On our last ordinary night, I aimed the ball at my younger brother’s head. We were on the trampoline in the far corner of our backyard behind the thick pecan, playing penalties and meta tres and world cup off the posts. I wanted, just this once, to beat him. My brother dove, then bounced upright, his teeth inexplicably green in the navy dark. The ball landed to the right of the metal post.  

“Out!” I yelled. 

My brother danced the loser dance with an L to his forehead. His legs tick-tocked side to side. He launched the ball back, but I leapt to the middle and controlled. A hundred feet away, our houseleaked sound. The windows were thrown open and I could hear our father’s loud voice making money on Zoom. The crepe myrtles sang in the wind, like crickets rubbing their wings together. The pointy leaves of the pecan shivered. Its fruit had just started to fall, which meant the trampoline would soon be sticky with aphid shit, but that night it was crusted in bird shit that I was expected to hose down but hadn’t.  

I was supposed to clean the house and put us to bed. Inside, the kitchen counters were littered with jars of oil mixed with cream cheese, jars of oil mixed with ice cream, jars of our spit and every condiment from the fridge. Experiments we’d been conducting until we got bored and gave up. Our mother wasn’t yet home. She could pin us with a glance, which meant I didn’t look at her until I had to, and then I couldn’t blink or shift or breathe. 

But there was time. It was parent teacher conference night and she’d be home late. She was a good teacher, got third graders to read who hated reading, kids to write who hated writing, famous for letting conferences run long, letting parents talk if they needed to, and they all did. Her lines snaked down the hall, she told us. At the end of the year, she brought home thank you cards and thank you bath bombs and thank you candles and thank you money. All she ever kept was the money. We gouged our nails into the candles. Took a mallet to the bath bombs.  

I kicked the ball again, and it glanced off my brother’s hand. “Bruh!” my brother said. “I’m too good at goalie-ing.” I had to let him say whatever he wanted because he was nine, four years younger, but no one acknowledged that he was bigger than I was at that age. He would be bigger, period, and forever the easier, tic-free son who didn’t obsess over jingles or fixate on phrases or seek oral sensory experiences. “That’s not a mouth object” was something my mother used to say to me.  

“You’ll never be better,” my brother said.  

The patio timer clicked on and the dim edge of the white light reached the trampoline so that my brother’s face lost its chub and his skull pushed against his skin. I rolled my eyes, and my brother tried to copy me.  

“You look like an idiot,” I said but sweetly.  

He lunged for my legs and we both slipped on the mat. My head bounced twice, three times. He jumped again and grabbed his junk in one impossible motion.  

I heard sirens. They never grew louder or softer, nearer or farther. On the other side of the chain link fence our neighbor’s yard was a cemetery of couches vomiting their stuffing and broken pots and moldy balls we’d tossed over. The neighbor kept a ferret caged on her patio that hissed when he saw our heads bob over the firebushes. We felt bad for the ferret and dared each other to climb the chain link to free it, but some days we cursed at it. Lobbed translations of the Hindi insults we’d heard our grandmother throw around: monkey fucker and sister fucker and broken dick. We were practicing for all the ways we’d be messed with, though we had no idea. Sometimes the neighbor called 311 to complain about our noise, and then our mother would tell us to stop making her look bad before calling 311 herself to say, “That animal’s got rabies or some kind of pox. Just waiting to bite someone and start the next pandemic.”  

The wind picked up. My brother front flipped while I kicked the ball full force, sure I’d score. But he landed on his ass, popped back up, caught it, and banged another ‘L’ to his forehead.   

There was a fire watch that night, and we had no business being out. The trampoline springs were exposed and there were holes in the safety net that was meant to keep us from flying off it. We weren’t supposed to wrestle or bounce close to the edge. We weren’t supposed to be on at the same time. Our feet could catch in the springs and mangle into pretzels, we could bounce wrong and snap our necks, break major bones. In places, bird droppings had turned from green to white to black, blending into the nylon trampoline so you couldn’t tell anymore where was clean and where was dirty. Once, I saw a red-tailed hawk on a top branch of the pecan, still as stone, its head too small for its puffed-up chest, its veins probably clogged like our veins with microplastics.  

I knew the future would be better if we just went to bed, but I was thirteen and thought I could bend the night to my will. 

Marrow barked, the signal our mother was home. Early. She dropped a stack of tattered marble composition books to the floor; kicked our shoes from the entrance. Our mother turned on every lamp, flipped every switch, casting the house too bright. She saw the Lego weapons, inside-out socks, waxy Babybel wrappers. Great clouds of Marrow’s fur.  

