Mother comes into my bedroom. She drops a black trash bag on my leg. Her feet are bare and tan, crisscrossed by sun. You’re too old to play with stuffed animals now, she says. She doesn’t crouch, take my face into her dish-soapy hands. She doesn’t say, Bring them back from their adventures first. She’s already gone, perfume like Father’s cigar smoke. The kitchen faucet water rushes through the pipes in the wall then stops. A plate slides in the drying rack. The faucet turns on—off—another plate.
Raggedy Andy is on my pillow, staring at the clothes-hanger paper mobile. He doesn’t like it—how it begins turning without breeze. Hanging in prayer around my bedpost is the yellow chimpanzee I tried giving to my babysitter, but she said her stuffed animals went in her closet when she married. Father’s closet is padlocked. The combination in his head in a helmet an ocean away. I’ve seen Mother turning the dial.
I shut the door. Father painted my room dark blue. He ran out in the upper right corner. The paint store was closed. In the morning, they took him back to where children turn into fireworks.
I’ll suffocate, Boxy the turtle says. Mother found him in a booth in the diner. The same people drink coffee every afternoon. They play board games. One man brings jolly ranchers to only the women and children. They melt the change together in Mom’s apron, the car ashtray.
There’s a TV in the corner of the diner like in the hospital room in Father’s older letters. Mother watches for Father’s face in the war footage on channel three. They all look the same, she says, squinting. She calls Grandmother from the diner to ask if that was him—channel three—a second ago—holding the hand of an arm torn from a child’s body. All the bodies look the same, laundry bags full of flesh.
I line the animals against the wall. From one corner to the electric outlet. Their black glass eyes clink against the wall.
Father came home last July. I waited for dark with the brown paper bag full of sparklers. The park fireworks whistled. People clapped far away. Mother sat by Father on the front step. He was hunched over, ears between knees, her hand hovering above his back. Look! I said, holding my squirtgun by my cheek, shooting so I looked like a fountain. She covered her eyes. I threw my gun at the sidewalk. He shook his head. Only one firework got above the trees. Red like Father’s eyes in the photographs in Mother’s closet.
I slide my squirtgun from my mattress. The mold-line is super-glued. The white trigger jiggles. I aim at the back of Raggedy Andy’s red yarn head. I fire—fire—fire—fire. Until his head is heavy, drooping, forehead slumped to the carpet. I aim at the next head, the next, water gurgling through the trigger hole, the next, leaking into my hand, down my wrist.
I wrap the bodies in my pillowcase. I stick my arm in the trash bag. The plastic smells like the end of something. If I crawl all the way in, I’ll end up on channel three.