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Here in the Cattails

by Lindsay Sproul

This is Massachusetts. They call this street Switchtrack Alley for the freight train that goes by every hour and three quarters. It switches here from right to left, and the cars are numbered and mostly mahogany.

Sometimes Marnie and Evil walk along the tracks to the tuberculosis hospital that closed in 1992, the year that they super-glued their hands together so good that Doctor Walker had to soak their skin in a basin with chemicals. It was also the year that Marnie ate only candy cigarettes for a week and Evil was a squirrel for Halloween. She stayed a squirrel for two days longer, and Marnie fed her sunflower seeds from her palm. They lodged them in their cheeks and kept them there for as long as they could.

There are differences between Marnie and Evil. Marnie is afraid of space, mostly outer space but sometimes inner space too. She stares up at the constellations and follows their curves with her fingertips and says, I don’t know where I am. Evil says, You are here in the cattails. She says, This is Switchtrack Alley. It goes leftwards. Feel the ground beneath you? That is where it stays. Marnie says, What if I don’t want to be orbiting? Evil tells her that orbiting doesn’t hurt and Marnie feels rescued.

Evil is afraid of sickness. She sees sicknesses on the news that are happening mostly in far away places like Africa and imagines tumors beneath her skin. She imagines the fluids inside her body and the interruption of their movement, and she believes that she can feel her heartbeat going wrongish. Marnie says, How many fingers am I holding up? She says, Give me your wrist, and she shows Evil her pulse. If that doesn’t work, she takes Evil to see Doctor Walker and they read nature periodicals in the waiting room until he can check Evil’s heartbeat. Marnie tells Evil that nature is good and right, and Evil feels rescued.

Marnie doesn’t have a father anymore. He drove away on her sixth birthday with the grandfather clock strapped to the backseat of his Fiat Spider convertible. He could be either dead or alive. Sometimes Marnie thinks she can feel him, she thinks she can connect brains with him and send him waves of colors and emotions and he can return them. Sometimes there is only silence.

Evil has both parents. She also has a guinea pig named Cannabis and a wiener dog named Grapefruit. She says, Boy, that dog is hot. Their house is big and everyone living in it has dark curly hair that doesn’t get combed. Their eyebrows, also, are dark. The bathtub in the house is apricot-colored with clawed feet. Evil washes in it with almond-flavored soap that smells like marzipan and in the morning Marnie likes to smell her hair when it is still wet. Sometimes in the wintertime it freezes in a point at the bottom and she pokes Marnie with it, which Marnie pretends not to like.

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