My Town Is Cute

I did most of the growing:
    Pippa picked peppers on the first day of July. She was the kind of person who you could picture eventually being prone to bloody noses and day dreams of swinging from vines, but she would never make it to the jungle. Pippa was a former childhood kleptomaniac, and her bed was full of old Monopoly money which she stole from her few friends. When she awoke her skin was just barely tainted $5 pink, $100 yellow, $20 green, or $10 blue. It was the only sense of control she had.
    Our town was cute in the way that sayings about Jesus our Savior lined the roads just as your vision hit the spot where bumper stickers fell. Pippa and I pretended our nation’s  flag was made of bell peppers, our eyes lined with the bright green and yellow and red. And we could eat it all up if we wanted to, devouring our identity and breaking free from the constraints given to us with citizenship.
    On those hot summer nights I jumped out of my first floor bedroom window and ran to her house so I could hush her into a sleep deeper than the deep blue sea. I stayed up past daylight, my feet still cold from bolting across wet grass, thin lines of green still stuck to my ankles. Sweat ran from my forehead but I wiped it off and pretended to focus in on Pippa’s closing eyes. She liked the taste of sweat, and would place her lips on the back of my hands in a goodbye, goodnight, good luck kiss. She would whisper nonsense, mere syllables as she drifted off into her dreams. All I could do was lay awake in her humid bedroom. Our walls were tainted ticky-tacky and slightly suffocating. When I inhaled it did not feel as though I was breathing anything in, the air was so thick it just felt as though I was constantly swallowing. Even when I was outside I always felt like a ceiling fan was rotating above my head, throwing the atmosphere off balance and pushing me to the ground, so hard I could hear my heart drum through my bones. Looking back, it all made sense, the suffocating and the dizziness and the falling. I was being restricted from moving forward and so I was trying to dig myself into the dirt.
    When the first dandelions started showing their seeds I would run into the fields and try to bundle as many into my arms as I could, but Pippa would kick them all down and tear them from my grasp. She would rip the globular heads off of their stems and stomp on the downy tufts. She would spit on my birthday cake candles and pull my pieces of change out of fountains, most of which were all dried up around our parts. She’d then go spend those along with my good luck pennies. Her piece of the wishbone was always bigger then mine and she would take my fallen eyelashes from my cheeks without telling me. Afterwards she would taunt me, chanting, “Darian, Darian, the wishless boy. All of your wishes have been destroyed!” It was more like a howl flying through the wind and whipping me on every part of my body.   
    Then there was the pain. It was constant, ever enduring. I try to associate it with my mother’s cancer on a smoke sticks and my father’s decision to be gone baby gone, but the older I grew the more I blamed myself. Pippa told me to breathe in real hard and suck it up, but I ended up just choking on smokey summer breezes. She called me a baby and would bite my fingertips, cackling as she went. Blonde hair fell down, down past her shoulders. Her feet were always dirty and those unlit shadows lay under her eyes from keeping her body too close that drowsy formula midnight. Unfortunate, since I was the one that didn’t sleep unless it was in those moments when you wake up only to realize you had dozed off for a few seconds. But again, the pain.  Sometimes I would find scratches on my side and I would feel weak, so weak. After hours of holding Pippa in my arms, when the room was pitch black and the moon was an empty glass of milk I would find myself crying. It was only in these moments that I would pray like my Mama told me, but not for my safety or health or for the children whose souls got lost and tangled up in the darkness. “That girl, you’ve gotta let them know she needs their help,” Mama would say, referring to Pippa. The only time they had every met was during a storm, when Pippa ran like a bat out of hell into our house, stark naked. Even under the roof it still looked like it was raining on her. Mama blew smoke in her face, and when Pippa didn’t cough, grabbed her a robe and a White Russian. After she left the next morning, Mama said, “Maybe she’s what’s making you so damn sad.”
    When we were alone together, which was often, Pippa would huff and she’s puff but could never quite blow me down. It angered her, and she’d cross her arms in frustration and tease me endlessly but she didn’t understand that it was never her presence that brought on the tears. She’d silently kick and scream and tug on her hair until all that was left was to lie down in my arms. She would try so hard that she’d just end up hurting herself.
    Once, when we were lying in a field on a hot Thursday morning when Pippa whispered to me, “My heart won’t run that race for you anymore.” She handed me a box full of wet dandelions and fallen butterfly kisses and burnt birthday candles, licked my sweaty palm, and walked away.