Matt Jones received his MFA from the University of Alabama. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Southern Review, Tahoe Quarterly Magazine, Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019, and various other publications.
You know how some people look like their dogs? Or how some people begin to look like their dogs the more time they spend together? Well, AJ Maple looked like his dog which wasn’t a dog at all. He raised minks. He had six of them, all the same slick brown coat and beady black eyes. It offended me, how he kept them harnessed and leashed like they were little dachshunds. And he looked like them. His eyes were too small for his head, which was a physical sign of serial killers according to a TED talk I had watched online.
I had also watched AJ’s videos online. He started posting them to Facebook back in the fall. He invented little contraptions and gadgets designed to kill rats and mice and sometimes squirrels and rabbits, what he called “pests.” At the end of each video, he pointed to the bottom of the screen where a link to his website flashed: Slick Six Pest Control Services.
He was wearing the shirt now: black fabric with blocky white text printed across the chest. Even his body was thin and wiry, his nose twitchy, but he carried himself like someone much larger. He held his shoulders back, chin up. I had confessed to Marsha over Christmas break that I thought AJ was probably a serial killer in the making. I showed her his videos, his YouTube channel where he shocked rats and shot them and drowned them in buckets.
“That’s how they start out,” I assured her. “They kill animals. They go from small to big. He’s at the small stage now, but I’ll bet it’s not long before he moves on to something else, to something bigger.”
Marsha clicked the link to his website and squinted at the photo on the homepage: AJ holding all six brown minks in his arms as if they were his children.
“I’m not sure your theory holds up, because on the one hand, yes, he does kill mice and stuff. But on the other hand, he loves his ferrets.”
“Minks,” I corrected her. “They’re minks.”
“Fine,” Marsha replied. “Minks. He loves his minks.”
Which I suppose he did, but I didn’t. I didn’t like their tiny black eyes, how he balled up the end of every leash in one hand while the six of them pulled him along through the bed and breakfast’s lobby. This was just past six a.m. It was summertime in Albion, the day of the annual Watermelon Festival, already close to ninety degrees before the sun had even risen. I was standing behind the lobby desk when I said, “You can’t bring those things inside.”
AJ chewed his bottom lip.
“I’d like to have a word with the proprietor and see where he needs me to set up.”
The bed and breakfast was a two-story farmhouse that my parents had renovated with some settlement money that my dad got after an accident at the CalTex Egg Factory just outside of town. Behind the main building was forty acres of farmland that they had started planting just two years ago. Beans. Beets. Cauliflower. Carrots. Watermelon, of course.
“I’m going to need you to get those rats out of here. We can’t have customers waking up thinking our place is infested. It’s bad for business.”
As the words left my mouth, all of the minks stood up on their hind legs as if they had heard my insult. AJ stiffened up, too. They were all kind of like one entity then, one grotesque being. What I hated most about AJ, about someone like him, is that he thought he had achieved something great or interesting. He acted like Dr. Bill Nye in each one of his videos. He was so serious. As if anyone really cared! He had a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty views on his YouTube channel, and half of those were from me anyway.
“If he’s so gross, then why do you always watch his stuff?” Marsha had asked me while we decorated the lobby for the holidays. While everything was still normal. While we were still friends. “You act obsessed.”
I huffed. “I’m the only one keeping an eye on him. Just wait until a girl goes missing. Just wait. Everyone will be totally stumped but I’ll have the evidence.”
“How do you even know he would kill girls?” Marsha asked, disinterested, already having moved on to scanning Colton Waite’s Instagram, as was her custom.
Now, AJ looked at me with those beady murderous eyes. All of them did, like little furry cousins. He looked like he was about to say something, but my dad came in through the back door.
“Oh good, you’re here. AJ, right?”
“Yessir,” AJ said, as if the two words were one. They shook hands.
“Why don’t you follow me around out back and I’ll show you where the problem is. Clara,” and my dad looked over his shoulder at me, “do me a favor and get off the internet for just a minute and grab AJ here a cup of coffee. Would you like a cup of coffee, AJ?”
AJ nodded and smiled. “That would be great.”
Then, as if he had just noticed them for the first time, my dad glanced down at the minks who were all swarming the mud-caked soles of his rubber boots. “Well, goddamn. Look at these little fellas.” He knelt down and tried to stroke one across the back. It sniffed at his fingertips and went dancing in a wild circle.
“Rita probably smells something she likes on you,” AJ said, kneeling down to pet the excited mink atop its small head. “That’s how she gets.”
I almost audibly gagged. “They have names?”
“They sure do,” AJ said, turning his attention to me.
“Rita?” I groaned. “What? Like Rita Arnold?”
