Eclipsing Cannon Street by Anya Groner

        “What’ll it be boy?”  Keisha is inches from her older brother Desmond’s face, her scowl bathed in his sweet, ripe breath. “I don’t have all day.”  Her skinny arm forms a triangle against her hip. This evening she is master of ceremonies, nuking marshmallows and dishing out S’mores on plastic plates to her big brother’s neighborhood friends, a pack of rabble rousers twice her age who tear up curbs with their bikes and stick lit matches in their mouths to impress each other. “One marshmallow or two? Chocolate melted or not?” In the kitchen she stares expertly into the microwave. She is waiting for the revolving marshmallows to expand into white snowballs so that she can crush them between graham crackers and watch the innards spill over the edges like the professor’s white stomach spills over his belt.

“I don’t even like chocolate,” Keisha tells the professor, a quiet man who’d been either kind enough to let the kids hang in his house or too tired to stop them. Even so, the S’mores had been her idea, a birthday party for Desmond, though his birthday was in March. She is shining tonight; her fingers sticky, melted chocolate splashed across her shirt, eyes ablaze. Steeping in purpose, she is boss, and yet barely aware that serving chocolate to the boys she loves is an act of martyrdom and grace, creating celebration out of the dust pile of boredom. In her loose fitting tights and her baggy ripped shirt, she is not just a girl, not even a big girl, but at five years old, mysteriously woman.

After the boys have eaten, Keisha tiptoes behind the professor as he surveys his living room, his big legs pounding across the floor while she collects plates.   Together they cross the ravaged landscape, the professor assessing the party damage. His eyes fall upon brown chocolate stains on the plush fabric of his yellow armchair. Desmond is lying back over the arm of the chair, his shoes on the fabric like Mama told them never to do. The professor lowers his eyes and looks at the lumpy bag of skin that is Keisha’s brother.  Keisha stands behind the professor.

“Wash your hands,” he booms.

Keisha crosses her arms and squints at her brother. “Wash your hands,” she mouths.

Desmond looks up and shrugs. “Says who?”

“Says me. Your gracious host.” Behind the professor Keisha sticks out her tongue and crosses her eyes, mocking both the professor and Desmond. “Whose house are you in?” the professor asks.

Desmond stands up, and scuffs his foot on the wood floor. “Chill yourself. I’m going. It was a joke.” He shuffles to the kitchen. “I’ll never be like him,” he mumbles. Behind him the boys laugh. 

Keisha smiles and is about to join in when Desmond catches her eye.  “Careful Keish, or I’ll tell Mom about you know what—”

“What’ll you tell?” Keisha asks.

“Anything I want,” Desmond says. “I’m boss.”

“That’s what you think.”

After the S’mores are eaten and the boys have cleaned up, the sticky mouths of the children begin to slow. Their breathing falls into a monotonous rhythm as their bodies, draped like throw blankets over the furniture, grow heavy. Keisha, no longer interested in organizing her brother and his friends, has curled up next to Desmond on the couch. Her eyes are still fluttering, nearly closed, as she breathes in the soft current of the boys’ conversation.  Desmond lies listless beside her, chocolate smeared like lipstick on his face, and Austin, his best friend, is reciting his usual droning grumble about the classical music coming from the speakers. It is almost seven and though it is still light outside, the first fireflies flash their twilight musings against the drone of the cicadas and tree frogs. Half asleep, Keisha listens to the professor on the phone in the kitchen.

“Goddamned kids,” she hears him say, and then after a pause  “It’s no big deal.  They’re sleeping now…  I know. But what else can I do? They’re bored. In this neighborhood, they’ll get into trouble.”  The professor clears his throat.  “Well what would you do if you were in my position?  Their mother is always working. Maybe it’s a trade, some of my life, for some of theirs. But that’s not true… I’ll be gone soon enough anyway,” he pauses.  “Keisha was so happy tonight, glowing really. If it wasn’t for her I’d—” and he trails off, side swept by some new thought.  Lying on the couch in the living room, Keisha grins and pride rises inside her like steam off a smoke stack.

Keisha awakens to the click of the door latch. The professor is walking through the front door. It takes some time before her eyes adjust to the night and at first she cannot see the long, black chest in his arms. She is the only one of the children awake. The boys are asleep around her, their bodies draped like throw blankets over the couches. They breathe noisily in the humid room.

