Milky Money

        Sam Wortman

​

   “Donald Trump says he was 'the one that really broke the glass ceiling on behalf of women,’” said Chris Matthews. I was watching Hardball on the tiny screen built into the headrest in front of me. The cabin of the plane was humid and the windows were foggy with rainwater that had instantly evaporated off the tarmac. During the summer months, Miami was a still swamp. Mom sat in the window seat and a large older man who felt like a space heater sat in the aisle seat. I watched the man peripherally, he was eating a cheeseburger using a magazine as a napkin on his lap. A new headline appeared on the bottom of the screen, ‘Donald Trump says he'd use ISIS to 'scare the pope' into supporting capitalism.’    I laughed, and Mom looked at me for an explanation.  

   “How are you dating someone who is voting for Trump?” I asked.

   “Don’t.” Her eyes were the same as mine, serpentine and sad.

   “Your kid is queer and your boyfriend is voting for…” I stopped. The greasy man in the aisle seat was studying my words. His eyes darted between my boobs and buzz cut. I gave him a death stare and shot, “Do you see the dissonance?”

   He opened his mouth and said nothing, though, like everyone else, I imagined he had much to say on Donald Trump or parental respect, but he only looked as if for help at the cheeseburger in his lap.

   “Cut it out,” Mom whispered sharply. Her bottom lip quivered like a boxer hitting a speed bag. “If you spent any time with Harry, you’d know he has nothing against gays, he couldn't care less. Politics were your Dad’s thing, not mine. I don’t say anything about the girls wandering in and out of your life.”

   “They aren’t Trump supporters,” I said and put my headphones back on trying to listen to Chris Matthews.

Dad had to be rolling six feet below.

​

   Cars were lining the street like trees by the time Mom parked the rental car in Kain’s driveway. There were seven August birthdays, including mine and Mom’s, in the family, and every year, after the kids got home from sleep away camp and Q2 earnings season was over, my brother and his wife had the family over to celebrate. Mom and I flew from Florida for the occasion, it’s what Dad would have wanted, and these days, I couldn’t help but feel, that like Hamlet, I swallowed the ghost of my father and his living will.

   For Mom, I was Dad. I was a little Kenny W. I was proof that they had loved. I was a tornado of his best and worst traits. He had been a pip; during the war, Dad had told his patients that he’d comp their root canals if they came up with one good thing Bush had done by the end of their appointment. (Most didn’t). At the grocery store, at the diner, in our house, he had ended up in fights. People had been outraged. An ‘Impeach GW Bush’ tee shirt! You don’t support the troops, they’d said. And now, fifteen years later, I was regularly tossing drinks into the faces of men slurring Syrians and wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.

   For Kain, I was an emanation of Dad, a toilet for him to take a shit in. Kain didn’t love me, and if he did, I didn’t feel it. Each time I had visited Jersey since Dad had died, he had taken me out for breakfast at the corner deli Dad and him used to go, which sounds sweet and brotherly, if he hadn’t stared at me long enough for his brown eyes to suck me in like black holes. When he’d spoken, it was because food hadn’t been in front of him, and he’d told and never asked. He’d told me that the ham-string he’d torn six months ago was still affecting his tennis game, that Dad had been nicer to me than he had been to him and Alby, that Caroline cried louder than the girls did when they fell and she had turned them into pussies, and on and on. His heart was a ghost town.

   And, as for me, I couldn’t let go. I missed Dad too damn much.

   I took the luggage out of the trunk and wheeled the two bags through the front door of Kain’s home, no one was in the foyer so before anyone noticed me I dragged the luggage down the basement stairs and stored them in the guest room. I could hear Mom talking, in an octave higher than usual, to Kain and Abby, the kitchen was directly above the guest room. We hadn’t spoken since our spat on the plane, and on the way here she had driven in a silence so loud it had been deafening. I opened the door of the coat closet, if there was weed, I wanted to smoke it before being slapped by questions there were no answers to, like what I was planning to do after graduation. I smelled the sleeve of Dad’s army jacket in hope his warm sandalwood smell somehow still clung to it, but it was rank like expired cauliflower, rank like his breath after chemo treatments, and I pushed it aside. I just wanted to see him for one more last time and give him a hug, though I knew I’d see him later, he’d visit my dreams, he did nearly every night. It’s like deja vu; waking up some mornings believing that Dad’s alive, that I can call to ask how his sleeps had been. On the second shelf I found a bong and an empty glass jar, the bowl had ash in it so I lit it up but nothing caught fire, and I drudged upstairs.