Rita Arnold was two years older than me. She had graduated the same year AJ did. She had been pronounced prom queen her senior year and ridden at the front of the parade on the Watermelon Chariot.
AJ narrowed his eyes. “No, not like Rita Arnold.” But he offered no further explanation.
“Please,” my dad said. “Get the coffee will you, Clara? You’ll have to excuse my daughter, AJ. She’s at that stage.”
The way he said it, he sounded tired. I didn’t know if he meant that I was at that seventeen-year-old girl stage or something else.
As they headed for the back door, the minks went scampering across the hardwoods. I stepped out from behind the lobby desk and AJ’s eyes darted to my stomach. It stuck out a little bit at that point. I figured that by the end of the summer I’d be showing enough for the school to say that I had to finish my senior year at home.
I narrowed my eyes at AJ and said, “What?” Like I was daring him to say something.
But he just kept moving. I heard my dad talking about entrepreneurship, about the courage of owning a small business. It made me want to vomit. Then again, a lot of stuff had over the last few months. The smell of eggs, of bacon, of sweat. The rumors Marsha had started about me. Were some of them true? Yes. Was the biggest one true? Sure, but it still hurt. Just like my feet. My back. Sometimes even my teeth. I’d been thinking a lot about cause and effect lately. Had I never started watching AJ’s videos and going to his website on the lobby computer, then my dad would probably never have learned about Slick Six Pest Control Services. Had rats never started in on the melons behind the chicken coop, then my dad would have never had a need to call anyone in the first place. Not everything was my fault, though. Not everything was in my control. What if I had locked the door? What if I had simply rejected him? Then where would I be?
I walked to the dining room where we kept a carafe of coffee for the guests. The only person in there that morning was an old man from Lexington, Kentucky. He picked over a piece of dry toast while reading the newspaper. There was also a family of four that had rented out two of the upstairs bedrooms. I poured two mugs, one for my dad and one for AJ. Then I spit in one, but by the time I got to the back porch, I’d forgotten which.
. . .
Think of everything you might normally do with a watermelon. If you are normal, if you hail from a normal place that is not Albion, Texas, then the list is short. Perhaps you slice away the rind and then consume the pink flesh. Maybe you cut it in half and scoop out the insides with a spoon. Or it could be that you prefer your watermelon served to you in triangle-shaped slices. There are many ways to consume watermelons just as there are many varieties of watermelon: Golden Midget, Orangelo, Densuke, Moon and Stars, but the variety most commonly grown and consumed in Albion was the Carolina Cross.
But that was the thing. People in Albion didn’t just eat watermelon. Come time for the summer Watermelon Festival, the watermelon was close to God in our town. People praised it and danced around it. My mother liked to jam the mouth of a bottle of Tito’s vodka underneath the rind and let the whole bottle drain into the flesh over a period of days so that when you ate a slice you felt your legs turn to jelly.
The agricultural club at the high school grew their own special crop of Fancy Creams, so-named because of their white creamy rinds that allowed them to be easily painted and drawn upon. Those were used in home-ec class as infants that girl and boy partners had to carry around over the course of the semester, girl and boy because the school insisted upon that particular pairing. The Fancy Creams weighed no more than twelve pounds on the high end, and during the first day of the Watermelon Festival, the town held a little graduation ceremony for each one of the fruits that had survived the semester.
The Watermelon Festival was, in a word, annoying. My parents’ purchase and renovation of the bed and breakfast made the annoyance inescapable. Guests traipsed around in shirts covered with graphics of smiling melons swinging from thick green vines. One of the only bearable parts about the festival in the past had been that Marsha and I used it as an opportunity to get drunk on watermelon, to blow up watermelon with firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July, to practice kissing on a prize-winning Carolina Cross that weighed in at one hundred and fifty pounds.
“Oh Colton,” Marsha used to moan, her hands stroking the bare green rind that made a rubbery sound against her wet palm, “Kiss me, Colton. Kiss me!” She straddled it and pushed her lips to its outsides while I laughed. Then the person who had grown the exceptionally large melon came out yelling about not sullying his crop.
But that was all gone now.
I had no Marsha.
I had no watermelon.
Well, I did and didn’t. Maybe it was kind of a mistake, what had happened between Colton and I, or rather, what came after. I hadn’t told him anything and I wasn’t going to. In fact, I didn’t intend on telling anyone. I thought that maybe when I started to show a little more obviously in a couple months, I’d just claim immaculate conception. After all, almost everyone in Albion went to church. They all believed in it to an extent. So why not me? Chosen by the Watermelon God, filled with his seed…
“Excuse me.”
