“Tell your Mommy to read!” Honk thrust his sagging eye-balled buttocks at your mother. She dropped to her knees behind him, crying, and put on her glasses. She tilted her head down to the small letters that swirled into his ass-eyes, read: And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Meth.

“Even your ass is corny,” your mother screamed at him, when they ran out and fought. You covered your ears. You covered your eyes. None of this was right for a little girl. Even your ass is corny. Even if you knew nothing but this, you still knew this was wrong. (At school, there were other girls, other boys, too, with the same look as you. Like someone had put lit cigarettes out on their souls.)

“Cuddle Room!” Tonk repeated. “Cuddle Room!” So tweaky-excited his voice climbed halfway to screech. “We have a winner!”

Mommy saw you in the Cuddle Room door, but she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, on account of the whiffle ball in her mouth. (Mommy was always letting Tonk put things in her mouth: whiffle balls, socks, frozen turkey legs, dollheads. It was another thing you kind of wanted to ask about, but were kind of afraid to find out.) Tonk didn’t see you at all, but your Mom’s eyes went cartoon-wide. You ran out. Sat in your dirt patch yard, watching ants. Focused. Felt something funny in your stomach. Maybe you’d breathed in some army ants. You liked to lean close and watch them haul dirt with their little pincers. Ants, the one thing you remember from science, could carry twenty times their body weight. If you could do that you would carry Tonk to the interstate, then you’d wait for a semi, then you’d drop him in front of it. Then you’d go home and take the pincushion or whatever out of Mommy’s mouth. Untie her hands and make cocoa.

From the time you were tiny, your earliest baby-baby memory, whenever you
woke up and opened your eyes, your moth-er was staring at you. Nights you and your little brother spent in the SRO, with the bedbugs and the stinky toilet down the hall, you’d wake up and she’d be sitting there, eyes two inches from yours, like she was trying to burn you with them. The same thing every night, radio tuned low to Coast to Coast with Art Bell, where people from towns in Kansas called in about alien abductions. Now, Art, I don’t mean to get racy here, but they touched my private parts, and they left a shiny silver dollar inside my brain. It shows up on X-rays, Art. The closest you came to meeting an alien was Tonk. You had to go to Kansas to meet spacemen. The closest Mommy came to sleeping was when she was zombied out. White zombie, Tonk called it later, when you left the shelter and moved to the snailback. White zombie, because her eyes were open and you could see the whites. She looked like she wanted to bark.