C4 antho - Chamber Four

~276~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
* * * *
Lyla floated above her life where no one could touch her.
She became the ozone, which was thin, invisible, and full of
holes too. She watched herself grow bigger. She threw up.
Her father snuck out for bread and nuts and never came
back, and she spent her first night alone, then a second. A
man, starved like a skeleton, tried to steal her purse and
keys. She pulled out a knife; her strength and hunger, electrifying.
After chasing him, she was ravenous and stole coconuts
from trees. She cracked them open. She drank their
milk. One day, she crawled to a wind farm and pushed out a
baby, as still and blue and breath-stealing as anything she’d
ever seen.
* * * *
Now, she tells strangers stories, babbling like an infant
who has just discovered speech.
She had seventeen children and two of them died.
Or she didn’t bother with babies because the man who
loved her couldn’t share her.
Once, she tells a surfer, she won a hula title in Honolulu.
Another time, she tells a sunbather, she drove a convertible
to the edge of a cliff. Because is a lie really a lie if it ought to
have been true?
One day her father broke laws and speed limits to race
her to the hospital and save her baby and get her help. But he
never abandoned her beneath the great white turbines,
where the wind was ground to pieces, where birds fell from
the sky.