You could turn to a liquid. You could wait for the tears or you could move to action. You could have closed the front door but it’s too late for that now, so you stood with your mind hot in the leaf-gutter street. Your shoes aren’t tied, you could tie them. Fingertips: you could redo the purple nail polish. You could wipe the moistened mascara from your eyes. You could smear it smokily in the hollows of your face. You could have been born a raccoon. You could have scurried through the vacant evenings, breeding beneath your high school bleachers, eating trash. You could have lived beneath those bleachers. You could have stayed in your hometown. You could hold back your tears but pretty soon you were going to become a liquid; you could move, flow through caves and carve hillsides. You could surrender your agency, feel yourself expand. You could throw down the sides of continents. You could send a mountain into the common dirt. You could bury the land in a fireless rampage. You could throw your foot into that trashcan right there on the sidewalk and so you do. Feel your toes go dumb hot in pain. You could have tied your shoes. You stood in a wet street buried in leaves.
A woman got out of her car beside you. She spoke words of concern but you heard nothing and said nothing. She could have parked closer to the curb. You could have terrified her, kicking that trashcan. You could have handled your emotions differently; you’d come huffing and weeping down from the hillside steps of the house. She made sounds at you again and when you didn’t answer she went away. You could have apologized for kicking the trashcan in front of her idling car with your untied shoes, but you couldn’t have seen her, couldn’t see anybody. Nobody but your family. Family trees. Leaves in the street, expired bits of a whole. There was death in the street, death and water. The woman from the car fisted plastic bags from the front seat and began walking toward the porch of the house across from yours. You saw coiled wires. Bags for electronics, flatiron, hair dryer, it was a delivery. She could have been the mother of a student like you. Only students lived in the cul-de-sac. Your mother. When your mother had called you sobbing a few minutes ago to tell you that your brother had tried to kill himself, you thought you could become a liquid. Liquids take the form of whatever container surrounds them. You could become this street. You could become the eldest child, the daughter. That she needed, the third parent. You could take the form of the person who consoled your sobbing mother, the person who told her that everything was going to be fine. You could occupy a novel form because that was what this moment required. Your father was at the hospital, she’d told you. He’d taken your brother. He wasn’t allowed to have his phone on him because it was a psychiatric hospital and they had rules.
Or you could climb one of the trees overhead. You could throw yourself into the wind and let it carry you into the scrolling dusk. The sky was lit to a grey grim dim; a Sunday sky on a Wednesday, like it was going to snow. The sky so low that you could reach out and touch it from the highest branch with your purple fingertips. You could let it take you, abandon yourself. Your brother could have thrown himself from the top of the bannister if your dad hadn’t found him, hadn’t peeled him away, one leg over the rail.
You weren’t sure if this was before or after the knife discovery. Your mother’s hysteria on the phone had blurred the chronology. Your brother had been hoarding knives in his room and your father had found them that afternoon. You’d bought the knives as a Christmas present when you were home for Thanksgiving last year. You gave your parents their present early because you weren’t coming home again for Christmas, because it was three weeks away. You hated home too. When your flight had landed, you decided you needed a few hours before you stepped back into the crummy linoleum of your parents’ hospital-lit kitchen, the window over the table that looked out facing the ill-kept front yard. Piney trees and electrical wires and grass that never grew. You’d made arrangements, a friend had picked you up from the airport; you’d lied about your flight getting delayed because you wanted to catch up with her before stepping back into your kerosene past. The two of you had gotten tacos and you’d told her the only reason you still came home was to see friends. You had finished dinner and walked across the parking lot of the shopping center to the Target and bought a knife set. It was almost a joke. You had had a conversation with your father on the phone recently about garlic. He still bought minced garlic in a jar and you told him he could just buy real garlic. The mincing was easy; you just took it under the flat of the knife and pressed it and then chopped it. It was easy, you’d said. But he hadn’t had that kind of knife. The knives had represented care when you’d bought them for your parents. You couldn’t feel guilty for disliking them, or for not coming home, or for getting short with them on the phone when their politics came up. The knives were practicality. They could stop ordering take-out because they had better knives. Except your brother had been dragging them through the bellies of his forearms. He’d been cutting himself for months, apparently, your mother had said. Hiding it by wearing nothing but long sleeves. Your parents could have noticed. They could have looked for signs that their son, their highschool-age son, had been cutting himself. There was that way he used to hang himself in doorways, gripping the tops of the frames whenever he entered a room. Your brother. He was as tall as a tree and you could only imagine the sight of your hysterical father dragging him away from the bannister after having found the knives, shouting, pleading. How he dragged him squealing into the kitchen, sat him at the table and tried to console him. The two of them red-faced and crying. There was terror and concern in your father’s eyes; there was death in the foyer, and he scored fingernail notches into your brother’s shoulders when he grabbed him tight at arm’s length to tell him that he loved him. You imagine the tears coming in such a torrent that his face was almost purple. Your father who had a red face on a normal day, balding, like Santa Clause with only a goatee. Your brother sobbing wordlessly. Could a person talk after they’d resolved to end their life? He had pastry slits in the bellies of his forearms, his pale white forearms. You imagined steam curling through the air. He’d been cutting himself because his body needed to release excess heat like an over-stuffed strudel. He could catch fire at any moment, and if you could become a liquid you could douse the flame.
