Colette is face down under a scrub pine with a horizontal crook, like Mother Nature made herself a seat. Megan B is wrapped up in a tarp covered in pine needles in the clearing. Gigi is half-buried in the mud of the culvert. Meghan P is in pieces scattered about. Tameka is in the pond. Jasmin is in a shallow ditch under a sheet of plywood. And No Name Girl, our newest, is scrunched up in a suitcase next to a pile of yard waste.
Seven of us are in the forest off the side of Highway 27—the Sunrise Highway. The highway runs the length of Long Island. East to West. We’ve been placed along its western section, right before the southern fork, in the middle of the pine barrens. There is a lot of commotion on the roadway. But for all the horns and speeders, there isn’t much happening. Just a lot of humanity passing by. Once in a while, we get a wreck. At the end of the month, when the troopers are trying to reach their quotas, there can be a steady stream of traffic stops. Otherwise, it’s just noise and squirrels.
With so little going on, we get to talking. Talk about the past, chitchat to pass the time. We all have our favorite subjects. We’ve heard our stories a thousand times. Except No Name Girl; she hardly says a peep. As if it’s below her to cavort with our kind. She won’t even tell us her name. Gigi suspects she is heavily Christian and thinks herself above all this.
Megan B likes to remark about the weather and name the animals of the forest.
“It’s raining,” Megan B says. “The pond’s frozen. . . . Chester the squirrel can’t find his pine nut stash. Right there, Chester, in that dead stump. Right there, you goof. . . . Hasn’t rained in three weeks. Tameka is completely dry. . . . Crows stopped pecking around Jasmin’s plywood. . . . Got some clouds today. No rain, though.”
Jasmin likes to talk of heaven and hell. Though she never stepped foot in a church. Not even for a wedding.
“What if we’re wrong about hell?” Jasmin says. “What if this is it? Bucktooth might be doing a saintly deed by dumping us here. We don’t know what God wants from us. How long do you think we’ll stay? Maybe the things we think are big sins are really small sins. We’re thrown into a game with no idea what the rules are and expected to win. Maybe stealing a candy bar is worse than murder. Maybe murder gets you into heaven and volunteering at a soup kitchen sends you straight to the fires.”
“Don’t work yourself into a frenzy,” Colette says, but it’s no use.
“How are we supposed to know what we did wrong?” Jasmin asks. “Everyone says different things. According to my stepmom, staining the white rug in our living room was a worse sin than getting into a fistfight at school. If screwing is worse than killing, Bucktooth will be rocketing right through those pearly gates, and we’ll be in eternal agony.”
“God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” says Meghan P, who likes to speak in self-help and AA aphorisms.
“I’m in hell,” No Name Girl says.
“And what did you do to deserve that?” Colette says.
“Nothing.”
Gigi likes to talk about her dad running out on the family when she was five.
“I was seventeen when my father finally called,” Gigi says. “He wanted to meet me for dinner. So I said yes, figuring he’d stand me up. We met at a Greek diner. He was an hour late, and he walked in holding the hand of this cute girl with miles of cleavage squeezed into a halter top and no bra, purple eyeshadow plastered on. I thought she was his girlfriend, but he told me she was my half-sister. Told me we’re the same age. Born the same month even. I’m sure my mom never knew. My half-sister was quiet like No Name Girl. My father introduced her and did the talking for her. He ordered two lamb souvlaki platters for him and her. She just played with her french fries while he ate most of her pita. After the entrée, he asked if I wanted a sundae. I said I’m good, but he ordered it anyway, with extra chocolate fudge. That she ate. Exchanging spoonfuls. I’ve never seen a father and daughter share ice cream like that, swapping scoops and scraping the glass sundae bowl together until it’s nearly licked clean—that was a romantic couple if I ever saw one. Then he hemmed and hawed about how dinner was his treat. I offered to split the bill, but he insisted. He said goodbye and gave me a big hug and went to pay at the counter. The girl didn’t say shit. I had a long drive ahead of me, so I used the bathroom before I headed out to the car. While I was pulling up directions, the manager came out and stood in front of me with a notepad in her hand, scribbling away. I realized she was writing down my license plate number. So I rolled my window down and said, Is there a problem? Turns out, the shithead ditched. He walked right the fuck out with his leftover fries. So I had to go back inside and pay while our waitress stood there with her arms crossed, scowling at me.”
The first time we heard it, we laughed. The second time, we listened absentminded. The third time, we mentioned to Gigi we had heard it before. By the fourth listen, we knew she couldn’t help herself, no more than the wind blowing hot air or cold air, depending the season.
“What was your dad like, No Name Girl?” Meghan P says.
“If she grew up with a dad,” Colette says.
“Bet he wasn’t a talker,” Gigi says.
But No Name Girl keeps her mouth shut.
Bucktooth stops by once a week. He parks on the shoulder of the highway and opens the hood of his white truck as if the engine’s acting up. Then he hops the guardrail and sits on the seat of Colette’s tree and eats a hamburger. If someone pulls over to see if he needs a helping hand, he’ll run out and say he’s all good, just checking his oil and taking a leak.
