All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner

“You’re home early,” as Daisy came in the door.
    The Bible was a little red Gideon’s that he’d taken from a Best Western in Syracuse. For research purposes. Someone who’d read through it before had made all kinds of complicated numerical calculations in the margins based on numbers found in Deuteronomy. This person was probably now hunkered down in a bunker somewhere in the Arizona desert, watching for flaming balls cartwheeling across the sky.
    “Did you know that there are all these liquid and dry measures in the back of the Bible? Omers, kabs, pots, firkins,” Jack said. “I guess that’s in case you wanted to try the recipes.”
    Daisy nudged his legs over and sat down beside him. She looked serious. “There’s something I want to talk about, Jack,” she said.
    He was prepared to tell her it was okay. He was prepared to bestow a blessing, like some kind of fairy godfather. Plink her on the shoulder with his magic wand and say, Daisy, I just want you to be happy. And if that takes flying off to Cleveland with a zesty former saint, well, fly away then, fly!
Be free! Be rich!
    “You know that scene at the end of
Lone Star
where the lovers discover that they’re actually brother and sister but decide to keep doing it anyway?” Jack asked.
    Daisy just tilted her head as if she was emptying water out of one ear. She was unnervingly silent.
    Through the front window, through the tracks of yesterday’s tear stains, Jack could see the woman from next door being carried down her walkway on a stretcher. Her mother fluttered behind the paramedics, handsvibrating around her head like a propeller just before lift-off.
    Daisy took his face in her hands and started kissing him. She straddled Jack and rubbed his chest. She squeezed one of his earlobes and her tongue ticked around between his lips. Jack thought it would help if he closed his eyes. If her breasts hadn’t been pressing against him, too heavy, too familiar, she could have been anyone. Daisy lifted her head. Jack opened his eyes. She was propped up by her arms on either side of his chest, smiling. He thought he’d heard her say, “I think we should have a baby.”
    “What?”
    “I think we should have a baby,” she said.
    The words dripped from her mouth like stalactites. It felt, to Jack, as if whole hours passed before he could answer, the day sliding into night.
    Jack expected her to eventually start crying and pounding at him with a balled up fist. But she just perched there above him, dry-eyed, waiting, and the only pounding he felt came from within, the pacing back and forth of his own heart, that drooling hyena, in the cage of his chest.

boys growing
    I had fallen in love by then with three dark-haired boys fiercely loyal to their mamas and I swore I’d never do it again. My own mama said: Never go out with a boy prettier than yourself.
    I tried to listen to her, but a noise got in the way. Sound of my blood motoring through my veins. A dull roar. Sometimes that.
    Sometimes nothing.
    A Saturday before the first day back at school, Labour Day weekend. He filled up the tank of my car and then asked if he should check the oil, his hair flicking in and out of his eyes in a wind that seemed to be coming from all directions. Hot, weasly wind. The foothills smouldering. Too far away to see, wild horses ran—tails on fire, trailing smoke. But you could smell it. The wholecity reeked of burning hair, cooked tar, sweat. Dull brown rivers of gophers, smoked from their holes, flowed across fields, small boys mowing them down with BB guns like they were on a buffalo kill. For a quarter a corpse. Small boys who didn’t get to sleep that night, their nostrils thick with blood sport, their trigger fingers, their everything, twitching. Bones growing faster than their skin. You could hear it—a terrible sound, canvas sails tearing on a tall ship at sea, a border guard grinding his teeth. Boys growing. It kept me awake. Their mothers the next day would