She yelled at Marrow for shedding. He was part terrier with needle-like white fur and he skidded out the flap in the kitchen door that my brother could still crawl through. She hadn’t yet realized we weren’t in bed, that we were nowhere near bed. Out in the yard, Marrow pissed on old tires our mother wanted to use as garden beds. He pissed around the leaking hose she wanted to patch. He pissed between the rusting lawn chairs she aimed to scour. Whenever she asked for our help, we ran from her.  

“We should go in,” my brother said.  

“You go. I’m staying.”  

“You won’t stay if I leave. You’re still afraid of the dark.”  

“Try me,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t risk our mother’s full attention on his own. We squared off and bounced. My brother was wearing my favorite frayed t-shirt. “Pluto: Never Forget.” Our mother had placed it in the Goodwill pile because I’d chewed holes into the collar. I’d stolen it back, then explained that chewing gave me comfort, at which point the lines around my mother’s mouth had softened and she was young again, which was, in the end, what I was after.  

But I didn’t know it then. Then, the wind-swept night was moonless and I was best at disobeying. I knew she couldn’t see us through the glare of lamp light on the windows. Even if she turned off the lights, the pecan would obscure her view. My brother and I continued our bounce. Minutes passed during which we didn’t talk trash, didn’t throw things at each other, not balls, not punches. At times, our bouncing could be syncopated then synchronized, almost peaceful. In my head was a stupid jingle: if it’s Covid, Paxlovid, if it’s Covid, Paxlovid, if it’s Covid, Paxlovid, if it’s— 

We heard a tray of spoons crash on the kitchen counter. My brother startled. We heard the vacuum growl on and our mother bang it into walls so hard the house shook. The sounds whipped through the dry wind, through the pecan branches, out past our yard and into other yards and through the In & Out/ Whataburger intersection and south down 35 where I hoped it would get lost in the loblolly pines far away from here. 

Our father’s Zoom voice paused. I wanted him to find her, crack a joke, whisper in her ear, make her laugh the way he knew how. Settle down. Then we could tiptoe back inside, crack more jokes, leap from the couch to the table, from the table to the shelf, strut on our toes. My father was funny and never cared if we lost our water bottles or chewed our shirts or used our pant legs as napkins. He knew all the best fails on YouTube and showed us clips of Triumph the Insult Dog and Grumpy Old Man on SNL, and on Sundays we hovered around him and avoided our chores, while from the corner of my eye I watched my mother for the anger that wormed under her skin or the frown that made me empty and sick.   

“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!” our mother screamed now. The jars. We’d lined them up neatly. Now we heard one smash. Then another and another.   

I heard my father say, “No, no, everything is fine” and motor up again. He could talk all night with his screen. He never tired, never dimmed. 

“We should go in,” my brother whispered again. We locked eyes and swayed, shifting our weight to stay upright. He couldn’t help but look small, like he could’ve crawled into our mother’s arms, curled into a prawn, and fallen asleep.  

“Are you fucking kidding,” I said.  

“We can sneak in through a window.”  

“She’ll explode.”  

“We can shut our ears.” 

“That’s just stupid,” I said.  

My brother shrugged, not quite understanding. “We can’t stay here all night,” he said, but I could hear the possibility in his voice.  

“I have a plan.”  

“You don’t.” 

“I do. We’ll distract her from being angry. Like when she wakes you up from terrors.”  

“Now that’s stupid.”  

“We have to get her out of the house.” I tried not to plead. He was right, I had no good plan, but I couldn’t listen to the sounds of our mother’s furious cleaning anymore. A month before, she’d nearly fractured her tailbone mopping the bathroom floor. Before that, she’d burned her whole palm frying bhujias. Her legs were a map of bruises, each one a country. “Look what you make me do,” she’d say and I’d hate her a little before wishing I could wrap her in Marrow’s fur and contain her safely.  

In elementary, I used to see her corralling third graders in the hall with grand gestures and metal chimes, kids lining up like it was Schlitterbahn. I never had her but wondered what it would’vebeen like, whether she would’ve molted into the frowning mother from home or whether she’d have smiled like I was someone else’s kid.  

I jumped and yelled into the neighbor’s yard, “You wormed ass-rodent!”  

“What are you doing?” my brother asked.  

“Wake up you bitch-loving turd!”  

“Stop!”  

The ferret hissed and spat and rammed its white snout against the cage. Marrow whined and ran in circles. “Fucking donkey’s son!” I screamed.  

My brother launched into the air bicycling his arms and legs above the pecans, gaining strength and speed. He landed with both feet on the mat and bodychecked me down to the springy mesh, which launched us both in the air, my neck headlocked in his arm, his fist in my side, my dirty nails hooked into his forearm. We rose in slow motion and fell at lightspeed. He thought he had me, but when we landed again, I clamped his torso with my knees and pinned him to the mat. The springs groaned.  

