Page 67 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Their mouths are so close. Crane can see the vein at Stagger’s temple shift and slither, disappearing into the brain, and one day maybe that movement will destroy the part of the gray matter that allows for what little speech Stagger can manage, but today is not that day.
Crane, with bloody hands, signs,please?Stagger nods.
The kiss is clumsy, and cold, but still a kiss.
It’ll be over soon.
Twenty-Eight
Crane thinks about the kiss constantly. Constantly. When he stitches up the hole and cleans up worm guts. When Stagger washes him every few days. When Stagger sleeps on the floor next to the bed and Crane lets his hand dangle down, fingertips brushing the blanket he’s taken.
No matter how much he thinks about it, there is never a second. He wonders if Stagger thinks about it as often as he does but does not ask.
The second wave of winter comes in hard over the mountains, as if the cold season hasn’t already arrived hard enough. The channel 10 forecaster stands in front of a green screen, tracing the path of a snowstorm headed straight for Wash County, while a maintenance man lays bag after bag of salt on the sidewalks. The heating’s shit out and Crane is pretty sure he can see his breath in the kitchen. He wears gloves to sleep, and sometimes Levi turns the oven on high and leaves it cracked. Utilities are included in rent, he says. If management doesn’t want to pay the gas bill—and if they want the local schools to stop reporting unfit conditions to the appropriate government agencies—then they can fix the fucking heat.
Someone calls into the news station to claim this is proof that global warming is a hoax. Someone else calls in to insist that liberals control the weather. A third says no, it’s the space lasers causing this, not carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide is good actually. The newscaster is baffled. Who said anything about carbon dioxide? Levi turns off the TV.
Thirty-seven marks on the wall between the door and the gun safe. The next time she visits, Tammy places her hand on his belly, checking for the millionth time that the baby won’t come out breech.
There’s three more weeks until term, she says, but it never hurts to keep an eye on things.
Crane’s water breaks at thirty-seven and a half.
Surprise.
It happens while snow comes down heavy, while Crane isnotwriting his suicide note. That’s the truth; that is technically not what he is doing. Levi is making lunch (beans to go with the cornbread Tammydropped off), Stagger is inspecting an instructional manual to make sure he still remembers how to read with what’s left of his brain, and Crane has the notebook he’d practiced drawing dragons in, giving himself a task that isn’t thinking too hard about how much he hurts.
He’s been hurting bad for a while. That morning, he’d woken up early to piss—and also because cramps were bad enough to shake him into consciousness—and found a wretched mess of blood and mucus in his boxers. It was so bad that the underwear wasn’t worth saving. Just went directly into the trash. But those fucking cramps haven’t let up. More than once he’s struggled off the couch to double-check the marks by the door, just to make sure they don’t say forty. They don’t.
Stagger keeps looking at him. Crane keeps signingokay.Gotta work through it is all.
What Crane is doing instead of writing a note is sketching. It’s not turning out great, and his memory of the subject is fuzzy. Blame pregnancy brain, and the passage of time. It’s supposed to be the main character of a comic he saw in high school, a flimsy wide-eyed twink with a soft face, but proportions are the devil and he turns the page to try again. That said, it does feel like a suicide note. What are suicide notes except a thesis statement about everything that went to shit? Every now and then they include a little memory, a tiny story, just to drive the point home.
Crane’s story isn’t even a good one.
In high school, the art class Sophie shared with Aspen was tucked away on the top floor, hidden by a set of heavy double doors. Unlike the rest of the school, which contained gleaming tile and shiny lockers, the art classroom had concrete floors and unfinished walls, paint spills and massive windows that turned the place into a sauna during the month before summer break. The advanced art kids took over one corner, scrambling to finish their portfolios, only rarely coming overto ask for knives or permission to use the kiln. The kids who were only there for an easy A, and Sophie, were confined to a collection of tables in the center of the room as they worked on their final project.
The final was a “future self-portrait.”Select one of the following mediums (pencil, ink, acrylic, oil, watercolor, pastel) and create an image of who you hope you will be at the age of 25. Extra credit (10 points)—include a 200-word essay explaining how your use of value, perspective, color, and /or style reflects your prediction.Sophie was excited. Extra credit meant a chance to show off just how good she was at writing essays. Two hundred words was insulting, actually. She could do better with a thousand.
Plus, the drawing was, on a mechanical level, pretty good for a fourteen-year-old. It was also the most stereotypical, cookie-cutter shit anyone in that art room had ever made. During a check of the initial sketch, the teacher frowned.
“Is this you?” she asked.
Sophie frowned back. “Yeah. See—that’s my hair, and that’s my mole.” She pointed to the drawing’s hand. “There.”
“That’s not…” A pause while the art teacher tried to figure out the words. “I mean, is ityou? It’s you, but when I look at this drawing, what am I looking at?”
Sophie squirmed, studying the sketch in front of her. What else was there to add? She was going to grow up, go to college, and get a job, obviously. Any specifics of a future life like that dissolve into static, but don’t they for everybody? She’s not a psychic. And it wasn’t as if she was going to do a whole project on what shereallywanted. If she drew a picture of herself with no skin on her face, she’d be sent to the guidance counselor’s office expeditiously. It’s just—she’d drawn what the rubric had asked for, right? Her at twenty-five, if she managed to avoid setting herself alight for that long.
“I don’t get it,” Sophie finally admitted, pretending she didn’t want to cry.
The art teacher was about to try again, but one of the other students started to paint the table out of boredom, and she had to go. So Sophie went back to her own table and stared at her drawing helplessly.
Aspen was sitting across from her, ignoring the project in favor of a comic book they’d positioned themselves against a wall to read. They’d placed a sticky note over what was clearly a big bold18+.
“You’re going to get an F if you don’t start soon,” Sophie informed them.
“I already have an F,” Aspen said. “Are you crying?”