I glanced up from the computer screen behind the lobby desk to see a girl my age standing in front of me. She was part of the family of four staying upstairs. She had a hand on her hip and a look of condescension on her face that I wanted to slap off. The tips of her hair were dyed pink. She wore a black shirt with a choker necklace made of metal balls fastened tight around her neck.
“We’re out of towels up in room four.”
“All right,” I told her. “I’ll get some up there.”
I turned my attention back to the screen. I had one of AJ Maple’s videos paused. In it, he was demonstrating how to catch and kill mice by filling a five-gallon bucket with water and stringing a greased up tightrope across the opening with cheese at the center of the wire. “This way,” he’d been saying, “when the mouse makes a run for the cheese, they slip off into the water and drown. Now let’s see how it works.”
“I need to shower now,” the girl insisted. “There’s barely any air conditioning in this place.”
I gritted my teeth and smiled. She was one of these girls from Austin who’d probably been dragged down here by her parents. She wore thick makeup and dark eyeliner. I imagined she thought of me as just a poor country bumpkin.
“Let me see about getting the thermostat turned up for you, and I’ll be up with some fresh towels right away.”
The girl let out a long sigh and leaned up against the counter. She had a mouth full of metal. “So, what is there even to do around here? I mean, besides eat watermelon.”
Her presence probably bothered me more than it should have. After all, I was halfway through one of AJ’s videos and trying to finish it. I didn’t know why I was watching. I didn’t need to see the end result. He had already explained what would happen: This way, when the mouse makes a run for the cheese, it slips off and drowns. Even so, watching felt like a compulsion. I had even created a different YouTube account so I could start leaving comments underneath each video:
Ratfucker!
This is psychopathic! I’m turning you into PETA!
I’ll bet this little shite gets off on this stuff. Shite so I sounded like I was perhaps from Scotland or England or a place where people said shite instead of shit.
AJ Maple seemed like a good target for my anger. I wondered if he felt the same way about “pests,” if for each one he drowned or shot or whatevered, he was really working through some psychological trauma or some unfulfilled desire. If he was on the path of a serial killer, which I assumed he still was, then he most likely had issues with his mother.
“Hey,” the girl snapped. “Are you high or something?”
I rolled my eyes. “I wish.”
Then came AJ striding through the back door. His boots were covered in mud that left imprints across the rug.
“You can’t be tracking through here with that mess,” I said, trying to channel the voice and passion of the commenter who had called him Ratfucker.
He paused and turned to me.
“I’ve got to get some equipment out of my truck. I asked your daddy if I could film and put it up on the website and he said I sure can.”
Instinctively, I clicked out of his website. “Film? Film what?”
“Yeah,” the girl with the pink hair said. “Film what?”
“The cull,” AJ said without an ounce of expression in those beady little eyes of his.
“The cull,” the girl repeated, sounding mildly interested. She twirled one of her pink-tipped strands around her finger. “What’s a cull?”
AJ’s nose twitched.
“Your daddy said there’s a rat problem out behind the chicken coop in the compost patch. He says they’ve been after the crop, so I’m gonna sick the girls on them.”
“The girls?” I scoffed. “They’re really all girls.”
“They’re smarter,” AJ offered matter-of-factly. “They’ve got that killer maternal instinct in them.”
“Hold up,” the girl said. “What exactly are we talking about here?”
“Nothing,” I told her.
“Well, I want to come and see for myself. I’ve been bored out of my mind.” She walked over to AJ and said, “I’m Kelsey.”
AJ licked his lips and stuck out his hand. “I’m AJ Maple, founder and owner of Slick Six Pest Control Services.”
The girl named Kelsey giggled. “Sounds cool.”
I shook my head as she followed him out of the door. I supposed that if you grew up in Austin then maybe a twangy slow drawl that made someone sound as if they had been kicked in the head multiple times by a donkey might have sounded sexy. Or at least interesting.
They came back through the front door a few minutes later, AJ with his tripod in hand. I had never really considered how he made the videos before. Certainly, I had watched them online enough, but I hadn’t thought about him as an intentional being: framing the shot, hitting record.
He must have had to watch the footage before posting it online. To edit out the dull waiting before the mice or the rats sniffed out the bait. I wondered if he found it at all pleasurable, rewatching the footage. I didn’t. I wasn’t sick, but there was something about knowing what would happen. I wouldn’t call it comfort. I didn’t quite have a name for the feeling that accompanied watching a mouse drown itself for the tenth time in a row. It wasn’t about death or the end result, but about the inevitable.
I re-opened the video and posted a new comment beneath the video:
Why fill the bucket with water? Why not just leave it empty so they get trapped? Then you can release them back into the wild humanely.
