Bulletproof Girl by Quinn Dalton

Author:Quinn Dalton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lennie Remembers the Angels

Lately, she’s going back to the two tall sisters in their white choir robes standing next to the box she put her mother in, looking at her, not like somebody you pass on the street, but staring into her, eyes marching right inside her like she’s just a house with the doors flung wide open. The two of them like any other woman in her church, wide-shouldered and big-busted, black hair and honey-brown skin shining, the way she’d look someday, she thought then. The women stood there while Reverend Earl was preaching by the grave, robe hems lifting in the hot air, moving like someone sighing, only no one heard them and no one saw them. And it wasn’t no dream. It was what happened, Lennie holding the paper bag one of the women had handed her, the bag gone soft and furry with the sweat of her hand, a bag full of cash, which she used to pay for the box and then the hole in the clay and some flowers, too, even though her uncle, her mother’s own brother, said her mother didn’t deserve flowers. A whore like her.

Storm coming up now, air heavy on her forehead. She rolls over, pulls a pillow to her chest out of habit so she won’t feel the flatness, the breasts gone and now just bone and ribbed, scarred skin. She rocks and cradles the pillow and tries to remember what the women were telling her without moving their red lips, that everything was going to be fine, she had her whole life ahead of her, the past didn’t matter. This was what she knew she’d heard that day, and she’d believed it. She was sixteen, small for her age, small like a child, and men loved that about her, the way they could put their hands around her waist and touch their thumbs and middle fingers without squeezing. Only they did squeeze.

The first crack lights up the room, everything bone white and then black, even though it’s only late afternoon. Another thump like it’s in her own walls, and she’s on her feet, down the short hall, past the row of Cedric’s school pictures, past the State Farm calendar, finding the ashtray and cigarettes on the coffee table in the front room. The rain starts, fat, slapping drops. Another thump and she screams. “Gimme that fucking lighter,” she commands the room, and then she sees its metal tip glinting next to the stove; she had used it earlier to light the gas, she remembers now. She lights her cigarette on the third try and stands by the kitchen window, shaking and watching the storm mix up the trees.

Another thump and she pounds the counter to keep her fear and her rage at the fear, after all this time, in the bottom of her throat where it belongs. Then she sees what’s making the sound, not really the storm but a little man coming out of the apartment next

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