Across the room the professor notices her watching and catches her eye. “C’mere,” he whispers. Her eyes are still fluttering, nearly closed. He places the empty vessel in front of the fireplace.  Keisha pulls herself up and walks over to the chest to peer inside.

The box is four feet long and two feet deep, the perfect size for a small child to lie down in.  Keisha squints her eyes and examines the painting on the side of the box, a carnival scene complete with a purple and pink carousel, a rosy white ticket taker in a long tuxedo and red bow tie, and marshmallow clouds puffy enough to pop. It’s the horses that amaze Keisha most. Though they are connected to the top and bottom of the carousel with long metal poles, they look real—their bodies shiny and firm, muscles rippling beneath their brushed fur. Black and brown, they are breathtaking atop the most magnificent—a chestnut mare with a black braided tail—sits a girl about Keisha’s age in a slender yellow dress, her back to the painting. Her posture is perfect, neck straight and shoulders squared, and a polka dot ribbon falls down the brim of her hat and onto her back. Though she is the star of the painting, breathtaking in her finery, Keisha senses the girl’s unease. She cannot see her face, but she can feel an unsettling beneath her composure, something wrong in the way her ankles bend in right angles so that her feet slide perfectly into the stirrups, almost like the pole that connects the horse to the carousel connects the girl too, as she spins round and round, forever in the imaginations of her many admirers.

“Do you like it?” the professor asks.  Keisha inhales, drawing the crisp cedar smell deep into her nostrils. She nods, unsure if she really does or not. “Found it on the side of the road driving back from my dad’s place,” the professor mumbles. “Course I had to stop.” To Keisha, the chest looks like a hiding place, though not the cozy kind, more of a dark place for a dark heart, a corner for a person to disappear.

Summer on Cannon street is slow bones. The old folks sit on lawn chairs and talk about presidential scandals and how fast babies grow. They sip beer and turn meat on the grill and only occasionally do exciting things happen like when the ambulance pulled up to the house where no one lives and came out with a blanket-covered stretcher and a real dead body underneath. Ever since Keisha’s mom took that class at the rec center and came home with a Certified Nursing Assistant certificate to hang on the fridge, she’s been working night shifts and sleeping during the day with a mask over her eyes and blue ear plugs in her ears. 

Keisha’s oldest brother Terrence used to make life fun, bringing Keisha and Desmond to the pool or taking them down to the river to throw rocks at the gulls, but since he found himself a girlfriend, he doesn’t come home except for when he has to. He’d rather be sucking face on the old couch behind the neighbors’ shed, unaware that sometimes Keisha and Desmond peek from the yard and wonder why two people would shove their tongues together like slugs. With Terrence occupied and their mom working two shifts at the old people’s home the kids started going to the professor’s house.

They call him the professor because of his glasses. His house is dark, the curtains usually drawn.  Wooden masks with twisting horns and flashing yellow eyes hang ominously above his mantle. When the children ask where they’re from, his answers are far less exotic than the masks themselves. He collects his treasures on the street, not because he looks, but because he can’t help but see possibility in what other people discard.  Through his scavenging he usually has something interesting to reel them in—beads for a door or a greasy new chain to add to someone’s bike.

A week slips by, one eighth of summer swallowed, before the children are back at the professor’s house, drawn like ants to sugar. The orange glow of sunset slides thin between the slats of the window blinds and lights Keisha's cheeks as she examines the long black chest and its quiet possibility. Already her five-year-old eyes are foggy with hope as she imagines all the places she might go. “Anywhere you want,” the professor had said, exasperated, book half-finished on his lap. He’d already refused to let them bake, claiming the house thermometer would erupt if he added any more heat to the soupy hot air, and the pool was closed. “If you want to get away, go in the chest, just lie down and shut the lid and you’ll go wherever you want, China even. Well don’t just stand there staring, try it if you don’t believe me.”  Of course they hadn’t believed him, but what else was there to do?

            Desmond’s left hand hovers above the box. He turns to look at his overheated and grumpy audience. He is the first to follow the professor’s directions and use the box to travel. He’d been confident and excited for the game, but now he is hesitant, stalled by the momentary belief that the box actually is magic, knowing from his mother’s stories, that most magic is black magic.

