by L. Soviero
Cousin Maggie moves in with my family while we’re in junior high. The week before, she winked at a boy in class and his head exploded.
Like a watermelon, she whispers, lying next to me in bed. She’s shaking one of the snow globes from my desk. Inside, two tiny skaters hold hands as they tumble toward the ice. Their scarves trailing behind, frozen. Their expressions suspended in anticipation of the disaster that will never take place.
We should be asleep, but there’s new-roomie-excitement keeping us up. I didn’t even try to wink — a bug flew in my eye.
The next morning, while Dad whips up waffles, Cousin Maggie tells me about the first time. I was six. In ballet. I remember bits of her splattering our tutus, our hair.
I lock pinkies with her and lead her to my bedroom (our bedroom). Scan my hangers for a t-shirt I no longer feel special in. Use its scraps to hand sew a make-shift eye patch.
I don’t ever want you to leave, I say as I lay it over her left eye. And a day later, she buys a zebra-print eye patch from Hot Topic. Tells me, I don’t ever want to leave either.
One Saturday, we go to the movies. Tell dad we’re seeing Aladdin but sneak into The Craft instead. In one scene, the clique strolls through the cafeteria, everything about them bouncy — their tits, their smiles, their hair — and I elbow Cousin Maggie’s ribs. I can tell she winks back at me under her eye patch because my ears ring and my vision distorts, the world becoming white noise on a TV.
After the movie, I beg her to never remove the patch again. We pinkie promise on it, kissing them with our candied lips to set it in stone.
But by the time we get to high school, boys are always intrigued by what lies beneath it. Some cocky enough to lift it a bit. Cousin Maggie always noodling out of their fingertips, never losing that polite smile. The type that stands in for the NOs she may one day be able to say.
Then, there’s the night we drink wine coolers with the boy from Spanish class. Decide to go skinny dipping in the creek though it’s cold. The three of us shivering like the reflection of moonlight on the water’s surface. How at one point, he presses against Cousin Maggie, their bodies a sort of anatomical puzzle. How he slides off the patch before there’s a chance to protest. And in seconds, he’s no longer beside us in the water but all over us like a thick mist. How gamy he tastes as I lick him off my lips.
She screams and punches herself and cries and cries. So, I wrap my arms around her and hug away the anger and frustration convulsing her whole body. We wash off all evidence of him. Dress somberly as if performing a sacred ritual.
We never really agree to a plan aloud, but take his belongings with us, tossing them out the car window on the ride home — black Converse in a wheat field, a Red Sox cap in a river, a pair of smiley face boxers in thorned bushes, gym socks in the gas station dumpster, a crucifix on a chain down a storm drain. As we discard his things, I can’t help but feel like we’re discarding him.
But there are always more and more boys. Each day we go to class, we move around them with the same care as unexploded ordnance — boys with constant semi-erections, jocks that encourage us to squeeze their biceps, grungy dudes who call us dimwits and then daydream us into their vision of the perfect girl.
At family dinner one night, Cousin Maggie says, if they only knew what they’re getting themselves into when they try to get with me. Dad smirks and mounds more mashed potatoes on our plates. Tells us we’re getting too thin. Then he winks and when he does, I expect something terrible to happen. I swallow my breath waiting for that terrible thing. Until my body trembles. My vision flurries. The world tips on its side. Like I’m in the snow globe and someone is shaking it. And soon they’ll place it back on a shelf once they decide I’m no longer amusing.
L. Soviero was born and raised in Queens, New York but has made her way around the world, currently laying her hat in Melbourne. She has an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. When she is not writing flash, she works as a Learning Designer. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, longlisted at Wigleaf and spotlighted in Best Small Fictions. Check out more of her work at lsoviero.com.
Emerge Literary Journal 