PORTION

Katis walks east – away from the big June sun – and stops when she sees cousin Stripe coming at her a block up – his t-shirt drenched with blood. He sees her and runs like a bear – she dips into an alley.

Katis presses her shoulder blades into the brick wall – the wall is cold and hard and she doesn’t want to move at all. She presses her spine deeper and feels the little sweat beads growing on her face. There are now more pores giving small sweat beads than ever before in her life has she known.

She sees him run past and looks out after him running so fast. The back of his t-shirt is just teal.

Exhaling Katis looks and the street is empty – she knows nothing about how long she waits. She lost her cellphone in the sewer and knows nothing about time passing. She lost the phone on purpose maybe because she saw a sign that said, “call from your cell”. And she didn’t want it any more. From your cell. So after texting to Stripe [dont forget about the pie] the phone jumped from her hands like a fish into the sewer hole.

The street is so hot it’s making a smell like a living thing.

The pie is Betty’s blueberry reefer butter pie. It’s Stripe’s business about the pie because Betty is his mother. Katis arranged for her co-worker to purchase the pie for some good money. All Stripe had to do was take it to the little park by the highway where the co-worker and probably all her little children would be waiting in some bubble tall car that wasn’t a truck or van.

Stripe is not slow, but some say so. Since Katis was born, Stripe has been in the picture. She’s always just been more at Stripe's family's house. You come into the house and he's there. Playing computer solitaire, or beating listless on that half broke drum set in the basement. You can say, Stripe – there’s a world out there with jobs and girlsfriends etc., but he isn’t interested.

After the phone, Katis was free to roam a while, taking in the messages from the creatures in her neighborhood. Robins, blackbirds of some kind, a grey cat. So much singing.

But some time had passed and Stripe had pulled up and said, come on Katis. Let us go deliver the pie together. He put his hand to his mouth, to hide his mouth. His hair was a grown-out spike, too long in the back. His face was like when he wanted to play with the action figures when they were kids, but she wanted to go to the mall and meet her friends. This made her maybe feel she should go with him.

But somehow she said, no thanks – I don’t like my co-workers. My job sucks. Shaking her head, her hands flat up at him while he drove slowly at her walking pace.

Stripe always wanted to hang out with Katis.

She said, what are you in love with me or what, go on, get out of here.

 Then he drove off.

Later she saw him on Cohassett and Madison, on foot, covered in blueberry. What happened. She ran.

Now she’s thinking she could leave this town. But. She has no money. Not even a cell. She keeps touching her pocket. She makes her way back to Betty’s house.

Betty sees herself in Katis – this Katis knows from the way she seems to put her in such low regards and esteems. When Betty says, “Katis – you should go to Tri-C to learn phlebotomy. Get you off my couch.” Katis knows she is saying, “You could have the things I should have had, such as a ranch house, and a wedding with a full wedding party, and an I-Pad.”

Betty says, “Don’t bring that cross-eyed white trash in here,” Katis hears, “You deserve better.”  Betty says, “Don’t you have somewhere else do go?” Katis hears, “Stay. With me.”

Putting up with Stripe is the price for having a mentor such as Betty. Betty smokes weed with Stripe behind the garage. They sit in shorts on the itchy grass. Katis’s real mother is a church type. She has a spunky haircut and prefers the other children. Katis would rather drink hot yeasty beer out of a can and watch Stripe fail on a skateboard in the driveway for four hours than spend one dinner with her mother. Her mother looking past her, anywhere but her eyes.

Katis lingers on the tree lawn. It is hot as balls. On the porch Betty says, “Get in here girl! What the fuck. I called you like three times.”

Katis’s face is all muddy and her hair is flattened into a part all the way through her crown. She apologized and asked about the pie. She sits down and bites into a green apple she pulled out from somewheres.

            “Child. You tell me about my pie. Stripe’s in the bathtub salty as fuck. Said some man showed up instead and smashed the pie all over him. What’s that about?”

            “I guess it would be her husband. They’ve all got the same one.”

            “Oh philosophy from the Pizza Hut food prepper. Thanks ugly, but you need to go on out of here. Get.”