As soon as he opens the lid, a clammy air slivers out. What is inside is certainly not the same as the bulging heat outside. Keisha’s eyes shine up at him, awed by her brother’s bravery. Of all the kids, she is the one little enough to believe the story is true, that people can cocoon themselves, transform like caterpillars to butterflies and travel to distant lands, magic in a moonbeam box.

“I’m going to Jamaica, to visit MeeMa,” Desmond announces, stepping inside. He bends his legs so he fits and Austin comes over to shut the lid. “Goodbye world,” he yells before the box closes and he disappears from view.

Keisha stares at the box and pulls at a loose thread on her stained blue shorts. Austin scratches the scab on his mosquito bite and wipes the blood down his leg making the shape of a rocket, a tattoo he plans on getting when he’s eighteen. Even the professor doesn’t pick up his book. He looks over at the children, or possibly through them, lost in some thought. The room is still. After a minute, Desmond pushes up the lid and shoots up like a jack-in-the-box. “I been to Jamaica and I saw this blue-black man. He gave me a drumstick and told me MeeMa was away, so I ate the chicken and threw the bone back.  You think it’s hot here, go down to Jamaica, mon. They be living in fire down on de island.”  He squints his eyes as if adjusting to the dark living room.  “I’m going again, I want to go to China like you said I could.”

            “Me first,” Austin rushes in. “You already went.” He lunges for the chest, but Desmond has closed the lid. Austin sits on top, moping. This time the anticipation is palpable in the room, like an extra heartbeat pumping into everyone’s bodies. There is silence from the box, and in the room only the in and out of breathing. Keisha’s brow scrunches together and forms a ridge between her eyes. Desmond has been gone so long, she wonders if he’ll ever make it back. Her legs feel weak and she wants him in the room with her, quick, before anything bad happens. She imagines the chest empty, his body hovering somewhere between here and China, caught perhaps in that hot, bubbling ocean in the center of the Earth. Her eyes scan the room, looking for consolation, but the other boys are riveted on the chest, uninterested and unaware of her mounting fear. It isn’t until she hears the thud of Desmond’s fists pounding the lid that she knows everything will be all right.

Austin stands up and opens the chest. This time Desmond just lays inside. “I went to China and them girls are sexy,” he breathes heavily. “I’m not even going to tell you what I saw, but it was dirty.” Desmond sits up and looks up and down at the air, as if standing before him is a shapely woman that only he can see.  “Mmm hmm,” he says, assessing and appreciating like he is one of the men from the stoops looking at the high school girls walking home from school. He stands up and karate kicks, slashing the air first with his arm and then with his foot. “Your go,” he tells Austin and sits down next to Keisha, whose eyes are so big they seem to fill up her entire face.

“You really go there, Desmond? Really?” she asks.

“Course I did,” Desmond answers. He pulls his eyes so they slant and shouts some pointy words while wavering his voice up and down wildly. “HI-ya, Hi-ya, pyong pong,” he yells. “You try.” He squeezes Keisha's shoulder. “Get outta here for awhile.” But Keisha shakes her head. “You scared?”

“No,” she replies, but doesn’t get up to show that she’s not.

After Desmond’s trip to China, Austin goes to New York in search of dancers he saw on a music video, and Niger goes to the zoo to see the Orangutan he missed visiting when the rest of his class took a field trip.

Keisha watches as the boys take turns jumping in and out of the box and finds herself once again drawn into the painting of the girl in yellow atop her striding carousel horse in a blue-sky world. Her eyes sting with jealousy and something wild within her tugs against its chains. Her heart rears inside her ribs and there is a pushing against her throat and eyes. She feels dizzy and powerful. She stands up and pounds the chest, anxious to release her pent up energy. “Hurry up. Stop hogging. We ain’t got all day.”  Niger pops out and she sticks her tongue out at him, “Elephant butt,” she says and jumps inside. Immediately cool air surrounds her, seeping from the wood. 

She closes her eyes and opens them, then closes them again. Lying in the bottom of the box, she doesn’t know what to do, how to make the magic happen. Is there a clicking of the heels, a word to repeat? Without destination or key, she is just a body in a box, scrunching her toes and then her face, desperately whispering every magic word she can think of, every word she’s been told not to say, and the words she’s been allowed to say too.  “Abracadabra, peanuts, fuck, monkey toes, please, shit, damn, up a tree, doing IT, touch your toes, never meant to make you cry, shake it, shake your thang, shake your thang, shack your thong, slick your tongue, sic your mom, she is gone, she is gone, she is gone.” And then she heard it. Quiet at first and then louder. Tinkly music, like a music box would make, metal being plucked by metal. Carnival music, slightly out of tune, speeding up and slowing down, like an unsteady hand is turning the crank of a music box.

