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Cynically BeautifulYay another storyTo lazy for a real update, have a story instead...Kiera Melissa Sartori It was hot; the early afternoon sun beat down on my hooded sweatshirt. Instead of taking it off I pulled the sleeves low over my hand and slipped my thumps through the holes. I had made there. I distracted myself from the heat by picking the chipping green paint from the picnic table. I heard my mother’s voice in my ears, yammering on about how I was contributing to the delinquency of young people in our society. “Christ Mom,” I said under my breath, its just paint.” I looked up and scanned the park, over by the play structures a group of mother’s stood like a giant human fence, but there was no sign of him. I wandered closer, trying to find a spot to hide from the intense heat. I found a cool spot next to a tree and sat down. The tangy smell of sap and dirt filled my noise. It was something I hadn’t experienced in years- the smell of dirt. I remember when I was little you couldn’t get me out of it. One summer, when I was six, I went out into my backyard during a rainstorm. I took off all my clothes and stirred around so much mud that I ended up covered in it. When I met my mother at the back door, she just shook her head and carried me directly to the bathtub. By the time she was done with me the water was black. I smelled dirt for days, but it was worth it. I watched the kids swarm around the play structure, there little legs pumping faster then their bodies seemed capable of moving. Their laughter blotted out the sound of his lazy footsteps and I didn’t know he had arrived until a familiar shadow fell over me. I looked up. He seemed impossibly tall from this angle, and though his face was impossible to see in the sun, I could tell he had that soft smile on his face, the one he was never aware of. “Hi,” he said, and suddenly it became hard to swallow and my heart took a sudden leap into my throat. He sat down next to me and stretched his long legs out in front of him propping himself up on his elbows. I was annoyed by how casual he seemed. I wondered what was going on under those intense eyes. I gave him a sideways glance; grateful I didn’t have to face those eyes directly for the moment. I worried my heart might stop. “Hi Kayl,” I said finally, wondering how much time had actually passed since he had spoke. It had felt like forever. He stared straight ahead, squinting because of the sun, but not bothering to shield his eyes. I followed his gaze. It was a little girl with curly brown hair just like his. She was running, that brilliant hair trailing behind her as she chased a small blond headed boy around the park. She caught him by the arm, and he whirled around, his blue eyes shining as he began to chase her in turn. “So you know for sure?” He questioned. I knew he was avoiding the real words. Neither of us wanted to face them. They were too big, too mind-bending too much for either one of us to get our heads around at the moment. I nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure I even took the test twice. They both said the same thing.” I watched him close his eyes and lift his face towards heaven. “Fuck,” he said. It was loud enough for a couple of the women in front of us to hear. They turned around and gave us a reproachful look as if to say Stupid kids. Yeah. Stupid kids, that about summed it up. I breathed in that dirty smell again, wishing I could once again be that little girl standing dirty in front of my mother, then watching as my mistakes got washed clean by her hands. I wanted her to fix this, but she couldn’t, no one could, not my mother and certainly not Kayl. This was going to have to be the first decision I ever made on my own. I pulled hard at the grass underneath me tearing to pieces. Kayl’s hand covered mine, ceasing my savage killing of the grass. I looked up at him. He was wearing that small smile again. I wanted to hit him. “Don’t,” he said softly, as if it mattered. I stopped pulling at the grass. And let him take my hand. He traced small circles on my palm with his thumb. Trying to sooth the emotions, he knew I was hiding. I hated it. The way he could read me. He always knew how I was feeling. He said it was obvious I was an open book. It made me feel as if I was a soldier standing alone in enemy territory. One shot and I’d be done, and the worst part it was that I never knew from which direction the bullet would be coming. I was venerable and unprotected, like my unborn baby. Together, we continued, watching the small girl is she ran in and out of a row of swings, with the boy in hot pursuit at her heels. The look on her face was one of fun and excitement. She showed no sense of fear, she was not afraid of being chased, wasn’t worried about what would happen if he caught her. Her large brown eyes sparkled the way a child’s always seemed too. I looked around the crowd of women, trying to find the mother of this tiny girl, but it was too hard to tell. Strangers always seem to look the same. “What do you wanna do?” He asked me. His thumb had stopped moving along my palm and his hand felt hand felt soft and sweaty in my own. S.A.M. hands had been my biggest fear when we played Red Rover in third grade gym. Sweaty and Moist, now it was just a matter of fact. “I dunno,” I said. “What do you wanna do?” I looked up, for the first time letting him look me in the eye. His eyes burned as they read me, but he wouldn’t find any answers there, not today. He turned back toward the park. The girl was looking behind her. Suddenly her feet caught in the loose gravel and she pitched forward with such force that my heart stopped. She lay there for a few moments in silence. Her pursuer approached her slowly; kneeling beside her he touched her head, using his whole hand to push the hair out of her face. I saw his lips move but his speech was too soft to catch. The girl drew a few shaking breaths and the boy stood pulled her clumsily to her feet. “I want to keep it,” he said. I looked away from the scene and met his gaze again. His eyebrows were pulled down in concentration and his mouth was set in a flat line, as if he was getting ready for an argument. I nodded, lowering my head. He shifted his body so that he could look up into my face. “Leslie, what are you