Since he tossed Jasmin under that plywood, he visits every couple days and holds the plywood up while watching her. We scream and squawk at him like a bunch of seagulls, trying to shoo him away.
“Go, get the hell out of here!” Jasmin says.
“I hope you get pummeled in a hail storm,” Megan B says, “or pecked to death by crows, or catch hemorrhagic fever from a bat shitting in your mouth, pervert.”
“I hex you with sepsis!” Colette says.
“You can always tell an addict,” Meghan P says, “but you can’t tell an addict anything.”
But Bucktooth only laughs, exposing those two rotten teeth his upper lip won’t cover, and gambols to his car, jackal cackling.
“His voice is like Styrofoam scraping together,” Tameka says.
He accelerates into traffic and blends in like he’s a regular commuter.
Colette has a conspiratorial mind. Her paranoia flares up now and then, attempting to find causation when there isn’t any.
Colette says, “I don’t feel well. I gotta find some chalk. I think I’ve been poisoned. If you eat calcium carbonate, it absorbs the toxins in your stomach. I’m so lightheaded. . . . A guy dosed my drink in a club once, and I fell to the ground in the middle of the dance floor and couldn’t move my limbs, but nobody did anything, they just stepped over me like I was a curb. . . . I wish I could wake my ass up . . . maybe I’ve been hypnotized.”
“Hypnotists can only put you into a trance if you’re willing,” Tameka says. “You can’t be hypnotized if you don’t want to.”
“If you hold a chicken down on the ground and draw a line in the dirt, leading away from their beak, they freeze in a hypnotic trance and stay that way.” Megan B says. “It’s real easy. A chicken will stay like that until they tip over and break their gaze, or until you pick them up. I wish chickens lived nearby. The tall grass in the clearing would be perfect for a roost.”
“See, chickens can be mesmerized against their will,” Colette says.
“You got me there,” Tameka says, “but we’re not chickens.”
“Maybe we are like chickens but don’t know it.”
“I got this call from my biological dad,” Gigi says, “when I was a junior in high school. . . .”
In summer, when drivers open their windows, Tameka tries to catch the music they play. Single syllables zip by under a stampede of drums and bass. Hardly enough to piece a song together. Even with the volume cranked up and the drivers belting along with the lyrics, it’s hard for us to catch the rhythm and key.
“I miss singing,” Tameka says. “I’ve never had a memory for lyrics, but I loved going to karaoke at the Irish pub down the block. If I have the words scrolling in front of me, I can remember every line. Plenty of regulars went every Monday like me. It’s strange, we never talked much, but I considered them my best friends. I know that’s sad, but I really felt that way. And I think they did too. We knew each other’s names, even without introductions, because the emcee would call us up. Mary, this older woman with neon red hair, would sing “Strong Enough” by Cher every week, and I would always sing “Criminal” by Fiona Apple because I felt like a criminal working the back pages. Plus I love that song. And after I finished, Mary would always lean over with her vodka tonic and say, I needed that honey, because I’m going through a bad breakup, and I really dislike men right now. She said that to me every week for two years. I think she was only saying it to be nice, to show solidarity. After she sang, I would say it right back, I needed that. And you know what, I really did. We never tired of our songs. It’s funny, there are things you can say over and over until they become gibberish, but not music. If you sing a song enough, it becomes yours. Makes it feel like you wrote it yourself. Anybody wanna sing with me? Who knows a song?”
But as soon as a song drifts to mind, the lyrics evaporate.
Fires come and wipe out this swatch of pine barren. Flames scorch the trees. The heat, stoked by the wind, melts glass bottles into puddles. We’re almost sad, watching what little is left of our bodies burn away. Once there is nothing left to burn, a firefighter finds us. We’re all charred bones by then.
Our charcoal bones are piled into an aluminum box. They shove us in a morgue freezer. They don’t know who is who, despite our efforts to tell them. They label us under a single name, Jane Doe(s). Not quite one, not quite plural, not quite a collective. They eventually put us in a potter’s field where they plant every other unnamed transient found dead and rotting. We are buried below a small granite grave marker with a number on it. 3277.
The newspapers must have written about our burial. Before our mound of soil has settled flat, people come to visit. A dozen or more daily. The pigs rig a camera, triggered by a motion detector, in the bushes near our corner of cemetery. It captures our most frequent guests: goth teenagers, squirrels, deer, gulls. They must be looking for Bucktooth because when he finally stops by to pleasure himself on our marker, trampling fresh sprouts of grass finally emerged from the soil, a crew of plain clothes officers burst from a van parked nearby. He’s arrested for public indecency and blood tested. If they had found us a month earlier, they would have had samples to match his blood to. But it’s all ash now. He’s charged and released. He visits weekly until he stops coming altogether. Maybe he has another dump site. Maybe he had a heart attack and died. Maybe he lost interest.
We’re bored in the cemetery. There’s even less going on in the land of the dead than there was on Sunrise Highway. The voices in the cemetery are all quiet. At least to our ears. But we’re not done talking. With nothing else to do, we give No Name Girl a hard time, prodding, cajoling, accusing her of every sin under high heaven. We have been deprived of new stories, and she contains one we have never heard. Her resolve to quietude is severe.