Then I deleted it because I didn’t really care. I was just bored, which I suppose you could say leads to its own set of problems.
. . .
The problem, if that’s what you could call it—which I did because no other name had come to me—started with the school’s Valentine’s day dance in February. Or to be more specific, with the afterparty that took place at Robbie Beckhart’s family ranch. Robbie was on the baseball team with Colton Waite.
Marsha and I drove out there together. She parked at the end of a long row of cars on the front lawn. We were down to the dregs on a bottle of Goldschlager her older sister had bought for us. On the far-right side of the house a bonfire raged. Marsha put the car in park and burped.
“Okay, let’s talk game plan.” She rummaged through her purse and attempted to put lipstick on her eyelids. I snatched it away.
“Let’s get water,” I told her, wondering how the hell she had managed the drive, but Marsha, like a lot of girls I knew—myself included—claimed to drive even better when drunk.
On our way up to the house, my phone buzzed.
I thought u weren’t gonna show up.
Marsha staggered on the lawn, the heels of her shoes digging into the earth. “Okay, I need to use the bathroom.”
Another text came in:
Ur friend looks fucked.
I glanced around the lawn. There was a group of boys ringed around the fire, drinking, smoking. Weed wafted through the air and mixed with the stench of horseshit. I put an arm around Marsha’s shoulder and got her in the front door and through a throng of people down the front hall where I leaned her against the wall.
Where r u? I texted back.
Keeping an eye on our child. He’s sad. Misses his momma.
“Who’s that?” Marsha asked, her eyes rolling in her head as she stared down at my phone.
“No one,” I said. Her face looked pale even with blush caked on her cheeks. “Let’s get you to a bathroom.”
Marsha lurched away from me. “No,” she cried in the voice of a toddler. “We’ve gotta talk strategy. We’ve gotta find Colton.”
Then there was a hand on my shoulder.
“You two weren’t talking about me, were you?”
I spun around to see Colton standing there, a broad grin across his face, our watermelon baby strapped into a sling against his chest.
To say that Marsha was infatuated with Colton Waite was an understatement. She had been for the entirety of high school in a mostly inexplicable way. She loved him in the way that it was possible to love someone from afar, in the way that if you squint enough to get a closer look, anything you want comes into focus. Mailboxes become bears. Clouds turn into gods. My grandmother kept a charred log in a big plastic trash bag under her bed because she saw the face of Jesus burned into the grain of the wood. She liked to show it to me and have me sit with her when I came to visit, and sometimes, she held the log one way and sometimes she held it the other way all the while insisting that the face was there. She said, “Little Baby Jesus,” and set it in my arms. It weighed as much as an infant, as much as a watermelon. It smelled like smoke and when I tried to give it back to her, I got a splinter in the pad of my pointer finger that I had to soak in water for two hours before I could remove it.
Marsha seemed like she was just about to fall right in his arms, to kiss him right there in the hallway even. It would have been about time because she’d been going on and on about it for years. She puckered her lips and her eyes bulged a little and then the Goldschlager came back up. I smelled it before I saw it, sour and sweet, flecked with gold.
“What the fuck?” Colton groaned.
The front of him, shirt and sling and pale fruit and all, was drenched with Marsha’s insides. I grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her toward the back of the house, through a master bedroom, and into an empty bathroom. Colton followed close behind complaining the whole way.
“Jesus Christ! Can’t she hold her liquor?”
Marsha mumbled while I set her down on a bath mat next to the tub. What she was saying, I couldn’t tell. When Colton tried to step into the bathroom, I put a hand to his chest.
“I’m going to get her cleaned up. Can you grab me some clothes from one of the drawers? Anything is fine. Actually, something comfy.”
He smelled already. His eyebrows raised to seemingly impossible heights and he said, “She pukes on me and you’re giving me orders?”
“Please,” I told him. “I’ll get you cleaned up, too.”
He slipped a pair of sweatpants and a camo button up shirt through the slot of the door. It looked like something one of the Beckhart Boys threw on to go hunt whitetail on the deer lease. I stripped her out of her dress and clothed her and her eyes rolled open at one point and she said something that sounded like, “Astaarlll.”
“That’s right,” I said, buttoning the shirt up to the nape of her neck. Once she was dressed, I called Colton in to have him help carry her to the bed. I tucked her in under the sheets and left her a cup of water by the bed.
“Damn, you take care of her better than you do our child.”
I looked up to see Colton holding the watermelon from our home-ec class, the rind glistening in stomach acid. I shook my head.
“You’re so stupid, Colton.”