   My aunt, uncle, brother, Dad’s ex-wife Sherry, cousins, and nephews were in the kitchen standing around the granite island eating and talking. The house looked staged as if it was indefinitely up for sale, there were prints of pigs and butterflies and typewriters and liquor bottles, bath-tub size baskets of wheat grass in every room and hotel-brand linens. As soon as Dad had died, Kain had ripped out and renovated the main floor of the house as if he had been waiting to collect Dad’s life insurance, but no one had ever confirmed my theory, and I wasn’t about to ask. The long, fat-bottomed, glass eggplant that Mom and Dad had gotten Kain and Abby for their wedding had been pushed to the edge of the island to make room for appetizers. It had always reminded me of a swollen milky tit and even the bottom of it came to a point like a nipple.

   Hit and run style, I kissed many cheeks trying to make my way to the backyard where the pool was. I loved swimming, spear fishing, free diving, skimming, anything that took me beneath the surface. Talking to my relatives or anyone except Mom and my best friend Dani had always made me feel like I was on a cliff about to jump in water as forgiving as concrete. People were sour about everything and nothing, but then again, I was too.

   Kain’s voice hung over the island like storm clouds. He was talking to Aunt Jo about being prevented by the board from purchasing 50,000 shares of a South African biotech company. I lingered behind her, and Kain didn’t see me, I wasn’t even sure if he knew he was talking to Aunt Jo and not one of his colleagues. Apparently, the board had said his reasoning for buying the stock was already factored into the price, and he’d thought different and tossed his coffee on to the table during the meeting. The only reason he probably wasn’t fired was because he was the CFO, and the fund was doing well.

   He finally saw me, put his beer on the counter and patted my head like I was a porcupine. “Still haven’t grown back your hair,” he said. His lip twitched like he thought he was funny, and bonfires kindled beneath the skin of my cheeks.

   “I like it.”  I said.

   “Are you a boy now?”

   “Just get me a beer.” Prick.

   Kain bent down opening the door to the beverage fridge built-in the island. I wanted to take the glass eggplant off its aluminum brushed stand and smash it into his skull.

   “What do you want?” he asked.

   “Something light and crisp.”

   He rummaged through the fridge.  “Funny, there’s a boy transitioning in Sophia’s class too. They call him Lily. Psycho parents.”

   “I’m transgender, not transsexual.”

   “There’s a difference?” He chuckled and handed me a lager called ‘Virgin Mary’ from a brewery in Havana. I tilted the bottle to my lips at an angle that allowed for a steady flow and drank till there was warmth in my heart. I reminded myself why it was that I was here, that it had been Dad’s wish for my brothers and I to stick together. Each time I visited I found myself having to remember that more.

   “When I get a moment later I want to talk,” Kain said grabbing his beer. I nodded and pressed my lips together, they burned from the change in climates. If he wanted to lecture me on everything he knew nothing and understood little about, I was going to shoot through his roof.

   My brothers were my half-siblings from Dad’s first marriage; it was only a little after Vietnam when Dad had married Sherry and raised the twins; whereas by the time I was born in ‘94, he was 51, an endodontist and in his prime to enjoy the riches of capitalism, staying at Four Seasons and in top-floor suites, rewards which I had advertently reaped being the only child of his later marriage to Mom. My childhood was as incomprehensible to my brothers as theirs was to me. They got hot just looking at me, hearing my voice cut into theirs, it was pathetic. The reality was, it was only till I was older that I realized how beautiful my childhood had been, and sure, the furniture had been nice, but watching Dad die on the Persian rug hadn't been. They didn’t get it.