Colette: “Say something, you stuck up bitch.”
Gigi: “Her father is Bucktooth, and he strangled her after she called him a dick during a family argument. You know, now that I think of it, a girl answered the door when I came to his house for our session, maybe that was her. Maybe he used No Name Girl to lure women in, to make his house seem safe.”
Meghan P: “She’s our dream, our collective unconscious of mystery, to keep us occupied. She’s an opportunity for us to relinquish self-involvement. Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.”
Jasmin: “She is the eternal. If God is a question, and she is a question, she might be God, watching, judging us, mulling over her decision.”
Tameka: “Did you know Bucktooth? You know, before? Is she saying something? Maybe she talks all the time, in a frequency we can’t hear well.”
Megan B: “Like a dog whistle. Or maybe she has a brain disease and can’t speak much. Remember the deer with chronic wasting disease that stumbled about the cemetery for a few weeks before having a seizure and croaking?”
Meghan P: “What a dream!”
We wait and wait until the cemetery is abandoned and left to seed. In a few years’ time, the ocean rises and laps at us. We’ll be underwater soon. There’s nothing we can do. We’re a tiny island waiting to be submerged. We can feel a change. This might be the end of our purgatory.
A mutual exhaustion settles over us. We talk less. Speaking becomes wearisome as the saltwater continues to rise. But with a storm cell on the horizon, knowing this might be one of the last opportunities, No Name Girl speaks.
“I’m not even from here,” No Name Girl says.
It takes her days, one syllable at a time, but she gets it out.
“I ran away from Pennsylvania. Hitchhiked to the beach. I can’t swim. And when you can’t swim, the beach is nothing but cold sand that gets stuck in everything, seagulls pecking at you when you try to eat, and nowhere you can hide for privacy. I found that out.”
The ground swells and the grass and flowers and trees drown.
“I broke into a lifeguard shack, closed for the season, and got some sleep on their cot, using moldy towels as a pillow. When I woke up, it was nighttime and I was wide awake. The shack had been wired for electricity, so at least I had a lightbulb to keep the dark away. The lifeguards had written all over the plywood walls inside with black permanent marker. Things like LIVE WELL, PET DOGS. And MARK HAS A BONER. And JANE LOVES HAIRY BALLS. And FUCK THE POLICE, to which someone scribbled below it, I DISAGREE, STING IS A POMPOUS SCHMUCK, BUT THEIR ALBUMS ARE RAD. Then the cliche, BEN WAS HERE, TINA WAS HERE, MAGDALENA WAS HERE. . . . In the drawer of a desk shoved against the wall, I found a Sharpie but couldn’t decide what to write, so I didn’t. I regret not leaving my mark. Even if it was only, WAS HERE.”
Bubbles erupt from a patch of earth as water breaches a coffin and floods it underground. A whirlpool sucks down, then fills in and settles.
“What did Bucktooth do to you?” Tameka asks.
“Nothing,” No Name Girl says. “I fell asleep on the shoulder of the highway while hitching home and woke up here. I guess a car hit me.”
A pine tree remains standing for a time after its needles fall out but topples in the loose soil.
“Then why was your body in a suitcase?” Megan B says.
“Were you hit near our guardrail?” Tameka says. “Was it a white truck? Like Bucktooth’s? We would have seen it. Right?”
No Name Girl shrugs.
Barnacles latch to our grave marker until our number is covered.
“What I think happened,” Gigi says. “Bucktooth clips her with his truck, out of view, a little ways down the road, scoops her into the suitcase, and plops her here to keep from drawing attention.”
“That seems like him,” Tameka says. “Are we close?”
No Name Girl never speaks again.
“There’s so much to know, we know nothing,” Colette says.
The standing water turns brown as sewage seeps into the tidal plain.
“Is the mystery over?” Jasmin says. “I suppose it is. Yet, I still yearn for God. Where can we look for the spirit now?”
A dying flounder flops about, swimming for clean water to suck into its gills, goes limp, floats to the surface, rots in the sun.
“Give it a rest,” Tameka says to Jasmin.
Mosquitoes birth from wriggling larvae and swarm the cemetery.
“We might find happiness in helping others,” Meghan P says.
Layers of silt cover our grave marker.
“All we’re able to do is talk, and that’s gotten us nowhere,” Colette says.
The days shift fast.
“It’s easier together,” Megan B says.
The seasons circle like a freezer opened and closed and opened on a hot, humid day.
“That’s why my dad brought the girl along,” Gigi says. “Imagine going through things alone. Even silent company is a relief.”
Golden tunnels of light do not appear.
“Sometimes I wish I were alone,” Colette says. “Not always.”
We do not wake up as squirrels or birds or slugs. It’s hard to say how long we’ve been here. We don’t mind staying longer, but we wouldn’t mind a change. The water dissolves us. The shift is so slow we hardly notice. Thousands of suns spin overhead as we fade. So much time has passed already, it’s hard not to think ahead to eternity. Will the sun shine after we are gone? Yes, but not forever.
***
Illustrations by summertime flag