A big smile grew across his face. He was stupid. I meant that. Stupid in the ways of so many Albion boys. In the ways of Robbie Beckhart and the rest of his teammates. They’d get drunk and streak naked through the catfish ponds behind the 4H lab. They’d pull pranks at school like filling the auditorium with pygmy goats in the dead of night. There was nothing particularly clever about anything they did, but they carried themselves with a kind of confidence that verged on invincibility. Our coaches, our principals, they could all sympathize. They were the Coltons of their own generations who had, through a process of aging and time and hair loss and expanding waist sizes and beer guts, come to understand that there was no such thing as invincibility. But inheritance was real. Robbie’s dad was a local prosecutor. Colton’s dad was a deputy for the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Department. I didn’t really know what the fuck I was talking about. I was buzzed. Half of that Goldschlager had gone down with me. The other half was splattered on Colton. I was stupid, too. He pulled his shirt off without me having to ask and stood there looking stupid and invincible. According to AJ Maple’s videos, that was how it happened: infestations. Pests got in through the cracks and small holes in an otherwise strong foundation. And then, how was it that he put it?
“They go at it like there’s no tomorrow, which, if you use Slick Six Pest Control Services, then there won’t be.”
. . .
Last summer, my parents paid Marsha minimum wage to work at the bed and breakfast right alongside me. We spent the afternoons soaking through our clothes while washing and drying towels, fluffing pillows, and cleaning up breakfast. We had both planned to do the same thing this summer. We were saving up. For what? We weren’t sure exactly, but we had talked about leaving Albion. Not just going an hour north to Austin or west to San Antonio, but further than that. Because if you didn’t get out after high school, then you probably didn’t get out at all. Even the people who went to college at UT or A&M came back to work for their parents, start families…
The thought alone made my stomach lurch.
“Your mother and I are about to head down to the parade. You wanna come along?”
My dad was standing on the other side of the reception desk. His forearms were covered in dirt, his cheeks red from the heat. He smelled like old-man sweat: acidic, meaty. Like hot dogs soaked in peroxide. I doubled over and heaved into the small waste bin at my feet.
“Jesus,” he said, half-stepping toward me.
“I’m fine,” and I waved him away. “I think I just need to drink more water.”
His face was an equal mix of concern and disgust, or maybe it was just uncertainty. Why were men so incapable? When I had called Colton to tell him that I was late, he practically imploded over the phone.
What? How? Is it even mine?
He was so angry that there were consequences. I told him that I was wrong. I wasn’t late, just stressed. I had wanted to talk to Marsha about it, to ask her what I should do. I tried texting and calling. I tried apologizing and small talk and inside jokes. I didn’t know exactly how she found out about Colton and I in the first place. She had been pretty passed out on that bed. We had closed the bathroom door, but not locked it. Robbie Beckhart and his girlfriend Leanne stumbled in and caught us. Was it him who told, or Colton? All those boys talked.
When Marsha confronted me about it, I lied. I lied then I caved. I told her it wasn’t very good anyway, thinking that might somehow make it better. I expected her to be mad for a long time and then cool off because we had been friends since the fourth grade and she had never even spoken so much as a sentence to Colton Waite, unless you counted the vomit. I thought surely that with time the problem would go away, but it did the opposite. It grew. It took on a life of its own. During the last week of school, Marsha had come right up behind me and hooked her foot around my ankle and the thing that I had never named, but for which Colton Waite had scribbled on a wide toothless grin and rose red cheeks—a monster of a creature that I could have never truly loved anyway—went tumbling down the stairs, its seedless insides strewn between the first and second floors. My watermelon would not be graduating in the parade, so there was really no reason for me to go at all.
My dad set down a glass of water on the reception counter.
“Why don’t you take a little break, okay? Maybe get a little fresh air.”
“It’s a hundred degrees out,” I told him.
He shrugged.
“Will you make sure your friend gets paid?”
“My friend?”
He gestured out the back door.
“AJ. I’ve got a check in an envelope on the kitchen table.”
“He’s not my friend.”
Another shrug.
By the time my parents made their way out the door, so too did the family that was staying in one of the upstairs rooms. A mother, a father, a young girl. But the older one, Kelsey, was not with them.
I sipped the water on the counter. I felt exhausted, like all of my energy had leeched out of me. It was almost seven, but the sun was still out. The air outside was thick and muggy. The parade would be starting soon. I didn’t want to be there, but I also didn’t want to be here. Marsha would probably be there graduating with her watermelon held snugly to her chest. I imagined Colton would be there. Why not? He had nothing to worry about. Nothing to be sorry for. The town was more his than mine.
I made my way into the dining room and sat down on a green sofa where guests sometimes read the paper while sipping their coffee. I just needed a moment to rest. I laid back and kicked my feet up. I didn’t mean to shut my eyes. It just kind of happened like so many things did.
