seen the colors of the walls at school and smelled the different air, and spied the logos of a hundred student t-shirts, more contact with the world than she’d ever had before.

Sam couldn’t be serious.

But she’d find out tomorrow.

            But the next night, she broke a glass and got shards in her hand, and Mother nursed her to bed, and the night after that there was a storm, and the night after that, she’d just put on her boots when Mother’s voice came from the kitchen: “Rabbit? Come here for a second? There’s someone here.”

            Sam she thought. Stupid, crazy, desperate Sam had pranced right through the front door.

But it was a man, early-forties, dependably built, receding hairline in a crest at his forehead, wearing slacks and brown loafers and a pale blue fleece vest. Mike Sharpe, he said, and stuck out his hand, and said: “the last time I saw you, you were only this high.”

“We’d better talk over dinner if we don’t want things getting cold,” Mother said. “Rabbit, we have a lot to talk about.”

Grace picked up the conversation in fragments. Something about how many years Mike and Mom had known each other. About Mike moving out of the neighborhood; his startup in Cincinnati; his return on a business trip; reconnecting with Mom; his experience with his first wife; a fresh start; Cincinnati; a fresh start; Mom and Grace and Mike all in Cincinnati for their fresh start.

            “It wouldn’t be for some months yet, rabbit. Mike’d have to go and get things settled first. We’d have a nice place to stay. And we’d be closer to better hospitals and doctors.”

            A new life.

“Isn’t this what we’ve been waiting for?”

A new chance to see something.

“Well, say something, rabbit!”

Goodbye to Safe. Goodbye and farewell, and hello to a new era of packing and changing. The melting of the winter snows came with the conversion of the house back to its former state: the dismantling of bars, the special, the pressure-sensitive hotpads in the kitchen replaced with those of a normal stove. One day a realtor named Cindy Lorde arrived, and within a month the house was sold.

They rented a room in a hotel called Mustang Palace. There was a pool, a workout room, a dingy little diner with built-in bar. Afternoons, while Mom worked and talked through the move with Mike, Grace was left to her own devices: a rare change in policy. She did not abuse her freedoms: she went no further than to the back fence of the lot. Once, she saw an ant mound and stuck her hand in, watching the little insects roam from freckle to freckle.

Two weeks, and then the message came from Mike that all was ready for their big move.  She and Mother celebrated their second-to-last day at the Outback Steakhouse with ribeyes as big as their heads. Mother drank screwdrivers until her voice became warm and syrupy and she took to calling Grace rabbit. “To think, rabbit, after all this time something like this would happen.”

Waiting, Grace thought, sipping her Shirley Temple, fingering the serrated blade of her steak knife. And suddenly, she thought about Sam. About the joke that might not have been a joke after all. Maybe she’d really wanted to leave. Maybe Grace really had been her last hope. Maybe she’d gone out there and waited, just as she said.

The thought nagged her all the way home. Why hadn’t she gone to the park just once to see if Sam really had waited? What was the harm? And what if even now, she were still Sam’s only hope? But what to do now?

Back in the Mustang Palace, she watched her mother wobble into bed, still loose and loving from four Crocodile Cocktails. In ten minutes, she was snoring loud enough for Grace to pull off the sheets, grab fifty dollars from her open purse, and open the door without risking detection.

“How do I order a taxi?” she asked the teenager working the concierge desk.

“I call the guy.” The woman’s mascara was black and sharp as railroad spikes. She picked up the phone and raised her pierced eyebrows. “Where are we going tonight?”

The lake had been frozen before, which wasn’t much different from how it looked now: a treacly, black mouth. She checked the bench, then the gazebo, then she sat, rubbing her hands. She didn’t know if the wind through her hair was hot or cold. She didn’t know, rubbing her thumb over the splintered wood of the bench, if the mark it left would sting. Fifteen years of her life in walls that swallowed her up like lakes. No pain—no, but sense. She’d felt as keenly the others. She’d felt it in Sam’s face when she asked about Cameron, what Mother must have felt: the want by some magic to swallow another’s pain into herself. Perhaps that would be her. If she got to continue the experiment that was Grace, maybe she’d be the one who could hold your pain for you. If she made it to her adult years.  

“We waiting for anybody here, sweetheart?” the cabbie yelled from the street.

“No,” said Grace, rising, “I’m ready to go.”