ShrimpShady

  Alison was born gasping for air, flesh equally hers and her mother's constricting her meager throat. As she grew up, she’d always stand out because of her red hair, which stayed true to her roots. It turned bright as saffron in the midday and rich like velvet drapes at sunset. When she was a little girl, her mother had fashioned it into a bob resembling a cherry from behind.

  That was how she looked when I first saw her. She saved me from drowning by the pier near home. Then she promised to teach me to swim if I taught her to fish because I put in her head, a mop of licorice, that there were sturgeon swimming in the river. An old man told my father about it, who then told me about it a while back. Suffice it to say that all fell through. We bounced pns of how we’d catch the sturgeon off of one another, her suggesting we got our dads to wrestle it. My father wasn’t around, though. In between our exchanges, I invented excuse after excuse for why we couldn’t start my swimming lessons yet. By the end of summer, we had neglected our promise, and I didn’t see her again until I entered my teens.

  The countryside hasn’t changed much, other than the trees feeling shorter. Wading through dusty paths, I make my way to where we met for the second time. It’s a rotten corpse of a pyground, decayed so severely that I can’t tell the difference between now and then. Leaning against the slide, I strain my ears in search of a red cardinal. There used to echo songs of all kinds from the trees, but they’ve gone quiet.

  I was much older when I saw Alison again, a couple hairs growing haywire from my chin. She sat on a weeping swing set, crooning while cradling an acoustic guitar. She turned to me as I approached, but she didn’t recognize me at first. I grew my hair out to cover up the zits on my forehead. But I knew her instantly. Whether Alison was six or fourteen, eyes wouldn’t change. They narrowed as her fwless cheeks gave way to a toothy smile.

  I took a seat beside her and we caught up, somewhat, about my pn to go to college in the city. My father failed, and I had no siblings, so I was my family’s only hope. As I spoke, she leaned forward, cocking her head and letting her hair cascade over the knees brought up to her chest. She only listened. Her pursed lips looked like a little bird’s beak, and her attentive hums resonated with some pitch inside me. When I paused, she slipped a cigarette between her waxy lips. You couldn’t tell a difference between the fme of her lighter and her eyes. I’d never seen a girl smoke, and the whole scene pyed out as if viewed through a peephole. As an adult, whenever I saw a cigarette butt, I’d look for even the faintest stain of her lipstick. I think I’d know if it was hers.

  After a while, she stamped out one st butt. Then we promised to talk some more, swimming lessons and sturgeon-fishing being brought up in jest somewhere along the dying notes of our conversation. I realized as I eyed her departing figure that I was already hooked. Her reticence was alluring, as if she kept secrets locked behind those pursed lips. She was stunning like nobody else, and my mind would have the sylbles of her name jump over a fence all throughout the night.

  She’d be there mostly in the summers, and I’d met her in four. The girl stayed quite a ways away in a house that was incomparable to anything else I’d seen. That being said, I’d never been there personally. And I can’t bring myself to visit now. It was an immense white and gray affair, propped up by pilrs stolen from the British Museum, and with verdant arches funneling people through a cobblestone pathway. Behind the house, as she told me, was an apple orchard with fruits that I just had to try. I never got to, though.

  Her house was almost painful to look at for a poor old rat like me. She was surprisingly unbothered by my living in a shack with my mother, though. In fact, Alison admired the closeness she interpreted based on her mind’s image of it. She wasn’t exactly fond of home either. She’d often spend time away from it and hung out with folks who did worse than cigarettes. The five of them fancied themselves a band, again, mostly for the summertime. Even though she had known the leader since she was a kid, Alison had only joined them a couple of years prior. Her guitar would swirl in their dense, psychedelic soundscapes, and the sweetness from her lips seemed to sing with your breath.

