SILAS — Jubili Bamzai-Wokhlu
Esther-Jane “Turtle” Libby has four names and wears them all at once. She also has three jackets, and wears these all at once. She wishes she had four jackets. She wishes the world was fuzz, and with four jackets, it probably could be.
The big one on the outside is from her big brother. He came back on a Tuesday when no one was home with his first paycheck and took her to the Gear Exchange where he worked. Then he said she could pick anything. She couldn't drag her eyes off this olive green parka on the wall that was two feet taller than her, and in the "teens" section. But Si smiled like a kid. “I see you Turtle. Very reptilian chic.” She kicked his knee and threatened to call him “Silly” for the rest of his life and so he stopped the stupid jokes and brought it down. She tried it on right there in the aisle. It felt like a portable hug. She loved that parka in a way she’d never really loved anyone, and it loved her back about as much as a faux-fur-trimmed clothing article could.
When they got back, their Dad’s face did something and her brother just smiled and said it's already paid for. But it was Dad who looked like he could be named Silly then. It was so cartoonish, how his eyes rolled around. He was shaking one trembling finger like a schoolteacher. Who could take that seriously? She’d never seen anyone do that in real life. But she didn't see the rest.
It comes down past her knees. The sleeves eat her hands whole. It encases her like an embryonic sack, the stomach lining a warm snake with the charitable resolve to dislocate its jaw and swallow her.
The first layer, the sweatshirt, was to distract from what her brother, waxing poetic but not wholly, called the “bone-cracking cold.” The second one actually helps her remember that once in her life she had been warm. The third holds a special power: a pocket universe. The truth of the matter was that Esther-Jane “Turtle” Libby was so fond of layers that she looked at reality and decided there should be more of them.
There was something magical about that coat. She could tell when she first put it on: it really felt like a hug from the inside, not in the aggrandizing way whimsical people talked about pumpkin spice lattes, but really. Not from anyone in particular: there wasn't someone to think about these days, only a blank space when she tried to conjure it in her mind--- but a hug in the abstract, with vaguely dream-like confusion, the way you'd imagine one if you were trying to remember what they felt like.
She pulls it tighter and something in her goes numb. Fuzzy, like soft TV static. Fuzzy like a comfy sweater. Fuzzy like that time of day when she’d take her socks off, and rub her feet together like a cicada. Like the release of falling asleep when her mind sank away from a down comforter, into something softer, easier, less than. With the resolution lower, the world was just dream-like enough that Esther began to realize she could shift the channel.
She tunes the mirage like a radio dial. It still smells like sweet cigarettes, like burning paper. She loves that heady smell.
In the silk dimension, there is definitely baking going on. Something baking, or just the idea of something baking, the warmth of an oven spreading from somewhere in the house. They’re probably making cinnamon pancakes scrambled and stuck to Teflon.
Yes. Her mother makes pancakes badly, adding cream cheese frosting to an acrid chemical mess… and wants her to be the taste tester. Terrifying. Fear pangs her heart: her name is being yelled from somewhere, somewhere far far off.
But Dad, thank god, comes to the rescue. He distracts Mom by doing a Transatlantic accent into the spatula to read out prompts from the crossword. He's actually pretty good at it, voice unspooling, muffled and crackling like from a phonograph–-no, fast forward a decade— he's like a radio show host, veering in and out of static. If she stays here surely they’ll forget her, forget they needed a taste-tester to swallow down that chemical gook in the first place. It's cozy, in Si-guy’s old closet, there’s a flashlight and a bunch of thrifted guidebooks. None of them are that interesting, but this is Esther-Jane “Turtle” Libby we're talking about here, she thinks—like she's an announcer now too. She’s happy to just make a game out of breathing: a roulette between sweet ash and acrid, throat-burning odor.
They are working on the crossword, calling letters across the table to each other in the warm scrambled language of people who belong with each other.
Seven letters, her mother says. Means nothing.
Worthless, her father guesses cheerfully.
That's eight.
Mommy’s got a constellation of freckles dotting down her nose and cheeks, but they're disappearing: it's been months since she's seen the sun. But Si only warmed in the freezing weather. Whenever he came back he’d accumulate more white freckled indents punched out of his arms that hurt to look at. There was something beautiful and harsh about those spots: they looked like the milky condensation haloes from Mom and Dads’ coffees that were bleaching the table wood, damaging the amber grain.
But when she asked him about it, he would just bluster about how the majestic and alien wasteland capital-C Changes you.
Si loved this time of year. He’d rhapsodize about the rugged beauty of snowstorms and the mountains up until the point you physically gagged him, tied him up, and left him on his boyfriend's carpet. But not for long, because he would probably be able to untie the knot with his teeth. Once upon a time, Si was a perfect little Boy Scout.
“Six letters?” Dad announces, dropping the accent. “And it says ‘tempest’ but the third letter is U.”
“It’s gotta be STORMS, surely we’ve messed another one up.”
“In life and in pancakes, it’s best practice to throw the first one out,” Dad says with fake deepness.
“We might have to throw the first ten out,” Mom says, nose scrunching up.
They must be getting distracted by the crossword. No one burns bacon the way Mommy burns bacon, the way that flooding above the sweet smoke, behind the whiff of blistered pork, throbs something else that’s rank and cancerous.
Turtle hated when Si started talking about solitude because it meant he wouldn't be coming back for a while. He'd go on about a cerulean crystalline world, icicles glistening like alien flora, the smell of cold water. She had nightmares about squalls burying him until spring, when they'd find his body thawed out like frozen meat.
Her dad is saying something ridiculous in the kitchen. He's a silly guy, garbles words together just for the sound of it sometimes.
"Five letters! They let him have it with a tire iron." He's laughing with his whole body.
Her mother smiles. Such a beautiful smile, infectious, glowing, like someone just placed a tabby cat on her lap. "I wouldn't say that thing's name again if you paid me!"
"Thank god we're not like him," he replies, with false solemnity.
Mom rolls her eyes, but you can tell she's amused. There's a glint in the corner of her eyes that looks a lot like Si’s, when he’s about to make a joke.
"No, it's really horrific though. I mean, the Clancy's brought us sympathy casserole."
"With marshmallows?"
"With marshmallows."
“Jesus Christ.”
Her father nods, face serene. "It's tragic."
Late late late that night, when they'd passed out in the kitchen, she'd tiptoe over and gorge on every third marshmallow in the sweet potato pie, with an ecstatic fervor, flattening them out till it looked as unblemished as the immaculate snow blanketing over footprints. Rendering her as invisible as the whole town of ghosts.
Outside, a car hasn't moved in three days. Snow fills its windshield like a closed eye, as white as the screaming blur as the closet door is wrenched open.
Jubili Bamzai-Wokhlu is a high school junior from Florida previously published in Phosphorescent Lit, who prefers to read Plato at least 10,000 feet above sea level. You can find her freestyle rapping at the crag, running to folk music in the rain and, of course, pulling accidental all-nighters writing.