            Katis’s face fell. Betty told her rejection is how her cousin feels that she doesn’t want to know him, to hand out with him. Katis is nothing like her father – he’s a city councilman. Salt and pepper beard. Warm-hearted and well-read. Betty says to Katis, “Why don’t you go stay with your father.”

            But Katis just goes out pouting – Betty doesn’t know why she doesn’t talk to her father. The child has special needs that she can’t do anything about.

            Aunt Betty even doesn’t want to see this face. Upstairs, Stripe starts singing in the bathtub, Katis can hear him from the tree lawn. Content to check for acorns on the front lawn a while. She know Betty’ll call her back in. Baby boomers get so pissy. She doesn’t know where to go so she goes back to the little park where Stripe was supposed to meet her co-worker.

            It’s hot – oh it takes an hour to walk there and her scalp is all slimy – the sun hurts her head for sure.

            The park is the size of a living room sunken into a green factory lawn on two sides and street level with two busy streets on the other sides. Some gift from the factory to the city. A pittance. No one stops here. She feels sweet on her scalp dripping like bugs, and she wants to take off her dark hair.

            She’se got that itch in her throat, and knows she needs a drink. The air smells like bruised yellow flowers and exhaust. But she lost her sunglasses and in the bright her sinuses are awful, so she stays in the little park for the shade. How will she get a drink. The sun is so awful beating on the sidewalk out dere – is it even noon? Solar noon. How can this day get any longer.

            Then the co-worker shows up. She pulls up, says get in, Katis gets in.

            She ask her co-worker Shelly, "What are you doing here", she pulls the sun blocker down, her eyes pinching already. No AC, the car is even hotter than outside. Shelly smokes desperately. Katis hates Shelly's flat hair on top that frizzes out on the sides.

            “I saw you – thought I should explain. Your phone keeps going to voicemail.”

            It seems like the kids aren’t here, but Katis looks back and there they are. A baby backwards in a car seat in the middle flanked by two leggy scrubs. “They’re quiet.”

            “It’s the heat. Makes everything limp.”

            “My cousin’s in the bathtub. My aunt tossed me out.”

            “It’s Matt. He looked through my texts – thought I was sneaking out on him. Ironic because it was supposed to be a surprise for him. Our seven month anniversary. Which I guess he forgot about.”

            “My father says most people misuse the word irony.”

            “We’ve been giving each other gifts on the 12^th of the month – the anniversary of our first kiss. I guess that part is over.”

            Katis sucked her cheek. “He says it just means sarcasm. But I remember literary irony being different, like the reader knows something the character doesn’t know, so that’s more like how people use it, but for life.”

            Shelly sank a tiny storm of cigarette smoke out the window. “I thought, if this one is still nice to me after the three month mark, and can still see me. If he doesn’t start getting short, or trying to fart on me, or blaming me for his shitty job, after the three month, then he’s the one.”

            “I guess people need to use irony like this. Because what else could you call it? ‘Something is expected to be one way but is actually the opposite, poignantly and revealed not to everyone at once’?” 

            “Do you need a place to crash or something, Katis?”

            “It’s like healthy. People, and advertisers, misused the word so much, as an adverb, that is has actually changed. But that’s language evolution.”

            She asked Katis again if she needed a place to crash for a few days.

            "No, Shelly. I just need to pay my aunt for the pie.” Katis looked at her.

            “But. I never got the pie.”

            “So. Betty made it for you.” The Xacto knife from Katis’s pocket came out and slashed her arm.

            “Fuck! Katis. The fuck!”

            The leggy boy began to wail as the car jolted and a string of Shelly’s blood bobbed down to the parking brake.

            “One hundred dollars.”

            “Betty said fifty!”

            “It’s for Stripe’s humiliation.”

            Stripe and Betty and Katis are back on the couch. Kim Kavorkian’s was on tv. Stripe has his hand on the back of Katis’s neck, her neck sticky with the day’s sweat.

            “I don’t care. I am not going back to Pizza Hut.” She says. Her voice like a radiance. Like a bell.

   “Fuck it.” Says Betty.

            The door was open but the air was still still. They had the fan on full blast. But it didn’t seem to reach them.

            “You’re hand’s burning my neck.”

            Stripe took an ice cube from Katis's Sierra Mist and gently circled it on the back of her neck, her skin.

Katis said nothing but went limp against him.