THE PORTALS OF TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
by Joyanna Priest
This prickly desert makes me think about hiding, about necessary protections, about survival.
Josh was in high school, two years older than me. He bleached his long hair and wrote the names of heavy metal bands on his torn jeans with a ballpoint pen. His little brother had been in my class one year in elementary school and we lived around the corner from each other.
In the desert it takes planning to bloom.
We got to know each other on the long bus rides to the magnet school, where he told me about pot and the hot girls who wanted to go all the way with him. He impressed me with the way he could puff cigarette smoke from the depth of his lungs as the bus pulled out of the lot, many breaths after his last drag.
So many natural things are the shades of human skin in the desert: the tans and browns of the earth, the bleached pale rocks, the pink and purple skies.
We sat near each other on the bus and talked on the endless rattling drive home as the bus made its jolting way through rush hour traffic to our distant neighborhood. He spoke to me with a kind of haughty hostility, but seemed also to relish answering my questions and entertaining me with grandiose tales of his exploits. In the mornings he put on headphones and didn’t want to talk, but in the afternoons I was the center of his attention.
The flip side of scarcity is overmuchness.
I wonder about the peculiarity of being an intensely private person who writes personal stories.
I mentioned Josh to no one, not even my best friend, (who would have been too shocked by the pot to consider my obsession). Falling asleep, I imagined a teacher catching Josh talking to me at the bus stop and ordering us to kiss. When I changed for PE, I looked down at my body and imagined his eyes on my thighs. I mortified and exhilarated myself, so I could hardly catch my breath sometimes.
The desert’s thirst begets extremes. Scorpions extract every molecule of moisture from their waste: they excrete only powder.
That spring I used up an entire pencil writing his name on every rough brick within reach on the outside wall of my one story suburban house. The penciled letters blended with the darkness of the brick unless the light hit from just the right angle– then the wall reflected hundreds of shiny gray JOSH’s framed by rectangles of dull mortar.
Coming home after getting off the school bus, I sometimes detoured from the walkway to the front door so I could press my palm to the scratchy bricks on the Josh side of the house, warm from the afternoon sun. When my mother weeded the garden on that side, I watched from my bedroom window, pulsing with sick fear, certain that she would look up and my secret would be obvious to her.
Why would a person literally tell on themselves? I marvel and squirm at that twelve year old’s unwillingness to contain her longing.
Feelings can be a flood.
Once Josh’s younger brother knocked on our door selling chocolate bars for his soccer team, I stood in the doorway and stared at him. I could feel my ears flaming with the closeness of those penciled names. If he turned back when he was walking down the street, he would see them. I imagined them in pulsing red neon rather than nearly invisible pencil marks. I said, “Let me get my parents,” but I felt like I was shouting, “I’m in love with your brother!”
After a desert rain, things sprout and bloom and wither in stop-motion double-time.
One day near the end of the school year I was dithering in the yard taking my time with a chore when I noticed that the light was just right to reveal the writing. I looked for the Josh’s, expecting the usual frisson of disturbance and thrill, but I saw only bricks. Even close up, I could find nothing more than an occasional errant curve of an O or an S.
The rain had done its work.
Joyanna Priest lives in Maryland with SO many animals where she teaches and learns and is working on a time travel novel.