. . .
The fireworks woke me up. I heard them first inside of a dream as a series of distant colorful pops, and then I opened my eyes to a sequence of loud cracks. The dining room was dark, not black, but gray and fuzzy. My forehead was damp with sweat. The bed and breakfast was still quiet. I checked my phone and saw that it was almost nine.
My mouth was thick with spit. I didn’t have any texts, not that I’d been expecting any. That, combined with the distant fireworks of the Watermelon Festival, reminded me that things were different now.
My feet ached when I stood up. The water my dad had gotten me earlier was warm on my tongue. It tasted strange but helped wash the reek of sleep out of my mouth. I flipped the kitchen light on and saw the envelope with the check inside of it still on the table.
“Hello?” I called out, tentatively, my voice hoarse. I thought I might be coming down with something.
When I looked out of the front window I saw AJ’s truck still parked in the lot. It seemed strange that he hadn’t left yet, so I went out the back door and paused on the porch. I couldn’t see them from where I stood, but I could hear the fireworks going off around Main Street. Cicada song saturated the night. In the distance, the chicken coop was just a vague outline of corrugated tin and wire fencing under the expansive limbs of a large Southern Oak.
I took the steps down to the grass. The earth was warm under my bare feet. I was still waking up. My body was moving, but my head was slow to come fully back to life. As I got closer, I heard the chickens chattering to one another. About what? Whatever chickens talked about. Food, warmth, danger. In some ways, that was appealing, easier at least. The sky cracked and I swung around to watch fading tendrils of green light fall toward the earth before disappearing altogether.
Sitting outside of the coop fencing were two, white, forty-gallon buckets. I recognized them from when my mom and dad renovated the house, using each one to carry out bits of plaster and old wallpaper and rusted nails. Even through the growing dark, I could see they were full. I pulled my phone from my pocket and turned on the flashlight.
At first, it was hard to tell what I was looking at: a gray mass. It could have just been a trick of the light, or the fact that my brain was sluggish, but the mass seemed to be moving. Only when I bent down did it become clear what I was looking at.
Rats.
Saliva-stained, still-bleeding, still-twitching.
Rats.
I grabbed my knees and heaved, but all that came up was tepid water. It landed in a slimy puddle on top of my right foot.
I wasn’t an expert, but there must have been dozens of them in each bucket. I wasn’t sure why, but I looked again. Call it morbid curiosity, whatever the thing was that made me watch AJ’s YouTube videos over and over. Their beady black eyes reflected the light from my phone. Some of their tiny clawed feet still spasmed. It seemed cruel, that some of them should be on the edge of death, trapped inside a mound of fur and flesh. I could smell the stink of soil and death and manure and the fields and the memory of Marsha’s regurgitated Goldschlager all at once. I heaved again but only spittle came up.
Then I noticed something on the ground next to the buckets: a pair of thick leather work gloves stained the color of rust at the fingertips. I picked one up and slipped my hand inside. They were a size too big. I flexed my fingers and the leather curled loosely around the shape of my hand. It struck me that they were AJ’s gloves, though I think I had probably known that before trying one on. I glanced up and looked around. There was a burst of red in the sky followed a second later by another distant pop.
I pulled the glove off and tossed it back on the ground. I listened. The air was still. The sound of my own breathing was loud in my ears. But there was something else. Something beneath the fireworks and the insects and the soft clucking of the chickens.
I walked around to the other side of the coop and looked out at the barn. It had never been fully renovated like the rest of the house. Instead, it had been turned into a makeshift storage area for all of the equipment that my parents hadn’t known what else to do with. From where I stood, I could see that the barn doors were slid open, just a foot or so gap between them. It looked odd, not for any particular reason. It was just a feeling that I had. I remembered what AJ had said about having only female minks because of their maternal instinct. Maybe that was what I felt. If not exactly, then something akin to it.
I took out my phone and opened my conversation with Marsha, though conversation was too strong a word. All texts from the last few months had come from me. She never responded. It was a strange feeling to be reminded of a truth that even I did not fully believe in. When did babies start kicking, and did it ever hurt? I had read online, in between leaving comments on YouTube, anywhere between four and six months.
I typed out a message then deleted it.
Typed.
Deleted.
There was a sound coming from the barn. That was the odd thing: it looked undisturbed, but if I listened—really listened—then I heard it.
Voices.
Murmuring.
Scuffling.
The sound of bodies.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. My legs shook, whether because of the heat or exhaustion or nausea. I remembered thinking on the night at Robbie Beckhart’s that Marsha was just a few feet away, on the other side of a door. I remembered worrying but also a voice inside me saying fuck it. And then the regret. The infinite unrelenting regret that outlived the night itself.
