Phenomenology

You could hear the seagulls, their screams coming down from outside and echoing under the stove hood. Mama stood in the kitchen, her face dyed yellow by the fluorescent light. Still dark out in that very early morning. She was mixing pancake batter, dyed pink from food coloring. Pink was the only way Bella would eat them anymore. 

“Could you give me a ride to work today? Gonna be too hot to walk to the bus stop.” 

She shrugged, looked him up and down. “I’ll take you, but you’ll have to find your own way home.” 

He worked at the raspberry farm, set too close to the highway. The roadside stand, sitting still, hoping the sun wouldn’t notice, under a trio of red beach umbrellas. Holding his breath against the heat, like hiding from a dinosaur. 

He had fallen off the harvesting machine his first day, out in the field. Not injured, but transferred. As if he would sue, if injured, if fired. As if he had thought of it, before the HR woman with her too bright lipstick had mentioned it. But there was a contract, a waiver, something. But he was fifteen, and an idiot. 

A moment of fear, the air knocked out of his lungs. Laughter, from the boys above him, their shirts stained pink and the sun too bright, and the ground hard beneath him. It was fine. That was all. 

It’s a folding table, no cloth. Just the red umbrellas and the cash box and cartons of raspberries, spoiling in the heat. Marta sits next to him, smoking, approaching the second half of her twenties. It had been determined he required adult supervision. 

“What you doing after this?” She gestured around at the farm. Summer was almost over. There’s big dark rings under her eyes, yesterday’s makeup still hanging around. 

“School, I guess.” 

She makes a noise, low in the back of her throat. “School. What did it ever teach you?” 

He made a returning gesture, around at the farm.“What did this place ever teach me?” 

She shrugged and popped a raspberry in her mouth, sucking on it. Puts out her cigarette in the gravel of the parking lot and pulls out a vape, chews on her lips. 

There’s a couple jogging out along the highway, insane in the dust and the heat.  

It’s the slope of her neck, ponytail swinging, a flash of full chest under sports bra, the divot of her spine and the well muscled back around it. His forearms, veined, his big knuckled hands, the stark shirtlessness of his body. Long legs and strong calves and hips, on both of them. 

He looks away quickly, looks across the highway. A scrap of tarp has torn loose from somebody’s truck, and is clinging to the asphalt, bright blue on gray. Marta rubs his shoulder, as if she has guessed at least some of it. I want to die, he thinks, but tries not to mean it. 

“Marta?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Why are you here?” Didn’t know how else to ask it, didn’t know tact yet. 

She shrugs, “I don’t know, kid.” Eats another raspberry. “Why am I here? It’s hard, not doing anything. It’s hard. Still kicking though, yeah? It’s a job.” She puts away the vape, lights another cigarette, ruffles his hair. “Be better for me. Go do big, good things, yeah? Go to college, be a doctor or something.” 

She gives him a ride home in her old pickup, shitbox on its last legs, no AC. 

In the night, when it’s finally cool enough to breathe, for the first time in a long time, he lets himself cry. Face pressed against the sweaty sheets, three am, tense silence of being the last one awake. Sometime past that, finally, sleep. Hollowed out and empty.