Robyn Carter
1. THE DISPATCHFrom Fifty-One to Eleven
When you were five the sky looked so enormous it was invisible. Then your big-kid eyes grew in at nine and you saw its shortcomings in a documentary about the Apollo Missions. From space, it’s nothing really, just a webby membrane coating the world in a thin, blue hum. Back then you didn’t think about how it’s all that separates us from never-ending darkness.
But now that you’re eleven, you do. You’re hardly a kid anymore. You know the same amount of math most grown-ups do: enough to figure out which set of loom bands is the better deal on Amazon. You know who to ignore on the bus and who to pay attention to. You know what those things in purple boxes at CVS are for. You know how you got out of your mom’s swollen belly, but also the routine and mind-blowing way you got in.
How everything starts from nothing, then something explosive but also way too small or far away to see. Not just people, but language and galaxies and pandemics and plastic.
How a single sheet of paper that comes in the mail can instantly turn your life inside out. Even if you crush it in your fist or rip it into a hundred pieces, its power won’t die. But blue whales are 98 feet long and 190 tons, yet so fragile the whole species is on the brink of extinction.
And how enamel is the hardest substance in the human body. Harder than bone. Harder than steel, according to scientists who study things like that. But what does hardness mean anyway if it can be softened by Fruit Loops or jellybeans or those shoes Second-Meanest-Mean-Girl’s mom got her at Payless?
Your body knows how far it can jump, where hands and feet go in a cartwheel. And up until now, as each new fact came along, you found a place for it among the others.
But now your old system is crumbling under a brood of spiny new truths that slither through your ears, prick your eyes, lump up in your throat, challenge the seams of your shirt and the boys in your class. Or they thrash around, loose and wild because facts like these don’t seem to belong anywhere.
Like how in presidential elections, the candidate with the most votes doesn’t always win, or how the universe is expanding, but expanding into what?
Like how all of a sudden, blood is the new teeth.
Or, like how the padding and rules of elementary school disappear the instant you start sixth grade and finally notice broken glass is sharp and concrete is hard.
Like how you still know what you know, but now also what you don’t know.
Or like how that poster in the library says, Better a broken arm than a broken spirit, but you’re pretty sure there are ways you can have both at the same time.
And like how the Mean Girls got good grades on that project about standing up to bullies mostly because they know how to turn their weapons invisible and slip them beneath your skin without leaving any obvious wound.
If you are an eleven-year-old girl and then an eleven-year-old girl with an open secret, your mission is to scramble from a landscape where the sky and the ground are constantly trading positions to a room where walls grow like hair and curves in strange, new places.
The only way to survive is to tell yourself the laughter is a layer of feathers you can count on to break your fall even though you know that net of hysterics is made out of the giggles and howls of all the Barbies you’ve dreamed about mutilating over the years but never actually did.
Sharpies and safety scissors don’t leave deep enough scars.
The kind of things you get used to. Like that sleepy chemical smell in the laundromat, or the whir of clicks and likes that finally stops when you stick a finger in the blades of bright, quiet noise. Still, you mourn the reaching because there’s no going back now. An offer of acceptance is proof you are an outcast.
Take it or leave it.
Or warm your hands in its hot glow for just a second. Actually, just one hand. With the other, reach into the back of the blue shelf above the paper cutter and find the tiny jar of baby teeth I keep there, even though only one or two of them are actually your own. Unscrew the lid and swirl a finger through the mineral spill. Tiny casualties of sugar or impending adolescence–– whichever came first––from the mouths of classmates and stranger-kids who are now just more grown-ups you don’t know.
Now, close the jar and shake it. Its density in your palm feels unfamiliar now but won’t forever. I weighed it once on a little food scale I found in the back of the closet atop a pile of yellowing workbooks framed in mouse shit and dice. Twenty-two grams. One more than a soul, according to people who measure that sort of thing. Twice the number of years you’ve spent on earth.
When you’ve had enough, put it back, but hold onto its juicy rattle and rot. That part is yours to keep.
No one can take it away from you.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYA kitchen sponge (to remind me to buy more)
A clay head my son made when he was little
A jar of safety pins and tiny plastic pigs
An old mannequin torso I found in a dumpster or something decades ago
3. BIOGRAPHYRobyn Carter’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Colorado Review, Playboy and other places. She is a two-time winner of the San Francisco WritersCorps Teaching Artist in Residence grant award. When she is not writing fiction or creative nonfiction, she writes for websites that sell sleep and substance abuse treatment, and/or she teaches writing to kids and prisoners. Robyn is the owner-operator of a fictional small business called A Toy Store Not a Real Store.