linda jr. is ready
by Holly Wilson
My legal guardian Vickie says Hurry the fuck up. She’s twenty-four, legally blind, and calls me her Fucktard Burden. Vickie’s a mean bitch but today she’s foster motherly, all how to spot the mall detective, how to distract the cashier, how to shoplift the fanciest bra from Penney’s.
This is because yesterday Mr. Bibb sent home a note from school: Linda Jr. needs a bra ASAP it said. I showed the note to Vickie while New Toddler Travis squirted lotion on Vickie’s legs and Vickie laughed so hard Travis’s face tic kicked in. Then in the kitchen Vickie stuck the note on the fridge and yelled the others down to dinner while Travis rubbed in the lotion. Meanwhile: me ripping fifteen red rings off fifteen circles of bologna.
I’m nine years old, I’ve never worn a bra let alone shoplifted one, and I’m sure whatever Vickie picks will be lacy to spite me. Vickie says I’m butch lesbo and I agree, I totally am. I wear keys on rings hooked to each belt loop and it’s a fact that in the murder-suicide my mom and dad died in, Mom was found with her arms stiffened around the Choctaw Nation Princess Starlight, an embrace the Oklahoma newspapers called both Sapphic and Deadly.
So now Vickie’s rushing me through the food court past Auntie Anne’s, and I hate being rushed, and I love a warm pretzel. Vickie’s like Little Bitch, Little Bitch, your hair is so fucked. You look like a parakeet with bangs, she says, so here I stop to check my hair in the window of B. Dalton. And she’s right, my hair, it’s a nest of something.
But—and this is important—No wonder Vickie calls you Fucktard I am truly not thinking. No wonder she calls you Little Orphan Dumbass I don’t go in my head. My twig and mud hair, my jingle-jangle keys, it’s true, but Vickie’s got thick glasses, not x-ray eyes. She can’t see inside my head where my thoughts boil to visions, to actual premonitions of future me. She can’t see badass Mall Arcade Manager Linda like I can. Sometimes at night when I put little Travis to sleep I hear the reverby shimmer of pinball synths even.
Here’s what a long time ago the lady grief counselor from the county said: You are a pilot of sorrow now, Linda. Today’s just the first day of the rest of it, she said.
So far that griefy bitch has been right but I refuse to give in, so now in front of Penney’s I say Okay Vickie, you slut, let’s rein these nips in, and here Vickie smiles big, her teeth spit-licked and shiny. So shiny I see the future play like a movie across them and in the future harshness is real, it’s a cat-kill-kitten world still, but for once finally I’m the fucking lion.
Holly Wilson has work in Couplet, Redivider, the Northwest Review, Narrative, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @WilsonJHolly.