The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

It seemed extravagantly cruel that there was no biological system for keeping Molly with me always, no way of carrying her around in a pouch above my pelvis like a joey.

It had all been for nothing. The months of sickness and stretching, the years of washing and working and worrying. I had bought Molly trainers with lights in the heels and taken her to church on Christmas Eve and taught her to look both ways before crossing the road, and I might as well have thrown her baby body in a corner and waited for her to cry herself to death. Both versions ended the same way: with me alone again.

She has a proper mother. Molly doesn’t. Soon, Molly won’t have a mother at all. Minus points. Minus all the points you ever earned.

Usually when people said you wouldn’t wish something on your worst enemy it meant you probably would wish it on your worst enemy, and in fact you’d find it quite fun to watch it happen to them.

“Don’t argue, Chrissie,” she said. “Don’t arg me, Miss Ingham,” I said. She went to her desk and took a headache pill.

Shannon said she didn’t want to play Stars in Their Eyes, so I kicked her in the stomach.

You had to hurt people when they annoyed you, to teach them a lesson.

Anyway, that was how I knew being dead wasn’t forever. Not always. People who talked about dying as if it was forever were either lying or stupid, because I knew two people who definitely, definitely came back from being dead. One was Da and the other was Jesus.

When I caught up with him he held on to my arm, and as we walked he kept stumbling and yanking it so hard I thought it was going to come out of its socket. I didn’t care. If he had torn my arm away from my body and kept it for himself, I wouldn’t have minded. I would have said, “You can have the rest of me too. The other arm, and both my legs, and my belly and face and heart. It’s all there for you, if you want it.”

“Why did you tell that policeman I wasn’t here?” I asked, hoisting myself onto the wall next to him. “They’re pigs, they are, Chris. The lot of them. Fucking pigs. It’s all our fucking jobs to keep them from getting what they want.”

“Sometimes you’re so stupid it makes me think I’m dying,” I said.

“What did you wish for?” I asked. “Can’t tell you,” she said. “It still comes true if you only tell one person,” I said.

“Shut your mouth, potato face,” I said.

She had liked me better as a killer.

her mouth screwed like the gray star at the bottom of an apple.

When bad things happened to you, people always said things like “Poor you” and “You’re so brave,” and it was meant to make you feel better but usually it just made you feel worse, because you didn’t want to be brave and poor, you just wanted the bad thing not to be happening.

“That’s not raspberry jam,” I said. “That’s blood. I had a nosebleed.” “Hmm,” he said, taking the sheets from me. “A nosebleed with seeds in it. Interesting.” “Well I am the bad seed,” I said.

I was always going to lose her. That was always going to be the end of this story.

I could work out what she meant, and the horror was strong, but other things were stronger—like the tremor of anger that ran through me when I thought of people spitting at her in the street, and the burr of warmth that came from knowing she remembered how old I was.

she grabbed my arm and pulled me back, holding so tight I felt fingerprint bruises rise on my skin.

His ears turned the color of ham.

We stared at each other until the air between us had a heartbeat.

“That’s for the toilet,” she said. “You’re for the toilet,” I said.

Only one person in Chrissie’s life had loved her in an ordinary, everyday way, the way you love salt or sunlight.

she looked tall and strong, like a lighthouse. I didn’t know why that was what came to me, but it did come, strongly. A lighthouse.

“I can’t kill anything else,” I whispered. “What?” said Jan. “I’m keeping it,” I said. “It’s mine.”