Wallstrait

It didn’t take a genius to figure out who poisoned dinner.

 

I woke up before my alarm went off for Sunday Mass, itching all over. When I lifted my shirt, a constellation of halo-shaped, bumpy rashes scattered across my chest down to my stomach.

 

I wasn’t allergic to anything, at least not that I knew of, but I started looking up comparisons of common bug bites and symptoms of mold exposure and pictures of stress-induced hives before my aunt walked into my room with twin red spots flushed across her cheeks.

 

“Morning,” Tita Linda said. She sat on the edge of my bed, put her head in my lap. “I’m so itchy.”

 

I ran my hand over her hair, careful around the knots matted at the nape of her neck. Even dull and unwashed, Tita Linda’s hair was the color of golden twigs, tangles twisted like a bird’s nest. My mother would need to put her sleek, professional, salon-grade hairdressing shears to task again soon.

 

“Tita, what was in the pasta sauce you made last night?”

 

When my aunt looked up at me, her wide, watery eyes were more buggish than doe-like. “It’s a secret family recipe. Your dad said he made it for you before. Whose did you like better?”

 

My father and his sister had learned to make squid ink pasta from their mother, who had owned an Italian restaurant in Metro Manila when they were children. My father had only attempted the recipe once, shortly after Lola died; his cousins back in the Philippines sent photos of her old handwritten cookbooks via WhatsApp. Black stains covered the countertops, stove, and sink for weeks afterward, even though my mother attacked the kitchen with baking soda and bleach.

 

“Yours,” I said. Tita Linda’s sauce had been tangier and more fragrant than my father’s effort. The saltiness of her sauce reminded me of tears.

 

That summer, while I waited for the timeless, shapeless months to pass before I left for college in the Pacific Northwest, I cried easily. The crackling jingle of an ice cream truck crawling down my childhood street. A going away party for a classmate who was studying abroad. Cooing mourning doves announcing dawn. Of course things changed, of course I had to grow up—but as the days blurred together, I could not conjure up any excitement for what was to come; only a slow, simmering sadness that buzzed in my ear like a high-frequency whine.

 

Now, my tongue felt fuzzy, swollen, sticky with morning breath and something foreign.

 

“I’ve been reading, Missy,” Tita Linda said. “It’s not possible to live a toxin-free life.”

 

While my aunt repeated what she had told me before, I started to dress for church.

 

“It doesn’t matter if your folks filter their tap water or not. It’s not about eating organic eggs, or not eating eggs at all. It’s already everywhere, Missy. It’s already inside us.”

 

Since Tita Linda had come to stay with us at the start of the summer, I had learned it meant heavy metal poisoning.

 

It meant arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, thallium.

 

It lived in our drinking water and seafood and batteries and herbicides and insecticides and pesticides and topical creams and bedsheets and gasoline and paint and fireworks and cigarette smoke and blood.

 

The weather widget on my phone forecasted a heatwave starting at 9 a.m. Poor air quality across Los Angeles county, red text warned.

 

My aunt scratched a dark lesion bulging on the back of her leg, swollen like a spider egg sac. “It’s in the billboards, Missy. You can hear it outside, can’t you? That buzzing. Those high, unnatural frequencies. That’s disrupting your adrenal glands. It’s why you don’t sleep well. It’s why kids your age have anxiety when you shouldn't be worried about anything at all.”

 

I breathed slowly through my nose. I wasn’t certain my throat wasn’t starting to close up. I wasn’t certain we would still be going to church, but I picked out a turtleneck to hide the rash crawling up my neck. I wasn’t certain whether I needed to cry or wanted to laugh.

 

“I’m sure being a lifelong smoker contributed to Mom’s cancer,” Tita Linda said, her voice wobbly. “But there’s no real way to confirm, is there? Know thy enemy. You think the smog is bad here? You can taste it in the air back home. Sometimes the pollution hangs so low, it feels like walking through a cloud.”

 

Down the hall, my father’s alarm rang. Tita Linda and I looked at each other. We knew our time was short.

 

My father woke my mother. Their voices were soft at first but soon rose. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I heard their confusion and panic and uncertainty.