Keisha shoots up, desperate and crying. She bumps her head on the closed lid of the box. She was there, at the carnival, and she knew it completely, because she heard, behind the music, the whinny of a horse, a sound she knows only from movies.

A month passes and Keisha still doesn’t have the courage to go inside the box again. Though the boys can hardly wait to get to the professor’s house each afternoon to travel, Keisha is hesitant, scared that she will get swept away into the world on the inside of the box, a world where Desmond and Terrence and her mother can’t find her. On the afternoons the boys travel, Keisha stays outside, talking to the old folks, playing with the neighbor’s baby, and waiting for her mom to get home.  For a while she hangs out with Terrence, hovering around him until he too pushes her away,  “Can’t you see I’m busy, I don’t need some shorty hanging around slowing me down.”  Even after he apologizes Keisha can’t quite forgive him. The old Terrence was always ready to play. But the new Terrence?  Keisha feels like she doesn’t even know him.

Keisha does not see the professor this whole time until one afternoon when her boredom has become desperation, she and Desmond decide to walk to the professor’s house. Drawing on all her five-year-old willpower, a force she imagines coming from her armpits and the backs of her knees, Keisha decides to lay herself down once again in the cedar chest. As they walk over, Keisha takes small steps, balancing on the side of the sidewalk, and Desmond, who only takes one step for each sidewalk square, has to keep waiting for her to catch up. 

“You really go to Jamaica that day, Desmond?” Keisha asks lazily. She sounds uninterested but really it is all she can think about, the music in the box, what happens when they travel one by one out of this world. 

“What, you don’t believe me?” Desmond says.

“I mean really really? Not pretend.”

“Sure. Remember how I told you how the bum gave me a drumstick? Well I still got the bone.” Desmond is grinning devilishly, the corners of his mouth reaching up towards his eyes.  They have almost reached the professor’s house.

“Really?”  Her heart beats faster. “Can I see it?”

“It’s in my room,” Desmond starts to say, but before he can respond their mom has screeched next to them in her black Explorer, sweating madly, her eyes wild and angry.  “Get in. Get in the car. We’re going to get Terrence. I said now.”

Keisha and Desmond hop in the back, for once not fighting over who sits where. Keisha’s mother slams on the gas and zips down the street. “Mama,” Keisha says, clutching her knees, the trip in the chest gone from her mind. “What happened?”

A string of angry words shoots from her mother’s mouth, clattering like broken mirrors.  Somewhere in the demolition Keisha hears her mother say, “He said they were getting beat up. Lord, I hope we make it in time.”

At first all Keisha sees when they arrive is the flashing. Blue and red lights bouncing off signs and doors and windows, like flickering TVs, only instead coming from the swirling bulbs on the tops of cop cars. A small crowd has gathered on a neighbor’s lawn, men and women shaking their heads. As Keisha and Desmond rush out of the car, Keisha hears a low moan rumble up from deep within her mother’s chest. Not until she is standing on the sidewalk does Keisha see what the people are staring at.

Shiny, dark puddles dot the hot black asphalt and in the middle of it, her crumpled brother lies belly up, heaving and coughing.  His thin wrist is outstretched reaching for his phone. His eyes are closed. Keisha squints. He does not look like Terrence, more like an animal, a run over, suffering, breathing lump. Limp. Possibly surviving, clutching his knees in towards his chest and rocking now, slowly, traffic moving around them as he leans forwards and back like a toy. Keisha reaches up for her mother and instead finds Desmond, spitting and kicking next to her. Her mother is busy, holding Terrence’s head, rocking with him now, speaking in two voices, her soul split, soothing and soft to her son, “it’ll be okay baby, mama’s here, it’ll be okay. I got you now.” And sharp, like metal on metal, to the cops, who are standing, writing things down, talking into black boxes. “Who did this? How did you let this happen? Well find them. FIND THEM and BRING THEM TO ME.” Standing on the shore of the blood puddle, Keisha sees her mother as animal too, frothing and big like a bear.  Hungry.

