Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit

By Kailey Blount

A tiny pot of water we can’t afford boils on the stove and steam puffs up in spits and sputters. I lean into the mist, face hovering just above the heat, and breathe in. The wet warmth snakes down my throat and into my chest, where it does its best to unclog the dust and dirt built up after days of swallowing the ash on Trash Hill.

“Your turn,” I say to Beth and lift her by her armpits.

“This is gross.” She groans, sandwiched between my chest and the chipped kitchen countertop.

“Would you rather get bronchitis?” I push her head into the pot and feel the pressure of her chest expand, semi-clean air leaking down her throat and out through her lungs.

“One more big breath,” I say when she begins to squirm.

When Beth was a toddler, she caught a nasty case of bronchitis. Pneumonia, I learned, is the leading cause of death in Bezos’ kids under the age of six. I became obsessed with the health of her airways after that. Every day before and after school, I’d boil my water supply and lift her up over the stove.

The first few times the steam enveloped her body; she shook like a starving sewer cat. I thought the shaking had something to do with the mucus secretions separating in her lungs. But then, one morning, she threw the worst tantrum of her life. Her screams were so loud the old lady who rented the room above ours smacked her broom down over and over until little pieces of drywall and debris fell onto our heads. But it was only when her nails nearly scratched out my eyes that I finally took a second to ask her what was wrong. She thought I’d been trying to cook her.

It all ended a day or two later. I was at school, staring at the HoloBoard, trying and failing to keep up with the standardized lesson plan, when my vision went all fuzzy. The board looked like one of Sparrow’s black ink pens splattered all over the screen. I don’t remember passing out, but I do remember waking up to a peace enforcer stabbing a needle in my vein muttering something about dehydration. I ripped that IV thing right out of my arm and told him I wasn’t paying thousands of dollars for water when my bottle was sitting right in my backpack. Maia watched me with hawk eyes as I drank half her water and the rest of mine. After that, my mom made me promise only to use the mist if we were sick or had extra water to spare.

Today, I break that promise. Well, I bend it. The mist is a happy coincidence. I fish out the bag of coffee grinds I swiped from the diner when Deb wasn’t looking. I sprinkle the dark beans into the pot and watch the murky tap turn black.

Our cabinets are almost empty. Dishes and cups have been disappearing at odd hours of the night, piled up in a room I’ve pretended doesn’t exist for far too long. I grab a mug from the back of the cabinet, and spider webs catch and crumble on my fingertips. The handle’s grooves feel familiar. I’m not the only Greco who steals from JPs.

“It smells like Momma,” Beth sniffs, as I pour the coffee into the cup.

“Do you want to go visit her?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

A smile lights up Beth’s face and I notice for the first time that the baby tooth she lost before my dad died is growing in crooked.

“Wait one second,” Beth says, and then she runs, her little feet waking up the swollen floorboards.

I forgot how contagious her joy could be.

I wait, letting the coffee burn a hole in the center of my palms. The sting is unnoticeable under the weight of my curiosity. When my small shadow barrels back into the kitchen with a piece of wrinkled paper clutched to her chest, I recognize it instantly. The yellow-tinted color. The dust mite smell. Sometimes after a big delivery, Sparrow’ll have extra blank sheets of paper that I bring home for Beth. It’s taken years, but our apartment’s once bare walls are barely visible anymore. Instead, Beth’s drawings and my mom’s paintings cling onto the cinderblock with a bit of luck and a lot of tape.

“A new picture?” I reach out my hands. “Let me see.”

“It’s a present for Momma,” Beth lifts a finger to her lips.

She skips to the closet-sized room and peeks back only once to make sure I’m trailing behind her, too intent on her destination to notice my hesitation.

My sister’s not old enough to remember my mom’s last slip.

We were still living in The Lines then. My dad had just been deployed. His army paycheck and her art commissions kept us afloat, paying off the ranch’s mortgage and my medical bills in small, highly inflated doses.

I noticed something was off when her palettes changed color. Pastel copies of the beach we spent our summers exploring morphed into images much darker. Coyotes with maws so bloody they appeared black. Deer heads decapitated and buried under wet sand.

She’d made her living painting family portraits for friends and neighbors. The canvases were always shiny, every face prettier than the last.

When she started painting the strangers, her brushstrokes got messy. Raw. Old scratched-up records blared through our walls. Amy Winehouse. Johnny Cash. Billie Holiday.

“Real artists, Jo,” she told me one night in between a commercial break, “I can’t make that fake stuff anymore. It’s killing me.”