thinking about?” “Don’t you know?” “I want you to tell me.” “Do you think we could do it Kayl, I mean really?” “I dunno,” he shrugged as if I had just asked him what kind of soap he wanted for the bathroom. “I mean, there’s still the rest of school—and you’re writing…” “I think maybe having a kid would give me something to write about.” “Kayl, this isn’t a muse! It is your son or daughter!” “I know,” he said. “I know.” I felt my chest begin to seize with a fear that I was beginning to become all too familiar with lately. Kayl tried to reach for me, but the last thing I needed right now was to be touched. The stretch of silence between was punctuated by the sound of a child’s cries. I looked up, the girl was a little less then perfect now, her hair was messed up, and her tears were smudges on her now grimy face. The boy had her by the hand and was leading her in our direction, glancing down at her wounded knee, his bottom lip stuck out in a child’s concentration. “What if I can’t do it? What if it is too much?” “You know I’ll be here to help you Leslie. I won’t let you do this alone.” His voice was sincere; I didn’t doubt that he meant it. At the moment I knew he did. But, what would happen nine months from now, when I had blown up like a balloon and he would have to cut his course hours and half to help support us? I certainly wasn’t going to be able to work at first, and I was skeptical that my mother could help pay for a kid, or even, if she would. At the sound of the child’s sobs, every woman in the park disengaged themselves from what they had been doing and looked up. A younger woman who had been sitting alone on a bench, engrossed in a novel, leaped to her feet and rushed toward the girl with swift but controlled steps. I wondered what it felt like to be the mother of sobbing little girls who fall and hurt themselves when you are sitting within ten feet of them, or the mother of a girl who, just into her freshman year at community college, makes the first and worst mistake of her life. Was it guilt that mother felt? Pain? Or was it failure? Did she feel that she hadn’t watched her close enough? Should have known? “I don’t think I can,” I said. My voice faltered audibly and Kayl’s arms went around me with an immediacy that I could feel. It took me a bit by surprise, his comfort caused my heart to wrench in my chest leaving something cold and heavy that I couldn’t name. I held on to him, willing back the tears, my heart beating hard in my ears. “Honey,” he said, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, if you don’t think that you can do it, than don’t. There are other choices, adoption. We could put her up for adoption.” “Her?” I questioned. He placed his hand on my still flat stomach and smiled. “A hunch I guess,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be like this,” I accused suddenly, drawing back from his arms. This wasn’t what I had suspected and it frightened me. “You’re supposed to freak out, deny that its yours, demand that I get rid of it as soon as possible.” He sighed heavily, but didn’t answer, only took my hand and pointed again to the bench. “Look.” The woman had finished cleaning the girl’s knee and was now smoothing a band-aid over the wound. The child’s sobs had softened to a whimper. The woman leaned over and kissed away the child’s tears, soothing her hair back into place one last time. The child put her arms around the mother’s neck. Holding on tight in a gesture that seemed to comfort both of them. From where I sat it was hard to tell who was comforting whom. The woman’s face was visible from over the tiny shoulder and I watched it change. The urgent look on her face melted into a smile and she moved to kiss her daughter repeatedly on the cheek. “Does it hurt anymore Kiera?” She asked the small girl, straightening and moving to sit next to her. “No Mommy, it’s okay now,” Kiera said, moving her dark head from side to side. “That’s my big girl,” the woman said, sounding almost relieved. “Why don’t you go back out and play with your friends for awhile, then we’ll go home and have a snack before Daddy gets home?” Kiera slid off the bench and sprinted towards the play structure, seemingly forgetting the pain that such behavior had caused her only moments before. The woman watched her go, cringing at the thought of new wounds before the old ones could even have a chance to heal, but she didn’t call after her to tell her to be careful, not to run. She just watched as her daughter rejoined her friends, listened to her laughter as they sprinted toward the swings; each child wanting to get the high ones because everyone knew those were the best. The woman smiled, and picking up her book, went back to reading, though I was sure that she still had one eye on her daughter. Kayl looked at me, that small smile on his lips, his eyes probing my own, searching for my thoughts there. The cold scared feeling still lay heavy in my chest. Suddenly I wanted to be back out in the sun, sweating under my heavy sweatshirt. “It’s so much,” I said. “It’s a life.” “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a life.” I sat a moment, allowing a silence to fall between us as I let that idea subtle around in my head. I thought of my life, all the little moments that had built upon each other to create my memories, all the smiles all the laughter all the scraped knees and bruises and even the tears. It was impossible to imagine that it all might not have been, if the lives of two people hadn’t merged at the exact moment that they had, everything that I had ever known, ever felt, ever dreamed of; would have been nothing. I remembered again, that moment, so long ago, when I stood muddy and smiling in front of the back door. I remembered seeing my mother standing before me, until that moment the thought that my mother might be angry about my adventure in the back yard never crossed my mind. My heart had fluttered in my chest, but then suddenly the corners of my mother’s mouth rose and I knew everything was going to be okay. “What do you think about naming her Kiera?” I said squeezing Kayl’s hand tightly. “What if its not a girl?” He questioned, giving me that small smile. I grinned back, feeling for the first time that it was truly genuine. “I guess I just have a hunch.”
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