Grasshoppers

by Andi Boyd

My best friend and I used to tear the legs off grasshoppers. Worse, we also sometimes popped their bright bulbous eyes. That summer one of our parents had gone to Shopko and bought us a bright, neon kiddie pool to share. This was where we held our swimming lessons for the ladybugs not wise enough to hide. We were not very good instructors. Mostly, we drowned them in droves. When we flung our collection of insects from the side of the plywood that nested in the crevice of a dead tree—our tree house—into the pool below, we called it diving school. Though diving was not something either of us was brave enough to do yet. Our swimming days at Crossroads Health Club were spent mostly in the hot tub, where we begged the supervising adult to spin us around like we were cooked vegetables in a hot stew. I was a carrot. My best friend, potato.

But, for all the bugs who did not survive our aggressive pool training, there were hundreds more in the yard the next day. For all our swirling boils, we came out red, puffy, sweaty, but fully alive. If not more so.

This was also when we found the gravestone in my side yard. It had been there the whole time, overlooked by us when we were sleuthing the neighborhood from a lilac bush or cultivating acres of carpet for the vinyl animals that lived in my toy barn. It had been there, imperceptible to us, leaning ever more in the wet soil as a tangle of weeds ached at its corners because my dad avoided it when he mowed.

Then, for no apparent reason, it became the only thing we could see. We plunged our hands into the dirt beneath its surface, pulling up palmful by palmful. We traced our fingertips in the hollows of the letters etched into the stone. We found a bracelet—thin brass—that probably came from those little machines at the front of the grocery store. It had one single charm in the shape of an ‘A’ hanging from it perilously. Which so happened to be the starting letter of both of our names. Moreover, it was the starting letter of the name on the gravestone. We did the kind of research that was available to us, which wasn’t very much. We filled in the lack of resources with our imaginations. I don’t remember the life we created for the dead person that we assumed was buried there, but I do remember never believing the story our parents told us. They said it was the burial location of the previous owner’s dog. But, we never found the bones. And boy, did we look for them.

We lived in that uncomfortable threshold of all childhood: knowing about things but not knowing them. We knew the sun would explode one day. We knew people did not live forever. We knew the mountain at the edge of our town was once a volcano. We knew to make noises in the woods to keep the bears away. We knew how our ankles tore if we did not complete dead man’s drop the right way. Nevertheless, we understood nothing.

There was a sacred hour between my arrival home from school and my parents’ arrival home from work. Mostly, this hour was spent at the dining room table completing homework or jabbing my unenthusiastic fingers at the piano keys to complete my practice hours. However, on certain afternoons I could not resist the call towards my new favorite ritual. I shoved the coffee table deep into the wedge of the couch. I twirled the dust that caught the sunlight and sparkled. I slipped my mother’s vinyl soundtrack of The Sting from its sleeve and listened to the record player crackle and spit as it began to play my favorite song. Then, I slipped my fingers through the crocheted holes of the family afghan and spread my arms wide to turn them into wings.

And I entered into the body of a dying bird.

I swooped, I dove, I flapped wildly, I rose and rose and dramatically swiveled downward until, by the end of the song, I was completely still and curled on the carpet. I held my breath until I couldn’t anymore.

This exaggerated danse macabre had become the only way to untie the knot in my stomach that had been fastened there since seeing a performance at my school of Peter and the Wolf. Because in that play, the absolutely unthinkable had happened: something died. Something was ungraciously eaten—I remember the belly puffing in the wolf costume and the way the actor blew feathers from his mouth—and was not returned. This broke my understanding of how stories go, of how fairness goes. I pretended to die these afternoons, in that lonely living room, to acknowledge it.

Once, my best friend and I found a real bird in the back alley behind her house. Its wing was broken, its body mangled. It was a sparrow. My best friend ran inside and called her parents to ask what to do about it. When she returned to me waiting by its heaving almost corpse in the alley gravel, she told me the worst answer possible. We had to kill it to end its suffering. Suddenly, we were been thrust into a place where we had to choose which of us was stronger, braver, more courageous. Kinder, also. It was her. She picked up a rock and held it high above her head, tears already forming ravines in her cheeks. She dropped the rock on the bird. But, the rock had been too small. The bird was only more injured, not dead. There was a look then, in her eyes, that I could not decipher. She screamed. She picked up a heavier rock. She killed the sparrow.

I can recall the scent of it with ease.

And another: putrid tang, sweet musk, metallic blood, bullet smoke. The first time I watched my father field dress a doe he had killed while hunting in the nearby mountains. We came upon it—having chased my father’s voice up the side of the mountain to find him—when the deer had already been flayed open. The scent that poured from that fresh carcass awoke something untouched, immature, unbounded inside me. I was not old enough or wise enough to resist it. It undressed my skin to reveal the animal of me: the teeth, the muscle, the growl, the predator.

