Guidelines
Current Winners
Former Winners
News from our Writers
Fiction Prize Home Page
Short Fiction Prize
Dept. of English
Humanities Building
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5350
Site Designed by Melissa Bishop/DoIT Last Modified 03/10/2003 09:31:46 AM EST
© Malia Mulder Wollan
Malia Mulder Wollan
A boy is sweeping. He sweeps the floor every day but Sunday. Every week. He sweeps hair and fingernail clippings and dust. He sweeps spider webs and the hollowed bodies of flies who circle in the fragrant, thick air until they can circle no more and end up under the boy's wide shop broom. He sweeps hair spray nozzles and black bobby pins and gum wrappers. He sweeps empty sample hair gel packets, fingernail filers, and used tissues. But mostly he sweeps hair. All colors and textures. Soft blondes and red striped browns. Sometimes he sweeps perfect ringlet curls or gray strings, or streaks of peroxide blonde. He sweeps all of these things into a pile in the center of the tiled floor. He shuts the door and turns off the fan, any movement of air in the room will blow the hair around and he will have to start again. In the stillness he scoops the pile into a black garbage bag. Under the dust mop, the hair strands break apart and become tangled in each other so that the pile he puts into the garbage bag looks mottled, like the hide of a strange animal. When the boy goes outside, he locks the door behind him and drops the garbage bag into the dumpster in back. When he reaches the corner he turns left and walks home, in the dark.
The boy's mother got him the sweeping job, even though he is too young to be legally employed. She says she cannot afford to buy him comic books and bicycles. She cannot afford to give him an allowance, so he sweeps the floor of Bray's Beauty College where she is an assistant teacher. His mother's name is Marlene, though the girls at Bray's jokingly call her Professor Persie. Persie is not the boy's last name. It started as Professor Persimmon, because Marlene dyes her hair a glistening red orange color, which matches the persimmons that grow in the yard next door to Bray's. In the fall, the trees have no leaves. The branches are almost black and from them hang orange fruits the size of a fist. Marlene didn't like the name Professor Persimmon, it sounded too prudish. But she liked the sound of Persie. It seemed to her adventurous and fun.
The boy lives in an apartment with his mother and a pedigreed cat with large, white-blue eyes. Besides teaching teenage girls to cut hair, his mother paints on large pieces of paper with acrylic paints. She also makes collages. The apartment walls are covered with brilliantly colored paintings. Some of them are pictures of women with brightly colored lips and darkly outlined eyes. The boy draws tiny figures in his notebooks with a black pen. Marlene tells him he needs to find bravery as an artist. She says he is too uptight, "Draw bigger, Dylan, draw bigger." She says he is caging his emotions up inside his tiny drawings. But the boy is not so sure he likes his mother's paintings, especially the ones with large-eyed women's faces. He doesn't want to hang his emotions around the living room and above the stove. He likes little black figures, shadows on the margins of his eighth grade biology notes.
When the boy approaches home in the dark, he hears Tina Turner playing loud on the cassette player in the bathroom even before he opens the door. Tina Turner usually means his mother is dressing up to go out. The boy slips out of the dark into the warm, bright living room. "Dyl, is that you?" His mother twists her head around the bathroom door and smiles, stretching her brightly lipsticked lips around her teeth. The boy thinks she is beautiful, for a mom. She is shorter than he is but she can still beat him at arm wrestling. She has large breasts and a small belly that sits right below her belt. She speaks loudly over the blow dryer.
"I am going out, make sure you're in bed when I get home."
"Where are you going?" the boy asks. He isn't sure he wants to know but he knows she will want to tell him.
"I am going out with Jonathan again..." His mother stops. She turns off the blow dryer and steps around the bathroom door, closing it behind her as if to lock all her beauty products out of the conversation.
"Your father called while you were working." She waits but the boy says nothing. "He and Janis set the wedding date for August 25th. That's what, three months from now? He wants you to be the ring bearer, but I reminded him you would just be starting high school and wouldn't want to miss the first few days. I don't know what they were thinking. You will have to decide soon 'cause Janis is a planner." She pauses.
"Only do it if you want to, Dylan. You can think about it for a while." She smiles again and her lips stretch more this time, but her eyes don't look the same. She feels sorry for him. The boy nods.
“Did he say anything else?”
“Umm . . . no, actually I talked mostly to Janis. Seems like she is in charge of the thing.” The boy nods again, but his mother has already lost her concentration. She glances at her watch. She has to go. She moves back into the bathroom and the blow dryer starts humming again behind the closed door. The boy doesn’t want to go to Oregon to see his father in August. He sighs and the sound on his outward breath is almost in harmony with the buzz from the bathroom.
A boy is sweeping. He is thirteen years old. School is out for the summer, and when he goes back, in August, he will be a freshman at the high school. Eighth grade graduation passed in the heat of early June, but the boy was not sad, like the girls who cried and smeared their mascara. The air is hotter and thicker now. The boy is pushing the broom wearing only shorts and a loose white tank top. He is thin. He is tan and wiry. He can finally beat his mother in arm wrestling. He is wearing a baseball cap, even though the sun has set. He doesn't care, he bought it and he likes it. It is dark blue like his eyes. Like his father's eyes also, the eyes that used to look back at him from the photograph on the refrigerator door. His mother asked if he minded her taking down the old faded picture of his father holding him as a baby, with his father's mother in the background. His grandmother died several weeks earlier and Marlene said it gave her the heebie jeebies to have a dead person looking down at her every time she went to eat. Especially a dead person she didn't like. It didn't bother the boy; he had never met his father's mother. All he knew from the picture was that she was fat.