A teenager with a gray Yankees hat stands nearby, looking, but not seeing, his left eye bloodshot, his lip bleeding. A cop repeats her mom’s question, “Who did it?”

Keisha looks around, relieved to have at least found the right question in the blood and cars and lights.

“They ran,” the teen says, “but I know them, I know where they live.”

Terrence groans on the pavement.

“Who did it who did it whodidit.” The phrase is running faster and faster through Keisha’s head.  She looks up at the cop, waiting for his answer.  He is wrinkly and pink, sweat pooling under his red eyes, his fingers fat and bulging, mangled hat in hand, arm dangling by his side.

“Why do you kids do this to each other? What is the problem with you people?” he mutters loudly, takes a deep breath, and opens his mouth as if to keep going and then shuts it quickly.

“But we weren’t doing anything, Officer, we was just walking and then I pulled out my iPod and they jumped us for it. They were jealous. We didn’t do nothing.” The teen takes off his cap and looks directly at the officer. “Please.”

“Save it kid,” the officer says pulling out his walkie-talkie. “I’ve heard it before.”

            “Ask my mom, ask my teachers, ask anyone, I’m good, I ain’t bad. I never hurt anyone. I never caused no trouble,” the boy with the hat trails off.  He is crying and Terrence is limp, his eyes open and his head tilted back, blacked out someone says. “Stabilize his spine,” another voice cries out.  Medics rush through the crowd and suddenly there are hands all over, pink hands and brown hands, taking him away on a stretcher like the one that came out of the house earlier that summer, only this time it is Terrence and there is no blanket. Keisha’s mom yells at her to get in the car. Keisha and Desmond hop inside and before they’ve even reached for their seatbelts, the three of them are driving faster than Keisha has ever seen her mother drive, around cars, through lights, following the ambulance desperately, parting the sea of their mother’s tears to get to the hospital. So they can heal Terrence themselves, with their love she says, like the nurses at church, heal with their hands, like Jesus healed.

            Terrence has two broken ribs, a persistent concussion, and the rest are scrapes. The blood wasn’t his, but belonged to one of the boys that ran.  Someone, and Terrence wouldn’t say who, stabbed someone else, and that someone else deserved it, and ran, or limped, or was taken home. Terrence spends three nights in the hospital so the doctor’s can monitor his head.  Keisha’s mother keeps vigil, staring at her son, his broad jaw like his father’s, his Adam’s apple poking out of his throat like an offering.

Even though Terrence and his friend know the names of the kids who beat them, the police do nothing. Keisha overhears them say to her mother that they say they don’t have enough evidence, that these things happen all the time, that their people have to find a way not to be violent.  The problem, they say, belongs to her people and not to them. Until then Keisha has never thought that she might be the owner of a problem, and now, at five years old with small hands and knobby knees, she feels weighted down by this information. It is her people’s problem and they have to fix it. It belongs to her like her toes belong to her feet, like her head sits on her shoulders, like the road sits on the earth with the sidewalk beside.

During the three days after Terrence was attacked, Keisha and Desmond stay close to home. Desmond doesn’t ride his bike. Keisha sits on the porch, feeling that she should guard the house just in case, although in case of what she cannot say.  Each day the neighbor Ms. Thompson brings them to the hospital to visit their brother.  They crowd around his X-rays and eat Jell-O from his food tray. Sometimes Keisha curls into the crook of her mother’s armpit, lays her head on her mother’s breast. “Mama,” she says, “What’s gonna happen?”

When her Mama feels good, she croons and says softly, “Terrence is gonna get better and you and Desmond will grow and we’ll move into a bigger house and maybe Terrence will be a doctor, and Desmond will be a lawyer, and you, Keisha Peach, you will be whatever you want to be.” Keisha feels safe with her mother, breathing in her warm coffee smell through the soft fabric of her Mama’s shirt. But when she leaves the hospital, the comfort leaves too.  She can’t help feeling that it’s unfair that Terrence gets all her Mama’s love, that if she broke her legs or her arms or her whole self, then maybe Mama would love her all the time too.

At home the rooms are eerily quiet. “If I could only get my hands on those kids,” Desmond keeps saying, smacking his hand into his fist, “I’d pull out their livers and make them eat them. I’d break their knees and make them run laps. I’d make slingshots out of their tongues.”