  They practiced in an old shed. Their leader, an 18-year-old who sang and pyed bass in only the most tenuous sense, tolerated my presence so long as I was on media duty. The thing was, the drummer did have a camera but didn’t know composition if it shot him in the face. So, I started taking photos and videos for them. They were brilliant, by their admission. I even reconsidered going to college because of it. I had thoughts of selling fish pictures to nerds putting together field guides. I toiled with these thoughts as I hung out more with Alison and the band.

  That all proved to be short-lived, unfortunately. The leader lost his mind by the end of the next summer, or as Alison put it one evening while nursing a broken string: he never ended up finding it. In hindsight, he was probably schizophrenic. The drugs didn’t help either. Circa You, as the band only just decided on calling themselves, hadn’t even put anything to tape when he shot his cousin up in the hills, a man who used to hang around and who stole from Alison’s orchard. He got ‘em good, he said, in his sick guts. Put ‘em down like a dog. We stopped hanging around the leader after that. It hit Alison the worst, but he did it for her. He ruined his life for her.

  By the following summer, the band was kaput. Nobody knew where anybody else was, but Alison and I got closer. We were joined at the shoulder at that point, and I did all I could to hold her up. We’d still frequent the shed as it continued to decay. The silence heightened our other senses, and I became drawn to the intricacies of her every breath, twitch of muscle, and the way stray strands of hair would rebel against the translucent hand tucking them behind an ear.

  She pyed a song for me once, the girl slipping her lit cigarette in her headstock. She pyed as if she were three and sang as only she could. It was a skeletal piece, far removed from her old band’s yered sound. I felt her pale fretting fingers on my skin as she closed her eyes and settled into a slouch like an idle marionette. Her chest bobbed in short, caught breaths.

  Near the end of her performance, a twig fell on her head through a hole in the roof, and as I picked it off, she looked up at me. I was bound to her gaze. Something otherworldly existed within her pupils that was as addictive as it was a hazard to study. Everything I could've said was lost in their vortex.

  Now, kudzu had eaten the shed, and my shoes squelch in little mossy puddles as I step inside. The air is pungent with rust. Mushrooms grow out of the tattered couch where we sat, and sunlight shoots through the metal walls. When I close my eyes, though, the shed feels no different from all those years ago, as if its soul is still in here. I expect to see her as I turn my head, but of course, she isn’t there. The humming I hear isn’t hers either. I’d never see her again.

  I always knew something was up with her, more or less. I’d catch her staring off into space sometimes, and her silences seemed more like she was gagged by words.

  One day, Alison told me about her parents. Her mother stared off into space as well, so she was kept home most days. The woman never forgave herself, believing her first act of motherhood was to harm her baby. Meanwhile, Alison’s father was barely ever home. When he was, he never had much nice to say about his youngest daughter. She was behind her peers in most things, a chain smoker, and more trouble than she was worth. His daughter was out and about in some unsavory business, he suspected, only compounded by her older siblings’ gossip. He’d warned never to let anybody touch her. Not until a husband was in the picture. The man’s derision was only ever assuaged by the kindly words of his young wife, who, after five arduous pregnancies, had remarkable sensibility.

  A little before we reunited, Alison’s mother had killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. There was only so much to glean from an open bottle of antidepressants. And Alison confided in me while we sat by this very ledge, just a few steps through the trees behind the shed, that she was gd her mother went on her own terms and in peace. I wonder how it felt, I heard her ask. Maybe like the moment before you fall asleep, when your thoughts, no matter their nature, were fleeting. Alison wished her thoughts could always be that way.

  It was close to sunset then, just like now. The sunlight grazed us in patches. It was all silent, save for a red cardinal. Then a smoky breath carried her words. She asked what to do with herself. I pulled her head to my chest, and she spoke words muffled by my shirt, but I heard a plea for help. I realized my embrace was the only thing keeping together this doomed sand sculpture.

  Alison rolled up her sleeve and told me of each of her pains, proceeding sequentially. When my mom killed herself, she said, my dad went easier on me. It seemed he no longer saw meaning in chastising his youngest child, and she had been left more or less to her own devices. It was an odd feeling, though, she said. She likened it to breaking out of your coffin, only to find you’ve been buried at sea. She felt she had nothing to hold onto. Despite her oddities, the girl adored her kindly mother. And seeing her stuck in time like that consumed Alison’s every waking thought.

