When I was a kid I had a fear of railroad spikes, the loose and rusty ones just laying in wait for skull punctures and freak accidents. As a broken family we took five mile walks in the evening and a third of that followed rails. Mom found a strange, handwritten song/poem called “In the Long Run,” and I remember kicking gravel around to myself while she read it to a made up beat. We fed sugar cubes and apple slices to a jumping horse named Joker, and we pumped water from the well in the cemetary. The scenes were backed by evenings and the dog chased after joggers.

I threw up on the sidewalk in front of the high school, waiting for my sister’s last bell to ring. I had just been slapped with suspension and my mother was in the hospital. I think we were going to see her. She was coming home soon to stay in a hospital bed in the living room and we fed her Ensure through a tube in the stomach for about a month. I watched her go from wheelchair to walker to cane to nothing. CC&7s again like nothing ever happened, back to the horsetrack placing bets on the names your daughters liked.

Now that I’m getting older I see that I only knew her as young, and unphased, and we picked her up from the bar in Cincinnati a couple times and stayed up knowing she wasn’t coming home. I dressed myself for school and blatantly sucked at it. There were Sports Illustrated models in their bikinis on the fridge and seven layer salads, and lemon to lighten the hair–hours and hours in the sun.

Brand new bike still boxed and not built yet, trophies, the winter clothes, the toys and paperwork. All gone, erased from storage in a move of ego revenge. All of our shit just gone. My dad bought me the bike you asshole. Your sons were spoiled brats and your exwife a mystery woman with red hair in front of a split level. His parents lived too close to the airport–the walls shook when a flight tumbled over. You made my sister iron your shirts in the morning before work and you left us alone for days and you were the idiot with a bowling ball. Nobody liked you and everything about me rejoiced when you left. You hit my mother and threw plants. A recall from the stepfather factory.

You can use moss as carpet in makeshift barbie doll apartments–vertical shoeboxes for showers and Jem dolls for boyfriends, a slow dance with arms extended in daydreams of elbow bends. Tasseled pillows were come rescue me chambers and couches were boats where I piled up all my belongings and floated alone playing cliffhanger with the upper body. A ball and a fence–I hit one against the other over and over until out the bottom bent and grass stepped aside for smooth streaks in the dirt from repeated placement. Knocked baby apples off tree branches practicing chip shots; avoiding the neighbor Don and his small talk, running the rust flakes off the chain and across the palm–the mark of been there, imagined that. There was nothing like avoiding the tomato plants and getting her attention; a squint of approval and confusion from a lawnchair in the sun.