My brother’s nose gushed, though I hadn’t touched it. He’d always been prone to bleeding from the slightest dryness and the softest impact, and I wondered what it was like, all that blood with no pain, no wound. I wobbled to my feet, my knees sore. Blood outlined his lips into a clown’s grimace.  

Except for the steady gravel of my father’s voice, the house went quiet. Our mother was at the kitchen window. She sniffed, deep and long. Over and over. The scent of blood: burnt toast and aluminum. She could tell when one of us was hurt. She called our names through the window, called and called. Bloody snot gurgled in my brother’s nose.  

Pluto now looked like a red planet. Every sound was plugged into a speaker in my ear. Our mother disappeared from the window. My father’s laughter grew louder, longer, breathless. I wanted to be in on the joke. I wanted to laugh, too. I wanted to turn back time, to watch my five pubic hairs retract, the chub return to my cheeks, to be little and harmless.  

A gale slammed into the trampoline and listed me and my brother sideways. Marrow bound toward us, tongue lolling, hair raised in fear. He howled and moaned, as if we were squirrels.  

My mother opened the back door. I took my brother’s hand, and it was warm as an underbelly. I forced him to keep still. I saw her silhouette, her bare feet on the cracked concrete patio.   

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” she called out over the wind. She couldn’t yet see us from behind the pecan but drew closer, her heels crushing purple bindweeds, her toes clutching dirt. I didn’t dare breathe. I wanted her out here, away from the jars and the vacuum and sharp corners, and I also wanted her far away from me.  

“No trampoline in the dark!” she shouted.  

My brother lurched, but I held him, stopping him from walking into a trap.  

“YOU’LL. BREAK. YOUR. GODDAMN. NECKS.” 

I didn’t know what to do, but I knew it was up to me. We’d made her this way, she’d often said. There was a time when she wasn’t so tired and clumsy, a time before we became too big, before we refused to laugh at her jokes, before we told her she wasn’t funny, before we became too unwieldy, requiring too many instructions, too many reminders. Before we transformed into the kinds of boys she hoped we wouldn’t be. At night she no longer lay down with us to spread our toes and scratch our knees and crack our knuckles. “Tell us stories,” we used to demand, and she’d tell us about her sister’s sledding accident when they were little, the accident our aunt said was my mother’s fault for forcing her to slide headfirst, but that my mother remembered as heroic, how she’d held out her hand to catch her sister’s bloody teeth. My brother and I listened and cheered her on. We’d wanted to believe her version only.   

There were other things, the flat top mountains she’d climbed and the black frogs up there that crawled instead of hopped and the flowers shaped like maces. She mentioned a man she once knew who drew her portrait in blue ink, and we knew this was not our father. On our birthdays she told us about our births, how quickly I’d slipped out, how stubborn my brother had been, how we’d torn her apart. “I couldn’t walk for weeks,” she’d say, all lit up and proud, then sad because it was all behind her.  

I liked best when she’d fall asleep and slurred words would slip from her mouth, things like “long ‘o’s and short ‘o’s’” and “process of elimination” and “be loud and proud” and I’d pretend she was talking to me.  

Our mother came closer. She crunched through the dry grass and around the rusted chairs until she saw us. “Come inside,” she said. Her voice was low and growly. “I won’t be angry. Promise.”  

I held back and my brother relaxed against my grip, trusting me at last. Except he had a knack for the traitorous when I least expected it.  

“He punched me,” he said and pulled free. “I’m bleeding.”  

I felt a jingle coming on. “It has to be Heinz!” I blurted. “You’re just mad cause I won.” But I’d never win, not once.  

She was skinny, our mother, but also a hulking mass, ropes of her hair coiled into gibberish in the wind. She wore her yellow pants with the large square pockets on the sides where she could store colored pens. She sighed and it was worse than anger. She approached the trampoline and looked up at me, not at my face but at my heart, aiming for a target.  

“Get inside.”  

My brother’s blood was still wet on his face. The night had turned gray. The lights in our windows blazed and my brain hummed with slogans and rhymes: Geico Gecko, the Quicker Picker Upper, EV SUVS. Marrow shat in a tire.  

Again, the ferret banged its body against its cage and its teeth knocked against the metal bars. It must’ve slept in its own turds. We’d never seen it romp in the yard like in clips our father used to show us, ferrets chewing through pipes, vomiting up tampons. Now the ferret dooked, a rooster-like chuckle, the ferret-equivalent of a bark, as if sensing what I was about to do, what I should’ve done ages ago.   