  I told her how strong she was, in spite of everything. The guilt over what had happened with the band leader and the man he shot still ate away at her as well, but I assured her it was between two adults. She didn’t have to despair over what they chose for themselves.

  The girl then asked if I still wanted to go to college. I didn’t really, as I found photography and fishing to be infinitely more fulfilling than reading, but I told her I did and that I would. I’d go to college in the big city, and I’d bring her along, and she could forget about everything that happened in this dingy town. I’d take care of her. She didn’t need her father, I told her.

  Alison smiled, and then she stood up. I followed her, and as the taller half, she crouched down slightly to kiss me on the cheek. I lost myself in her gaze, as usual. She must’ve said something too, but then she turned to leave. I had failed once again to tell her I loved her.

  That was the st day I’d see her bloodbeating skin. I called in sick at first, but I did end up seeing her. It had only been a week. Her sisters had changed her into an airy white dress, something she never wore. She had washed up the riverbank that the ledge oversaw. They cleaned her up well, though, as I couldn’t even tell.

  Still a lustrous red, her hair y like she had merely been asleep, tossing and turning. The curve of her lips, too subtle for a smile, called to mind what she said about her own mother’s peace. They had made up the scars on her wrists, too, as if they made her unpresentable. I wished I could’ve touched her.

  Her father was there, in the corner of the room. He didn’t know me. I saw her band members too, save for their leader, and they and everybody else thought of it as a tragic surprise. Only I understood her from the beginning. No one else loved her as I did. Only I found the beauty beneath the pains of flesh and mind she bore. But in the end, I couldn’t save her.

  Her ghost had possessed my muscles then, and I found myself a heaving mess, once again, at the cliff behind the shed. At a te summer’s sunset. I’d find myself back here time and time again as the years passed, as I went to college and gave up on photography, as I forgot how to tie a fishing knot, as I never learned to swim, and as the sturgeons disappeared from the river by the back of the vacant house I once called my own. I could only sit on the ledge.

  The day dies before me. Alison’s hair seems to glow across the sky beyond the ledge, stars speckle about the strands as if pilgriming to earth. I hum the best I could a song Alison liked to sing, and her cool breaths lull every single anxious child in my cells. Closing my eyes, I imagine her apple orchard, though I’d never seen it. I imagine taking a bite of the fruit I never got to have, under the shade of evergreen leaves.

  Now and then, Alison would come to me. The only girl I’ve ever loved grew more beautiful and even more indelible as her form took precedence over every arousal of every sense I had, and am now a prisoner to. I'd see her in a red-haired stranger, in a discarded cigarette, and in between trees on summer nights. I'd hear her in every grouchy voice of a woman woken up, and sweet melody hummed in the woods. Her soul, wrung out of the girl’s liminal body, haunted my every other thought.

  “Hey.”

  I turn to the voice. The woman peeks out from the front of the shed. Crimson hair sweeps over her eyes. She wipes her hand with a handkerchief as she makes her way over to the ledge. Bug bites blend with the freckles on her itchy cheek.

  She holds my hand.

  “I’m done, so let’s head back already. The bugs are killing me,” she tugs, “What’re you looking at anyway?” she stops in her tracks and follows my gaze to the horizon.

  “I was just thinking how the sunset reminded me of lustrous red hair.”

  She grins and yanks me down by the colr. The trees rustle behind her, and somewhere, wings fp. Her frigid hands seize my face and turn it to hers. As our lips meet each other, I wonder why I smell cigarettes.

  It’s nearly dark now. A cardinal sings, but she tells me it’s just a mockingbird. Only after a while does she pull back and ask,

  “You brought me all the way here just to say that? You must really love me.”

  “Yeah,” I search for a cigarette butt in the ground, “I do.”

  She kisses me again and thank God she closed her eyes.