That winter, we had a bonfire, and she burned all her fake art. But before the sunsets, beach fronts, and flowers became ashes, I put on a show.

Eight months pregnant with Beth, my mom could barely walk, let alone bend, so I was our curator. A good curator, she told me, has just as much taste as the artist. The baby was dancing, kicking, begging to be a part of the show, so before running out into the backyard, I brewed her a cup of coffee.

Outside, the sky was blue. Now, looking back, I wish I’d taken deeper breaths. Let myself feel the clean air in my lungs without distraction. On that day, as I listened to the birds chirp, I laid out a picnic blanket. The same picnic blanket I’d cut into a dress years later. The pains in my joints were murmurs back then. Barely there signals of a haunting yet to come.

I stacked the fake paintings, one on top of the other, and framed them around the sides of the blanket. The assault of color reminded me of the map we memorized at school. The Lines, we were told, fenced in the company towns to keep them safe. The real paintings were harder to place. I began with the coyotes and the deer and repeated the same story over and over, until only slivers of red and white checkers remained. The strangers easily filled those spaces. Back then, their baggy eyes and sallow stares scared me because I didn’t know them. Now, they scare me because I do.

Last came the tree. It seemed nothing like the ones I grew up climbing. The fruit it bore looked like contorted bodies. I could practically smell the rot engraved in the lines of grey. I thought of my mom’s tree painting when I first saw the senior oak on Trash Hill. The whole thing made me feel strange.

When I was done, my mom waddled out of the house. The screen door swung behind her, caught, like me, in the summer breeze. Nervous for her approval, I couldn’t keep still. I paced around the frame until I felt too dizzy to stand.

“Your mind is magnificent, Jo. I couldn’t have done it better myself.” She smiled down at me as I rolled in the patches of grass, arms and legs outstretched like growing branches. “Here, feel. The baby thinks so too.”

I crept close and placed my hand on top of her overripe belly. Back then, before I knew the feeling of Beth’s arms around mine, her tiny kicks were my favorite feeling.

Now, the girl in question slams her foot into the door and lets out a startled cry when her flimsy slipper forgets to protect her from the hardwood.

“It won’t open.” She whines.

“Move over and stay right here.” I swat her out of the way and shimmy the key into the rusted lock.

The door creaks, hinges unused to outside pressure.

“Mom?” I keep my voice low to match the daytime darkness. “It’s me.”

I shoot Beth one last stay-right-there look and pad into the room, sidestepping our lost spoons and bowls, and cups. I ease onto the end of the bed, careful not to spill the coffee. The mattress dips, and the springs dig into my butt. I think I see her blink, but the bundle of blankets between us makes it hard to tell for sure.

“Look, I made you some coffee with the beans you like from JPs. Why don’t we sit up?” I say. And then, I watch her closely as she struggles to lift her frail body up against the wall.

“Is the baby crying?” She asks, far from here.

I’ve noticed that when she slips, sometimes time does too. Her sadness clumps years together like wet laundry hanging from one weak clothespin. She’s mistaken cop car sirens for Beth’s wails and news anchor rambles for my dad’s booze filled rants.

“The baby is okay,” I say, and position the cup in her hands.

“Jo, honey, is that you?” She asks.

I move to speak, my mouth halfway open, when I realize she’s not talking to me. She peers around me at the shadow I told to stay still.

“Come here,” She shoves a pillow out of the way and pats the crumpled sheets flat. “What’s that in your hands?”

Beth tiptoes to our mom. Unlike on Trash Hill, where she chases Daniel and David with reckless abandon, here her steps are careful, like she knows that one wrong move will snap the unsteady tether I’ve painstakingly sewn for all of us to stay together. She climbs into the bed, and my mom cocoons her, wrapping a ragged blanket around her shoulders. Despite the heat, goosebumps trail up my mom’s thighs. She is paler than usual. Her self-inflicted scars an angry, puckered pink.

“It’s for you,” Beth places the paper on my mom’s lap, and we all lean in.

Four stick figures, with crayon dotted eyes stare up at us. You can tell by height who’s who. My dad’s stick figure stands tallest; his brown curls a mop of swirls on top of his lopsided head. Next to him, my mom. Bright orange. Their stick arms hold hands. A large blank gap separates them from the two girls on the other side of the page. One is a miniature of the other.

“You’ve always been so magnificent, my girl,” She runs the pad of her thumb down the figure of my father.

There’s a glaze to her eyes that, despite the stuffy heat, chills me to the bone. I set my jaw and pluck the drawing out from her hands. I won’t let her leave us, again.