I did not weep for the doe’s life. I did not turn away from the body spread open before me. Instead, insatiable, I begged my father to cut, to reveal, to hold the bleeding heart in his palm for me to inspect. To search the womb. To pull out the deer pellets. To watch the pink stringy morsels of sinew slip away beneath his bowie knife blade. I watched myself in its unclosed black eye and marveled at the beast of myself. I felt the wildness of my blood, the hair on ends, the fangs. I did not shudder then at the electricity in the veins, though I remember my father reacting to it, pulling me from the animal as he said that’s enough, fearful maybe at the discovery of how much was still feral inside me.

But there was a plainer violence than all of this, waiting.

My Mamaw had given me a teddy bear when we went to stay with her in Mississippi while she was sick. He was small—that size that could fit into an overly large mug or inside of a balloon that was often given in a gift basket. Which is how he had been given to my Mamaw while she was in the hospital. More important than his size, though, was his color: a bright, electric blue. I named him Bluebear.

The earliest weeks of Bluebear’s life were the kind of weeks that any stuffed animal might wish for. He slept with me every night. He crept with me down the hospital hallways to the candy machine to sneak my Mamaw yet another Baby Ruth candy bar she wasn’t supposed to have. He went everywhere that I went on the family property, stuffed conveniently inside a shirt or a very large pocket. The benefit of his size. I suspect that I even found a way to sneak him into the gospel concert I went to with my uncles, dad, and cousins. The point is, he got to see at least a little bit of the world before I ruined him.

I lived in that uncomfortable threshold of all childhood: knowing about things but not knowing them. I knew the sun would explode one day. I knew people did not live forever, and grandparents were usually the first to go. I knew the mountain at the edge of our town was once a volcano. And how to be loud enough for bears. But I did not know that my Mamaw would be the first grandparent of anyone’s grandparents to pass away.

I cried daily into Bluebear’s slowly matting fur, and I refused to let my mother wash off the stink of my grief. I wanted to be reminded of it. To see it in Bluebear’s sagging limbs, to smell it on his belly. To have at least one object in the world represent that which was the most unfair: my Mamaw was gone. I did not know, before, that it would feel nothing like the insects or the wolf-eaten birds or the deer. That it would be gigantic, and it would start to eat all of the joy inside me and make surprising enemies: the scent of carnations, other kids who still had their grandparents, people who said she was in a better place now (what could be better than with me?).

Heaven, apparently. This is what everyone kept telling me. I read the same Bible verse over and over—about having hope, about the dead simply falling asleep in God. But, the tenderness of death in the abstract was not quite the experience of it in the concrete world. It was instead: that awful solidity of her body at the wake, or how I begged the funeral director to place a glow worm in her casket because I myself was afraid of the dark and thought she might be also. It was the desperation with which I asked to be pall bearer for her, and pushed my tiny body, almost dangling off the coffin like an ornament, as we carried her to the cemetery. But most of all, it was that terrible hole that opened in the family plot. A hole they told me I would have to put someone I loved inside of. A hole that gaped like a monster’s mouth that they planned to feed with my Mamaw. But worse than the hole—my god—was when it was filled.

My best friend and I used to tear the legs of grasshoppers. We didn’t know it then, how we were building a fortress through this violent play. How we would hang onto the phone with each other later in our lives, when I called her to tell her my uncle was killed by a drunk driver. When she called to tell me her mother’s cancer was back. When her father sent me a wooden box—a replica of the one he had made me in childhood that had been taken along with everything else by a hurricane. When my heart failed. When she told me she could not sing anymore. When her mother’s cancer came back again. When one of my close friends took her own life. When her mother could not defeat the cancer. When she had to leave her life in Chicago. When her father could not defeat his cancer, either.

Because we had also been also deer watchers. We had also been vicious swimming instructors. We were bird killers. We tore the legs off living creatures. We did this in the open. Without shame. Without gentleness. Without consideration of altering the fabric of something else’s existence. We were learning a lesson that we would need, but not yet. We were seers into our own future lives, doomsdayers preparing for our forthcoming disasters. Growing older would take so much that we loved with it, but we did not know it yet. Maybe we were just practicing at being human. But it was more than that. We were also mimicking, studying, pretending to be gods. We were teaching ourselves how to forgive them for taking the hearts and appendages, eventually, from everything that is alive.

 

Andi Boyd is a writer and educator living in Houston, Texas. She holds an MFA from Texas State University. She has published prose and poetry in Black Warrior Review, Pembroke, Gulf Coast, Narrative, among other journals.