by Naomi K Lewis
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I: Wolf!
WHO KNOWS WHO I was before the autumn I turned eight. Timmy to my mom, Timbelina to the lunchroom villain squad, Sir Timothy Brian F. the Fantabulous to future biographers. Then came my birthday, Mommy’s cake all sky blue with white marshmallow clouds and Superman flying fist forward, a week or two before the trees in our neighbourhood started to shed yellow and red leaves. And then came the Saturday I smashed down onto a raked-up pile of them and straight to observation.
I’d heated my forehead against the radiator that morning and clung to the bedframe claiming smallpox, but my mother said, get out get out, I have eight hundred canapés to make. So I dodged around knife-wielding Mommy in the kitchen and donned my red boots and redder cape, which billowed behind me as I skidded down into the gulley behind our cul-de-sac fast as fast though Maryland tick season was long over. Across the stream at the bottom in a single bound and I heaved myself up the other side, knees up, knees up, slipping on the rotting leaves and drying grass. Music was playing, but not the kind I wanted to hear.
“Swing low, sweet chariot ...”
My back-to-back neighbour, Kate Katie Kate Kate a.k.a. Katherine-Ann—yes, Bass, the one and only—bounced on the Batman-blue trampoline in her back yard, singing along with a record playing through the open back-porch door. “Coming for to carry me home ...” I liked it when she went up and her hair went tight like a plastic bowl on her head. Down and the hair rose into hedgehog bristles, her plaid shirt bloating out to show her belly button above black stretchy pants. The pants fastened round the bottoms of her pink-socked feet.
“Don’t go in,” she said as I marched up the porch’s steps. “Dad’s waxing Mommy’s bikini area.” I checked, my face up against the screen door. Dark shapes moved inside.
“And,” said Dr. Bass. “Aaand—”
Dr. Bass’s wife said a word we don’t say, one fast bad syllable.
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about the author
NAOMI K. LEWIS lives, writes, edits and teaches in Calgary. Her story collection I Know Who You Remind Me Of was published in 2012, and she co-edited Shy: An Anthology (UAP, 2013) with Rona Altrows.
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