Keisha’s mind fills with images. Images of crumbling ribs and broken hands, rivers of blood, marching cops shaking their heads, walking on by, and in the center, not Terrence, but Desmond, skinny legs and arms shattered on the street. Opening up closets, she expects piles of teeth to rain down on her. Lumps in her bed are bones sewn into the mattress. The dead corpses of cicadas that litter the ground are casualties, bugs whose lives have been stolen, shells of former beings.

            Keisha finds no escape. Days are long, but nights are longer. Sleep doesn’t come for hours and when it does, the images stay. One night Keisha crawls in bed with Desmond, but Desmond tells her he is too old for her now, grown, and she mopes back to her own bed.  She learns in the day to fear the night, wishing she could just escape, flee from her own mind. That’s when it dawns on her that she can go to the chest and travel to where it is always day, live between worlds jumping from daylight to daylight, migrating with the sun, and she can do it all inside the cedar chest, just big enough for her to lie down flat and shut the lid.

            Keisha goes to the professor’s house alone, sneaking off when Desmond isn’t paying attention, which lately has been most of the time. When she gets there, she tells the professor about Terrence over a glass of Kool-Aid. He’s come home from the hospital. Yes sir, he complains a lot. He has bandages too. The professor can come sign them. Keisha has signed her name twenty times. She is practicing her signature. 

            “Damn,” the professor says, his face in his hands.  “Do me a favor Keisha, stay little. Can you just stay little for me?”

Keisha shrugs. “But I’m not little. I was the tallest in my class.”

The professor’s eyes are small and glassy as he gazes down upon the girl before him.  “You’re perfect, honey, just the way you are,” he murmurs, putting his hand on her head. He strokes her braids and then pulls his hand away quickly.  “I’ve got something to tell you.”

            “I came to use the box,” Keisha reminds him, confused that the professor would cry when Terrence is home now and recovering. “Can I?”

            The professor leads her into the living room. The chest is there, still and slender, ready to hold the dead and the living and whatever comes in between. Keisha places one foot in front of another until she has crossed the floor and is standing next to the gaping mouth of the empty vessel. She steps in and lies down.  She has grown since she last entered it.  The wood touches her arms on both sides and if she points her toes she can push off the edge so that her head presses up against the hard wood. “Take me away,” she whispers after the professor has closed the lid. “Take me away.”  The darkness is thick and pooling. She imagines herself dissolving, her feet and hands stretching into infinite space.

            Keisha is inside the painting again, this time atop a horse. Carnival music drips unsteadily from a speaker in the center of what she can now see is a carousel with real horses. Ten horses walk in circles around a sparkling axis, a pole covered with mirrors and gold. The sky is blue and the sun is shining. A sweet smelling breeze slips through her hair. The horse jerks beneath her and she adjusts herself so that she moves with the rhythm of the animal.  There is no death here, it seems, just endless festivities. She relaxes in the warmth of the sun. Her eyelids grow heavy.  The green hills around her rise like bellies and she relaxes into the slow, lilting music.

Keisha’s revery is interrupted by a sound like laughter above her. She looks up to see a swarm of crows flying towards her. Quicker than her eyes can follow an enormous black bird, large enough to devour her whole, swoops down towards the carousel. Keisha grabs onto the pole in front of her and steadies herself. The bird lands on the horse, cocks its head, and caws at her. It stares at her, its beady eyes piercing her skinny arms and legs, memorizing the lace trim on her dress.  She freezes and for a moment she believes she will die, the bird’s talons in her flesh, her pierced body flailing in the blue air. She holds her body still for endless minutes until the immense creature caws one final time and takes off, the flapping of its wings blowing dirt into her eyes. 

Her heart pumps furiously against her ribs. She clutches the horse between her knees and breathes slowly until her heartbeat slows.  Then with her right hand she reaches down to hold it around the neck, discovering a hot, sticky fluid at her fingertips. Dark brown blood congeals and spills out where the pole runs all the way through its body, from top to bottom.  Beneath the animal, blood drips onto the dry earth. Keisha pulls her hand back in disgust.  She understands now. The animal is not part of the carousel by choice. It is captured, bleeding to death. She looks down at herself. She is wearing a yellow dress, the one from the picture on the side of the box.  “This is not me,” she thinks. “Let me off,” she prays. “I wanna go.” But the music goes on and the carousel spins. The horse’s blood has dripped down its back and begun to stain her dress a rusty brown.  Keisha screams and kicks the horse’s flanks with her heels.  It rears up beneath her, ripping metal from metal, the pole scratching deep into its side, opening the skin, as it charges away. 