I jumped from the trampoline to the chain link fence. I hooked my foot into a diamond link and propelled my body up and over the metal notches at the top like a gymnast, like I wasn’t knock kneed and pigeon toed. I stuffed my body between the firebushes and landed, unscathed, in the neighbor’s yard. It was smaller than it looked from the other side. Here was the red ball I’d torn the hexagons off of. Here was the sunken yellow loveseat. Something in me was shaking but it was not a thing I could control. Just like I couldn’t control the long strides I took to the cage, crushing pecan seeds that had fallen into the yard. The ferret had its jaw around the wire bars of its cage and with a steady hand I didn’t have, I reached for the latch. On the other side of the fence, Marrow lost his mind.  

A hand slapped my arm and I pitched back onto my tailbone, hard. The neighbor. Two gray, sweatsuited legs planted on either side of me. I cradled my arm close to my chest and stared up at her large, oval nostrils. If I’d stood she would’ve been small and I could’ve pushed her down, but I wasn’t like that and couldn’t move because there was no “there there” in me, one of my father’s Zoom phrases, which felt worse than our mother saying we were doomed to amount to nothing.  

“Monk bites,” the neighbor said.  

“Did you just touch my child?” my mother shouted and rattled the chain link. Surely the entire East Side was listening. The neighbor shook her head and folded her arms. She crouched down next to me and up close the wrinkles of her gray cheeks were a hundred smiles and her breath smelled of chocolate and pixie sticks.  

“I could have you arrested for trespassing,” she said and reached into the cage. But Monk dodged past her. Its claws tapped and scraped against the concrete. I hoped it would run off to a better life, but it leapt toward me, its body coiled like a spring, ready to spit in my mouth and gouge out my eyes.  

Then, inches from my face, it doubled back, remembering. It scampered up the neighbor’s arm to prance from one shoulder to another. She kissed its paws and pulled its s-curved body into the crook of one arm, then extended her free arm to help me up. In her gray eyes I saw my own eyes.  

The chain link rattled again, as if my mother was throwing herself against it. “Get out of here,” the neighbor said gently, “before your mother hurts herself.” 

The ferret pointed his triangular nose at me. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t take the neighbor’s arm. I’m sorry to say I left her there and ran back without apologizing. I climbed clumsy the way I usually did, straining to hoist my legs over as the neighbor’s screen door open and shut, her singing, “Darling, darling, ain’t you a darling.”  

I landed heavy on all fours where my mother was waiting, arms folded, hip cocked to one side. “Lucky I didn’t kill her. Get to bed,” she said and pointed at the house with its broken jars and oil-slicked floors and whole pillows of Marrow’s fur.  

I hated her fully in that moment. A bubbling, frothing hate. I hated her for thinking she’d saved me, thinking she’d won.  

“No,” I said and climbed back up the trampoline just as my brother was about to hop off.  

In a panic, he grabbed me around the waist, pushing and pulling at the same time. “We’ll go, Ma. We’ll go,” he said because he always walked everything back.  

“We won’t,” I said and steadied my legs because I couldn’t think of what else to do. My brother froze and we both waited for trouble, for our mother to scream again and threaten to drag us insideherself. She was at the lip of the trampoline now and her hands gathered her hair back tight from her face, lifting the skin at her temples before letting it all go.  

“Show me,” she said.  

“Show you what?”  

“Show me how you fight.” She climbed onto the trampoline and wobbled. The hems of her yellow pants caught under her heels. “Fight me.”  

“Ma, we’re sorry!” my brother said and held onto me tighter. “Look, it’s all gone!” He wiped his blood-crusted nose with the back of his hand to prove it.  

But my mother was focused on me. “Show,” she said.  

At the time, we didn’t know what she hadn’t told us. Later, I’d cling to that not knowing. I’d roll around in it as justification.  

To my brother I said, “We’ll play Take Out the Legs.” It was an old game when one person slammed the other to the ground then jumped next to them to make it hard to get back up.  

“I don’t want to,” he whispered back.  

After the next day and the appointment and the eventual news that the experimental treatment had failed, that the rotten cells had gone on marauding, my brother would be the one brave enough to hold her skeletal hand until the breath went out of her. Our father would watch, and I’d leave the room. Later still, all my brother would remember was how calm she’d become. How sweet.  

He’d forget this night when I jumped first, jumped high, and how when I landed, I grabbed our mother around the knees and dragged her down. She was both lighter and stronger than I expected. I had to squeeze my knees around her thighs to keep her from kicking and pin her arms to her sides. Her hair spread out on the trampoline mat to form a black sun.  

I gave my brother a little nod like we were in one of those 90s comedies our mother hated that our father let us watch, where the men communicated through shrugs and nods and tips of their chins, a private language. My brother bounced closer, up and down next to her body, his feet inches from her head, which bounced too, and once my brother found his rhythm I let her go and she broke into air, her back arching and her eyes laughing like she’d been daring us all along, from the minute we were born.