C4 antho - Chamber Four

Everything is Breakable with a Big
Enough Stone
____________
by Taryn Bowe
from Boston Review
When Lyla was ten, she had 32 teeth. She washed her
hair with a special coconut oil and slept in a closet. Each
night, waiting for sleep, she touched one wall with the crown
of her head and the opposite wall with the flats of her heels
and pretended she was holding the two walls apart. Her sisters
giggled in their room. They dangled pants and panties
from their windows, hooting in high wheezy voices when
boys stopped on the street below. Lyla’s mother ran outside,
shooing callers off with hairbrushes, plungers, bread knives.
Her sisters dropped their panties onto the tops of trees. Girl
fights followed; her mother, shrieking; her sisters, violent
with their fists. In her closet, Lyla pressed her fingertips
against her eyelids until she saw blue, then tapped every
tooth with the tip of her tongue.
Before he went to work each night, her father knelt by
her door and pressed play on a tape he’d made of his laughter.
He laughed at a joke she’d told him about convertibles,
and then at another she’d told him about fruit. If she could
be any fruit, she’d be a lychee because she was so sweet, and
if she could be a car, she’d be a bright red convertible because
this was the kind that everybody wanted. Her father
laughed like a man you could trust with your life. His breath
grabbed in his throat and hissed, but when air found his
lungs, low rolling hollers bellowed out of his mouth and out
of the tape deck’s circular speakers.
When the tape was over, Lyla opened the closet door and
pressed rewind. If she could go back to any age, she would go
back to being ten.