Keisha and the horse run past the gates, the bystanders, and the field, into the tree-speckled meadows.  When they finally slow down from their mad gallop, she reaches forward to examine the animal, to thank it and check its wound, but as soon as her hand touches its coat the animal begins to shrink, deflating like a balloon beneath her until she is standing above it, until she can barely see it or anything else.

            She is huge now, her sides pressing out into everything, her skin peculiar and pricked, bumpy. She has so much sensation suddenly, every bit of her alive and feeling. She cannot see herself, only out from herself, the universe all around her as she floats, a blown up child, in space.

            In the cedar chest, Keisha’s body starts. Her heart flaps open and shut, open and shut, like a door swinging in the breeze.  Memories flow through her body—Terrence heaving on the sidewalk, Desmond popping wide-eyed out of the chest, her mother’s tears at the hospital—entering and exiting her private escape as Keisha, eyes open, hands reaching up towards the light, gathers her limbs and pushes up into herself, into the world, with its rubbish, its torn asunder fragments littering the broken sidewalks, bones and beer bottles, punctured tires and cut knees, the sale of hours and the bartering of lives, the broken brother and the healing brother and the wounded mother.  The lid opens and the professor is standing over her, his shoulders shaking as he looks down upon her, the small girl in the small box in his living room. 

“Are you okay? I heard you scream.” He reaches down for her hand, but she shrinks back. He steps away and Keisha climbs out of the chest by herself, rubbing her eyes. The room is bright, the walls white and blinding. The decoration around her suddenly shabby, the beads falling apart, posters peeling off the wall, the carpet stained.  Even the professor is strange, leaning and unshaven, his t-shirt ripped, his elbows dimpled with fat, the skin on his neck drooping. Keisha rubs her eyes, but the professor looks the same.

“It’s okay, Keisha. You’re out now.” The professor squats on the floor so that his eyes are level with hers. “What’s wrong?”

Keisha shakes her head.

“Whatever it is, it’ll be okay,” he whispers.

Keisha still doesn’t speak, but inside she is erupting. Nothing is okay, here or in the chest, or anywhere.

“Thatagirl,” he says, his voice cracking. “Be brave. I’m glad you’re here. I have to talk to you about something anyway.” Sweat drops collect on his face like rot on old fruit.

He leans towards her. “I’m moving,” he says. “To another neighborhood.”

“Why?” she asks, looking at the chest. “You can’t. Stay here.”

“I got to,” the professor replies, kneeling down so their eyes are level. “I can’t live here any longer.”

“What’ll you do? Where could you go?” Keisha’s lip quivers. She feels faint, as if her feet and hands sprouted holes and the blood is rushing out of her.

The professor’s voice is hard now. “I’m sorry, but I have to.”

“Where?” Keisha insists.

“I’m moving,” the professor says loudly, too loud, “to a neighborhood where the children play in yards and the adults work day jobs. To a neighborhood where brothers don’t get shot.”

“Terrence didn’t get shot.”

“Oh honey.” The professor puts his hands on Keisha’s small shoulders. “I didn’t mean that. I want safety.” He pauses. “I wish you could have safety too. I wish I could take you with me.”

Keisha takes a deep breath, holding the whole world in her chest as she closes the door in her ribs, the entryway to her escape. She feels as if she is being ripped apart, torn open and left in the sun to dry. Keisha pulls her leg back and kicks the professor hard in the shin. Then she runs outside into the furious heat, leaving him bent over behind her.  “No you don’t,” she yells before she slams the door behind her. “Stay then.”

The sidewalk is solid beneath Keisha’s feet and strong legs hold her skinny body. She stomps away boiling, singing to herself a song she invented in her dreams.  She doesn’t see it yet, but the world is full of boxes, house boxes and car boxes and body boxes. Small places to shut herself away. Keisha kicks the curb. August heat rushes up against her and she rolls into a jog and then a run. Her breathing is heavy but still she sings, her voice getting louder as her legs move quicker and quicker, until her speed creates its own wind. She is fueled and fast now, an unstoppable force, running down hills with her brothers, running up mountains alone.