 

“Are you all packed?” I asked Tita Linda. She insisted on cooking last night to celebrate her imminent departure.

 

“I think so,” my aunt said.

 

Tita Linda was never supposed to spend the entire summer with us. She had just shown up one day with all her belongings: two suitcases with three working wheels between them and a manila folder of unpaid phone bills, missed rent notices, and maxed-out credit cards.

 

“Tita Linda is going to stay with us for a bit,” my father had said. “She needs a place to rest in between sorting out some things.” Then he waved his hand, a dismissal of any further explanation, a disinvitation for any additional questions.

 

Most days, Tita Linda just slept. I hovered in the hallway, listening for any signs of life in the guest bedroom. Sometimes I heard her flipping between news channels. Most of the time I only heard white noise while she napped.

 

But sometimes, she would emerge with bright eyes, and that’s when I knew we would spend the afternoon in the backyard, our own Eden. We ran through the sprinklers over dead grass. We napped on old towels under the sun. We played hide-and-seek around the side of the house, between trash cans and flowerless dirt beds and broken pieces of awning no one had thrown away, no shame at our childish glee. We watched ladybugs crawl across leaves and captured roly-polies. We made up our own constellations, pretending we could see more than a handful of stars in the smog-soaked sky.

 

When we played, Tita Linda spoke to me like I was her equal, suspended between places of belonging.

 

She trusted I could handle the weight of her warnings: that the trees were listening, that we shouldn’t wear aluminum deodorant unless we wanted to end up dead like Lola, that the sea levels weren’t really rising, that the raging wildfires up north were a coverup for a bigger, imminent meteorological disaster. She liked romcoms and sang ABBA while she cooked. Even dull and unwashed, her hair smelled familiar and comforting, like warm milk and soft earth.

 

I loved her because of this, of course.

 

Of course I believed she was looking out for us.

 

I didn’t care if my aunt was packed, and I didn’t want to know where she was or wasn’t going next.

 

All I knew was that I didn’t want my best friend to leave.

 

Before I could understand all of this—that strange love, this tender fear, how time moved whether or not I felt a part of the moment—my parents burst out of their room, and what followed happened quickly.

 

They appeared in my doorway, leaning on each other for support. One of my mother’s eyelids was swollen shut. The other side of her face drooped, slack and ashen. My father’s reaction was even worse: on any exposed skin, open sores oozed something inky, something saucy, something black that smelled like tears.

 

Tita Linda faced the window away from them, staring down into the backyard. “Is it time to go?” she asked.

 

Someone rang poison control. Someone else dialed 911. I Googled how to cure poisoned food. Google asked if I meant how to treat food poisoning.

 

By the time we loaded into the car, we were all a little slap-happy. The heatwave didn’t help.

 

My face felt hot and heavy in my mother’s lap as we spilled across the backseat. Up front, my father and his sister looked at each other, their profiles mirror images: they had their mother’s nose, humped and regal; they had each other’s eyes, wet and worried.

 

“Just a slight modification to Mom’s recipe,” Tita Linda slurred. “The body is an incredible machine. We can adapt to anything if we give ourselves enough time in small doses.”

 

“We’re okay!” I sang. I wasn’t sure if anyone could hear me. I imagined introducing myself to a classroom full of strangers staring up at me with black eyes, suntanned and healthy. “Tita’s going to make sure we’re all okay.”

 

I didn’t ask where we were going—if we were going to the hospital or to church.

 

My father drove so fast I thought we were flying; or maybe I was just floating, hovering above our bodies sardined together.

 

Wherever we were going, I just wanted to ask—a doctor, a priest, my dead grandmother, Tita Linda—if you could build up a tolerance to goodness just as well as you could build up a resistance to poison.

 

Whoever I asked, I was certain, would answer with a knowing laugh, full of pity and wonder.

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Taylor Leigh Harper’s work appears in LEON Literary Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Rougarou, SPLASH!, In Parentheses, and elsewhere. She has been a contributing curator for agoodmovie towatch and Projektor. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Southern California. Reach her at her website.