Thomas and I are looking at the tossed-out goods on the sidewalk. It’s mostly old lady things. An ivory vanity, a big oval mirror. He points at a framed poster, upright in the seat of an armchair.
He says, This?!
It’s a unicorn prancing under a rainbow, bordered in a thick creamy white. The unicorn looks mindless. It’s trapped in its frame.
What do you think? I say.
Thomas mutters, No way.
We both know how our mom feels about us bringing things home, things we find. Strange things, she calls them. Once, I showed her this quarter I’d picked up at school. I found it in the lunchroom. I said, Look! And, gasping hard, she slapped it from my hand.
It pinged brightly down the sidewalk.
Our mom was always talking about the ghosts in our world—so many different kinds. Some attached themselves to anything lost. That’s why we had to be careful. Did we want to bring home bad things? That would follow us forever?
Was that what we wanted?
No, we told her. We would keep them away.
For as long as I could remember, I’d been scared of ghosts—in dolls, in forests, mountains, and rivers, in loose fingernail clippings and in the dark clots of hair in our drains—in so many things. Like her.
But a coin?
I asked Thomas, You think a coin can be haunted?
He said, You think anything can?
It’s almost sundown.
Thomas is agitated, checking the sky for signs.
All day, he’s been pushing me in our shopping cart, to the park and back, around and around our streets. I taped brown paper bags to it for armor and put in a bath mat for sitting. I asked Thomas to draw hot rod flames on the sides, but he said no. He has his limits.
Now, it’s time to go home.
It’s Sunday. Our mom’s in her room. She’s resting.
But we both know how she gets after dark.
Hold on, I say.
I hop out of the cart and circle the poster. I’m sizing it up. I have the authority of a man in a hard hat and a bright orange vest. I nod slowly. Yeah, I say. It’ll fit.
I doubt it, he says.
It might.
I sneak a look at my brother, checking him for signs.
So do you want it or not?
I tell him, I’m thinking.
Lately, our mom has been phoning her friends at night. I can hear it through the walls. It sounds tinny. It curls through the air vents like gas. It sounds like Taiwanese and laughing. But she only talks like that with people back home.
I had to know.
That night I hopped out of bed, I heard Thomas say, Don’t. I took my hand off the doorknob.
I looked back at him.
You’ll regret it, he said.
It might be Dad.
It’s not.
The moonlight filled the blinds behind him. He was sitting up in bed, a dark form against a silver screen.
You’ll be sad, he said. I promise.
I bit my lip.
Back in bed, I could still hear her, faintly, laughing. I thought it might be my imagination. Then I got a little scared.
I said, Thomas?
He turned his body to the wall.
It’ll be dark soon.
The streetlamps flicker on to glow a cupped dusty light. The last of the sky keeps purpling.
Thomas is saying, Why’re you messing with her?
How am I messing with her?
You know.
I say, I’m not!
Look. He uses his arms to measure the poster. Then he holds that length against our cart. It’s too big, he says, although it’s obviously not. You see? He shrugs. It won’t fit.
Can we try? I say.
Come on.
Thomas, please, I say.
He looks to the big crossroads, Valley Boulevard, so many blocks down—where tiny cars are cutting back and forth both ways. He says, She’s probably waking up soon.
Thomas, please! I say.
He shakes his head.
What if it’s OK? I say. What if she likes it?
What do you think will happen?
Then we can talk about it! I say.
I still wanted our mom to take care of us. I wanted her to talk to us and hug us, to tell us that we were good boys, handsome and nice. Why didn’t he want that too?
I say, Just tell me what to do then!
OK. First? he says. Stop crying.
I drop my head. The grass is orange but graying. Where I look, it’s turning to ash.
You and me, he says. We’re different people. You have to figure something out on your own.
I say, I can’t!
He stares. You sound like her.
I watch him walk to the corner at Valley and cross, before the light changes red and traffic floods back in, like he walked into a faraway river.
For a while, I thought he might come back.
Forget him, I think. Forget that stupid poster.
I’m pushing the shopping cart on the sidewalk, toward the crossroads at Valley. On the corner, I could do something big. It’s bright there, so many cars zooming both ways.
It’s slower on the grassy patches so I drop the cart into the street with a bang. A car is honking. I look back into its headlights, blinded. It swerves by me, so big that I can feel its wind. It honks again after it passes.
More cars keep honking and passing. Nobody stops.
I should cry more, I think. Then somebody would help—a policeman or a fireman. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Help.
I bet Thomas is probably home by now. I bet he’s begging our mom to stop doing something weird. The police are probably there too. They’re laughing.
Why? they ask Thomas. Where’s the crime?
I run.
It’s not like sitting in the cart after shopping at Zody’s or 99 Ranch, when our mom says, Ready? And I say no, I will always say no, and she shouts, Go! And l hold onto the bars too tightly as she runs through the parking lot and laughs.
It’s not like that when I’m running.
I’m getting closer to the corner. The stoplight changes color, and, in the whooshing of cars like blood and bad feelings, I hear her saying, Don’t you feel free?
But how could I? Unless I’m the one who’s running, pushing faster until I build up the speed to shove hard and let go.
Here comes the red.
I hold tight.
Steve Chang is from the San Gabriel Valley, California. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, Hobart, J Journal, The Florida Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Find him at stevehasawebsite.com or @stevexisxok
Photo by Karolina Grabowska