Nothing to See Here

by Kevin Wilson

And like that, it was the two of us again, me being weird and her revealing that, by god, she was weird, too.

and I guess I thought maybe there would be space-age furniture, but this was the kind of wealth where things were so plain that you didn’t realize how expensive they were until you touched them or got closer and saw how they were made with great care and with super-fancy materials.

“Well, that’s cool,” I said. I imagined Madison as the first lady of the United States of America. I remembered the time during a basketball game when she elbowed this girl in the throat in order to get a rebound and got kicked out of the game. I smiled.

I hated the way I always tried to get out of hard work, but, Jesus, hard work sucked.

“Safe travels,” she said, and she allowed just the slightest musicality into her normally monotone voice. I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.

“Are you ready?” I asked the kids, and they nodded. “Two slides?” Bessie asked me, and it took me a second to remember what she was talking about. “I lied about the slides,” I admitted, and she nodded like she had expected lies. They looked at each other for a second, and then Bessie shrugged, and they walked just a few steps ahead of

“And Dolly Parton is a humanitarian, Jasper,” Madison added. “She’s done a lot for the state and for the children of the state.” “She’s an actress,” he said, like this was evidence of something. He was smiling, maybe playing, but Bessie seemed embarrassed now, like she’d made a mistake, and I got angry. “She’s the greatest Tennessean in the state’s entire history,” I said flatly, definitively. “Oh, Lillian,” Jasper said, chuckling. “She wrote ‘I Will Always Love You,’” I said, dumbfounded that this didn’t end the debate. “Lillian,” Jasper said, his charm turning serious, so haughty, “do you know that there have been three Tennesseans who have served as the president of the United States?”

Jasper started to talk, and it was like when he prayed at dinner that night, just platitudes, like a computer program had written them based on phrases in the Bible and the Constitution mixed together. He talked about responsibility and protecting the country and yet also ensuring its growth and prosperity. He talked about his own military service, which I actually hadn’t known about. He talked about diplomacy, but I wasn’t watching any of that.

The kids ran in circles, the flame trailing off of them and falling to the ground, where the grass caught fire for a second before it smoldered. They burned and burned, like they were eternal. But I knew that it would die down, that it would fade away, back inside them, wherever it hid. I knew that soon they would turn back into the kids I knew so well, their weird bodies and tics. I didn’t try to catch them or put them out. I let them burn. I sat on the porch, a perfect day, and watched them burn. Because I knew that when it was over, when the fire disappeared, they would come right back to me.