The boy pushes the hair out from under the chairs and collects it in a pile. Now while he works he thinks about a girl named Karina he met at the pool. She wears a white bikini and has breasts as big as his mother's. She is beautiful. His mother saw her in her bathing suit and said she was a slut. The girls she teaches at Bray's saw Karina down at the bar, even though she is only a sophomore in high school. The boy doesn't care. He is sure all the old men don't mind having her around. They probably buy her fancy drinks with thick flavored syrup and dark red cherries or sour olives. She is so beautiful she can make even the public pool look sexy. In the heat of the still room full of bottles of beauty products, he thinks about the long brown hair that reaches far down her back. He will never sweep her hair into garbage bags. He is sure of that because he figures she will never cut it into a little boxish hairdo like his mother's. Karina is dark and round. His mother is white and stretchy with hair the color of persimmons.
A man named Jonathan sleeps in his mother's room during the summer. Sometimes the boy runs into Jonathan in the bathroom or kitchen wearing white boxer shorts. His chest is covered with long dark hairs. The boy's chest is smooth and brown. Jonathan makes the boy mad. He doesn't know why. The man leaves the toilet seat up and the boy's mother says nothing. She smiles and giggles like a kid. She doesn't wear a bra. She paints images of huge women with their mouths open. The same dark lips as she has always painted but now the mouths are open wide and inside are swirling colors. Marlene says the women are laughing. She needs more laughter in her life. The boy is not sure. The open-mouthed women give him the creeps. They have no teeth and the colors in the mouths make the boy feel like he can see inside the women, way down into their guts. The paintings make the boy remember a movie he saw in his health class. First, it showed a pregnant lady from the outside and then they showed the insides, with a half-developed baby floating in there like a tadpole. He doesn't like that people can get inside the guts of a person, where the heart pumps blood through criss-crossed blood vessels and food gets digested in the dark. The paintings make the boy's stomach hurt like he was being turned inside out so anyone could see. The boy doesn't draw figures anymore now that he is out of school, but sometimes he wants to move his hands across the paper and leave shapes. But he doesn't.
A boy is sweeping. In two days he will start high school. In two weeks, his father will be married. He will not go. He doesn't want to go watch the joining of two people he doesn't know in a bond he doesn't understand. It is Saturday night which means sweeping is harder. There is more hair. The air is humid so the hair sticks to the tiles. The flies have lasted longer this week and they move in twitching patterns above the boy's head as he moves back and forth across the floor. His mother is tired. Jonathan hasn't been roaming around the bathroom in his underwear in over two weeks. His mother paints pictures of women with shiny colored, closed lips and darkly outlined eyes. His mother is beautiful. She says they will send their art to his father and Janice for their wedding. The boy doesn't think Janice will like brightly colored women, like his mother, hanging on her wall. He wonders what his father would think of his little shadow margined drawings. What art he could make to send his father. When he is finished sweeping, he carries the black garbage bag outside with him. He locks the door. He walks home with the garbage bag and keeps it under the stairs. For five days the boy collects the black hair-filled garbage bags. On Thursday, the boy starts school. He wears Nike shoes and baggy jeans. He is thin and tanned and tall, like his father. Karina says hello to him in the hall. He blushes. She smiles.
His mother has finished a new painting for Janice and his father. It is a bright landscape with many figures and trees. None of the figures are women with brightly colored lips and outlined eyes. None of the figures have faces. The paints are mixed so that no single color is distinguishable from another. Everything looks soft and round like when the boy puts his friend's glasses on and looks out over the street.
"So Dyl, do you think Janice will tolerate it?" The boy nods and smiles.
"What are you going to send?" The boy shrugs.
"Try'n get it done tonight so we can get it in the mail by tomorrow. These are going to cost a lot to send but it's better than some stupid silverware set." She ends the sentence on an upward note, like a question, then laughs wearily.
"I am going to BJ's to have a little chat with Jonathan. Put something together for your father while I'm gone. You'll be glad you did."
His mother flicks on the light in the bathroom and plugs in the curling iron. After several minutes she emerges curled and colored and smiling. "See ya later." And she is gone out into the night trailing the dry scent of curled hair.
The boy gets the black garbage bags full of hair he has been collecting beneath the stairs. He rips a large piece of paper from his mother's drawing pad. He gets Elmer's glue out of the desk. He turns out all the lights except one in the kitchen, which makes a triangle of light on the living room floor where the boy has his back turned. It is hot and muggy. The boy takes off his shirt. The boy squirts the cool white glue on his finger and begins to make a shape on the page. It is a figure. It is a figure with its mouth wide open. The boy makes the glue thick and sticky on the paper. Then the boy opens the garbage bags and begins to pull out handfuls of varicolored hair. With his fist he presses the hair down into the glue until the outlined figure is covered in the hair cut by thirty beauty school trainees. The boy finds tight dark curly hair to put in the figure's open mouth. The boy stands up over the paper and his shadow drops down across the matted hair. This is a figure for his father and the boy is proud. He has sweat collecting in the hair under his armpits. The boy steps back and the triangle of light from the kitchen spreads out over his bare back.
Out in the night his mother is walking home. She passes Bray's Beauty College and the ripe persimmons in the neighboring yard. She hums to herself softly. She is thinking of her son. She loves her son. She yawns and for a moment her mouth hangs wide open, like the figures they both create, over and over.
©This piece is copyrighted by the author. All Rights Reserved. No reproductions of this work may be made, in any form, without explicit written permission from the author.