I darted across the grass to one broad side of the barn and leaned against the wall. The short sprint made my stomach lurch again.
The fireworks made it difficult to know for sure, but closer, I thought I heard something high-pitched. Human even.
What made a person do a thing they knew they probably shouldn’t do? Desire, wishful thinking, perhaps. Did mice or rats ever see that cheese suspended at the center of the greased-up wire and stop to consider the fact that it all seemed too good to be true? Rodents at least had the excuse of being rodents. What was my excuse? My prefrontal cortex wouldn’t be fully developed until the age of twenty-five. I had heard that in a different TED talk, and probably somewhere else, too. It was one of those things teachers sometimes said. It was one of the reasons we were told not to get high or drink alcohol—because we were still developing. It made it seem as if nothing mattered, or rather, as if everything mattered in an outsized kind of way. Recently, I had been thinking a lot about how the future seemed sad in an inevitable sense whereas before I had felt the opposite.
Something clattered from inside the barn and I froze. The thought first crossed my mind as a joke: maybe AJ Maple was inside there right now, killing someone. The girl with the pink hair. Kelsey. There was noise, I was sure. Breathing and gasping. Shuffling across the barn’s dirt floor.
You’re not gonna believe this but I was right about AJ, I started to type out on my phone without realizing I was even doing it. The last text I’d sent her read, I had the weirdest dream. Sent almost two weeks ago. 4:32 am. No response.
Standing outside the barn, I could no longer remember what that dream had been, only that it had woken me up before sunrise and sent me down the hall and into the kitchen where I found a guest leaned against the countertop with a bag of frozen peas pressed against his forehead.
He was young, younger than my own parents at least, and traveling alone. He was fully dressed with big, heavy, black boots and jeans so faded they were almost white. When I asked if he was checking out, he said yes. Just here for the night. He had a long day of driving ahead of him and I didn’t ask why or where, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I was tired and felt strange standing there with just his face shadowed in darkness and me in an oversized t-shirt with a tear at the collar.
In hindsight, part of me wondered if that had been the dream itself. However, when I woke up a few hours later, my dad asked me about the peas. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about because mostly it wasn’t worth getting into. It was, after all, just peas. Later that afternoon, he put up a piece of paper on the fridge that asked guests to please be considerate of the contents inside.
I don’t know why I was thinking about that. There were just things I hadn’t been able to share with anyone, big or small. Marsha would have gotten a kick out of the peas, and she would have asked where I thought the guy was traveling to and I would have said that he seemed a little bit mysterious, like he was on the run or something, not creepy like AJ Maple, just intriguing. I deleted what I had typed out to her on my phone. I noticed then that the fireworks had stopped. The air had on it the smell of black powder and sulfur.
I could hear them giggling. The girl, at least. Kelsey. I put my eye close to a thin gap in the barn’s wall and saw enough. I didn’t mean to stare. AJ had a bony back with shoulder blades that seemed to stick out too far. Kelsey’s shirt hung from the top of a rake leaned up against the far back wall. Even in the low light, I could see how pale her stomach was. I could see the deep t-shirt tan lines on his arms. He held her in an awkward kind of way. It wasn’t jealousy that I felt. Not disappointment or relief either. I didn’t have a name for the feeling.
Something brushed up against the top of my foot and I startled away from the wall. It was a rat, I thought. A rat that had unearthed itself from one of the forty-gallon buckets and come scurrying back to life. I didn’t scream, but I stumbled backward into the dirt and fell on my butt and my phone went flying from my hand.
It stood on all fours, head twitching, beady black eyes pinned right on me from just a couple feet away.
Not a rat, but a mink.
It moved quickly, more like a snake than a thing with legs, closing the distance between me and it in what seemed like the blink of an eye. I scuttled back on my hands. Its nose flickered. Sniffed.
I kicked at it once, though my heart wasn’t really in it. It scampered back and then forward again.
“Okay,” I said softly. “Just take it easy.”
Then its nose grazed my toes. I felt the fur of its face bristling against my skin and I froze because wasn’t that a thing? Somewhere along the way in life I was sure that there had been a reality TV survivalist or at least a girl scout troop mom who advised to never run away from wild animals. To never show fear. Or to play dead. It was two sides of the same coin.
Out there in the fresh dark of sunset, it didn’t look so intimidating. I thought I could hear the soft sounds of its rapid breath, its slender chest rising and falling.
“Rita,” I whispered. “Is that you?”
