Poor Houdini

Four very thin trees stand above their own reflections and hesitate, as cold girls do. She thinks of rhymes for girls do. Whirls through. Pearls anew. Use it in a sonnet? Eddy's mother lives by a lake. It is a gray: and glassy evening. Supper was all reminiscences, Eddy recalling slow white mists drifting over the schoolyard each day at five, when the chemical plant incinerated its Styrofoam, and how he broke his collarbone and no one believed him for three days, his mother at the head of the table smiling and continuing with her fruit cup, his brother sitting opposite with his head down, a man tall and thin as a door, closed like a door. He ate as if expecting more. Four, chore, whore, underscore ran through her mind perkily. She mumbled something, got up from the table, and left. Now, at the lake, no one swimming, she watches the water slide from slate to black.

- By Anne Carson. Illustration by Lauren Peters-Collaer

What does your brother do? she asks Eddy on the way home, and Eddy says he has three paper routes. Paper routes? A grown man? Isn't he twenty? Says he doesn't need much to live on. And we both got something when the old man died. He lives on that? No, he bought a Bugatti. Shit, where's he keep a Bugatti? Oh, he crashed it or gave it away, I forget. So he stays with your mom? Trailer out back. Where I saw the chickens? Mom would rather he didn't keep chickens. Did you all eat supper together all the time growing up? Yes, he says. She likes the idea of her and Eddy learning about each other's childhood. She starts to tell him about her mother's voice crackling from the intercom every night at six, the meal laid out on plates on the kitchen counter, all of them shuffling off to their rooms with their plates to eat alone. He glances at her vaguely and speeds up to take the ramp onto the highway. They are driving through early-spring croplands. She stares out. The fields look shaved. We had chewing and long silences, he says. It's not much better.