Your mother told you that your father had jogged away just for a moment, leaving your brother alone at the kitchen table, so that he could grab the insurance card from his office before calling the hospital, and when he’d come back he’d found your brother, still seated, with his teeth clenched and stabbing himself repeatedly in the thigh with a screwdriver. It had been the only sharp object in the kitchen. The knives had been upstairs, the knives you’d bought as a passive-aggressive joke. Your brother had nicked your father badly in the scuffle over the screwdriver. The interior heat of his mind drove him to poke holes in himself, otherwise his skin would catch and melt.
Or you could become the tree. You could plant yourself in the pavement, sprout tendrils into the earth from your untied shoes. Your laces could worm their way into the bedrock, tether you to something sturdy. You could remain in the middle of this street forever, this street caked in death, with discarded leaves stuck in its teeth. So many leaves, the gutters wouldn’t flow.
Or you could flow. You could move. You could drive all the way to your mother in Tallahassee. She’d cried to you on the phone and you’d cried too. She hadn’t even been at the house when it happened; she’d gone out to pick up food. Everything had happened outside of her, she’d said. She hadn’t even seen your dad or your brother. She was so alone. Everything she knew had come to her over the phone from your dad as he soared beyond the Best Buy and the Olive Garden in his pickup with your brother, caught a free passage onto the interstate to the hospital. But he could have called earlier. He could have seen the signs. You could have given them a better fucking present; your parents couldn’t even make a Wednesday afternoon lunch, why did you buy them knives. Your brother had probably gotten your parents to pick him up from school. That was how this had happened, could they not see the oddity of picking up a perfectly healthy boy who wore nothing but long sleeves? They lived in Florida. You could go home more often. You hadn’t been home since you’d bought the knives, almost a year ago. Could you come home, G—? Please, G—? your mother had said between sobs. Your toes hurt like a mother from kicking that trashcan. You’d kick your mother if you had the chance. You’d throw your foot into her bad knee, send her crumbling into the linoleum; how many cortisone shots would she take before seeing a real doctor. It was her goddamn knee, she used it even when she didn’t. No one in your family could take care of themselves. But that was the point. Come home, G—. They needed you. You’d thrown your untied shoe into the trashcan because you couldn’t become a liquid, couldn’t douse the flame. You couldn’t do anything except get in your own way. She needed you. You’d huffed off the phone, telling your mother that you’d have to email your professor before you could come. That you loved her but you needed to see. You were a teaching assistant, you’d asserted to her, as if that were a job. You were supposed to be running a lecture tomorrow on Suzy Favor Hamilton’s memoir, Fast Girl, your favorite book. But you knew the excuse was shit; you were getting a master’s in sports psychology, for Christ’s sake, your professor would have driven you herself. But you could do it. You could drive 900 miles to Tallahassee. You’d done road trips with your friends. You’d done the overnight leg from Santa Fe to Las Vegas. You could scurry into the distance. But you couldn’t make it because you didn’t have a car.
The woman delivering the electronics to the house across from yours had passed beyond the porch and the front door. The car was a Mercedes, push to start. You’d never driven anything like it, but all you could think of was your brother in a wheelchair, in his long sleeves, being moved unwishfully through cantaloupe rooms. He was six three and he wore long sleeves and you’d bought the knives he’d been cutting himself with. He’d tried to kill himself and he could try again. The Mercedes sat dormant in the street. The car had an interiority to it, cupped spaces you could sleep in.
Could you steal a car, G—?
But you didn’t have to answer that question. Because when you saw the keys in the drink holder, the noise in your mind vanished. And as you tugged open the door and threw the car into drive and jostled over the speedbump unbuckled, it was all galvanized metal. You would deliver yourself as a stranger to no one.
Trevor Lisa is an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. When he isn’t writing, he’s either running, eating, or playing air drums with kitchenware.