It stopped and stared at me as if I was right, or at least as if it had heard the sound of my voice and wondered. Rita like Rita Arnold. Prom Queen. Princess of the Watermelon Chariot. I had witnessed her in the parade two years prior, waving serenely from her perch upon a giant watermelon-shaped float draped over the top of one of the flat beds the city employed for maintenance. It was both terribly cheesy and an immense honor. The girl who’d been chosen to ride on the front of the Watermelon Chariot this year was Addie Miller. Sitting there in the dirt with nothing but a mink for company, I was overwhelmed by the desire to see it all again. To wander through town linked arm in arm with Marsha guided by nothing more than alcohol and a meandering desire to imagine what it must be like to exist at the center of something while comfortably toeing the margins.
The little mink who was maybe named Rita scuttled up between my legs and stood up rod-straight like a prairie dog. It was, in that kind of moonlight in that kind of moment, both smaller and larger than I had ever noticed before. Its nose wouldn’t stop twitching. The scratching of its paws landed on the soft skin of my inner thigh where my shorts rode up. It sniffed at the fabric and I thought, perhaps, I had been too harsh.
There was something about it, something hard to pinpoint. The hairs on its pinched face glistened: its snout, around its eyes. It shifted its attention to the bottom of my shirt and I saw what it was, its whole face stained damp and red from the work it did. Did it enjoy it? Or was it just work? What was Rita, the real Rita—Rita Arnold—up to now in the world? What does a girl like that go on to achieve? Does she ever worry her best days are already behind her?
I reached my hand down and the mink pulled away, ducking and bobbing and weaving like a miniature boxer. I let my fingers hover and it came close enough for me to touch it. Slowly, I drew two fingers across the top of its head. It seemed to like it. At least, it didn’t seem to hate it. The thought had never crossed my mind before, but I found myself wondering if AJ was sweet with these things.
On the other hand, he loves his ferrets.
That’s what Marsha had said.
Not everything was as simple as people wanted it to be.
“Isn’t that right?” I whispered.
Then something buzzed and a sharp pain tore through the pad of my index finger. Like a bee sting, like the kind of big splinter I got when my parents bought this place and I had to help them renovate it.
“Fucker,” I hissed and kicked the mink away. It dodged my foot and slithered off back around the barn. I held my finger up in front of my face and saw a single bead of blood where it had bit me. I put my finger in my mouth and sucked and tasted iron.
Just to my left, my phone buzzed again. I couldn’t see it at first, but then I noticed the edges of the screen glowing, face down in a patch of weeds. Before I picked it up, I thought about who might be texting me. I willed it to be Marsha. Somewhere from within the murky fog of memory that song about being under the same moon echoed in my mind and I was filled with a great longing. A kind of tunnel vision. I was already picturing it in my mind: how we would reconcile. It wouldn’t be right away—it would take time—but I would tell her about the night with AJ in the barn and his shirtless back and the girl with pink hair and braces and how their tongues danced across each other and I felt sick and the mink that looked like, no, that was named after Rita Arnold bit me, I knew I never liked her, etc. I flipped the phone over.
On the way hime from the parade.
It buzzed again.
Home, my dad corrected.
The words didn’t mean anything to me at first. In fact, they were a little blurry. The screen was too bright. I wiped at my eyes and still had trouble making sense of them. My throat felt tight and I hadn’t noticed I was even making noise, not until he was at my side with one knee in the dirt and a large hand clamped on my shoulder. He smelled bad, like musk and sweat. I wanted to puke. Not me, my body, some internal mechanism that I could not just flip on and off. He asked what was wrong, and I heard her asking from the barn door, what’s wrong with her?
“You’re alright,” AJ said. “You’re alright.”
I wasn’t, and for some reason the name AJ Mink popped into my head. It wasn’t even a thought, just an image. A billboard you might pass along the highway like the ones of the personal injury lawyers with names like Scott Bass the Texas Hammer or Tom Long the Country Bullet.
Crushed by an eighteen-wheeler? Call me!
Big car wreck? Call now!
Friendship betrayal? We’ve got you covered!
There were little pinprick explosions behind my eyes from squeezing them shut so tight. Crying—really crying—can feel like a strange and new thing if you haven’t done it in a long time. Like the world is just too much sensation all at once.
I pretended all my pain was in the tip of my finger where I’d been bitten. I imagined it all gathering there in a single dense mass, pictured it red and swollen, felt it even, the second heartbeat of a thing alive and pulsing.
“Don’t worry. AJ’s got you,” he said, his voice muffled and far away and inside my head. I kept my eyes shut. They would not open. There were certain things a person should not see, the death of a thing, for one. “Really squeeze if you need to. Get it all out. You won’t hurt me. I can take it,” and only then did I realize my hand was latched tightly onto his, though for the life of me I was not sure who had reached for who first and whether or not it really mattered in the end anyway.