   I walked outside and the stones on the patio warmed my soles, the sun didn’t feel as hot as it had in Miami. All shapes with similar faces were wrapped in colorful neoprene either sunning or swimming in the pool, and my nieces climbed out of the water like frogs and each gave me a wet hug. I held their small faces in my hands trying to kiss their cheeks and they wiggled away laughing. I couldn’t wait for the maturity gap between us to close, to have fun booze-filled barbeques and holiday dinners with our kids and the best friends that we just so happened to be lucky enough to sleep with. I couldn’t wait for family gatherings to be not like this.

   “Aunt Eden, that’s not a bathing suit!” Sophia said. She was short for ten and keen on style, her white one-piece had a multi-colored lion with a headdress on the front.

   “I’m comfortable,” I told her. I was wearing a sports bra and boardies.

   “Can I call you Uncle Ed?”

   “No, I’m a girl.”

   She shrugged and looked at the water. I could see the war waging above her throat as she decided on a narrative to interpret my changing body. For most of her life, my eyelashes had been curled and painted, my legs, armpits, and crotch shaven and my long hair had been sandy from the sun. I got on my knees so we were eye-level and put my hand on her chopstick collarbone. “I cut my hair that’s it. You are a smart girl, be mature. Your dad told me there is a boy transitioning that you are in class with.”   

   “Lily’s weird.” Her eyebrows seesawed.

   “I’m kinda like her.”

   “That’s weird.”

   “It’s okay to be.”

   She stuck her tongue out at me and dove back into the pool staying below the surface. She looked lithesome and free as she kicked through the water. At ten I had been in a bikini, posing as a girl who liked boy bands and dick.

The heat index was higher than the temperature of the hot tub, how my brother Alby was neck deep in it especially with the jets on was lost on me. I hated the aggravated water, the turbulent bubbles licking my face with heat and breaking against my skin. I turned off the jets and sat on the ledge putting my feet in. Alby always appeared younger than Kain, though they were twins. It was as if the fact that Alby lived by himself in a one bedroom on the Upper East Side and did the same shit everyday - work at a private wealth company, then dinner at Delieza’s- meant he would never wrinkle with time. His hair was full and as black as brown could get.

   “I heard your Mom has a boyfriend,” Alby said.

   I nodded.

   He waited a moment, and I kicked my legs through the water, dissolving my reflection. “What’s his name?”

   “Harry.”

   “Do you like him?”

   “He’s a Republican which would be fine if he wasn’t a Republican voting for Trump.”

   “You’re kidding! Dad was so liberal.”

   “It’s like she finds political play hot.” I tilted my head back and mimicked Mom’s high voice. “Oh, yes, Hitler.”

   “Don’t ever do that again. Is Harry, at least, nice to her?”

   “How nice could a Trump supporter be?”

   The metal gate to the pool screeched as Mom opened it. She was wearing a red sun-dried dress that made it obvious she was a petite woman with the legs of a teenager. She waved to her step grandkids that were swimming and sat next to me on the ledge of the hot tub, taking a sip of Chardonnay and pressing the button to turn the jets back on. She didn’t bother giving Alby a hug or kiss. No one ever did, he hated to be touched.

   “What are you guys talking about?” Mom asked.

   Alby looked at me.

   “Harry,” I said.

   “What did Eden tell you?” Mom asked Alby.

   “The truth,” I said.

   “That he’s a nice guy and treats me well,” Mom slung.

   “Exactly,” Alby said.

   The cicadas yelled from the sappiest trees they’d found in the back of the yard. Alby reached for his towel and pulled himself out of the water. Of all Dad’s kids, Alby looked most like him; the hooded gray eyes, tennis calves and swimmers back, and as Alby walked along the stone path towards the house, Mom and I watched him like he was the husband and the father that we had lost.

   “You know, I hate the bubbles,” I said.

   “To bad, this is not a democracy.” She took a long draw of wine as she lowered herself into the hot tub. “Just so you know, Kain invited Harry to come to the bbq, to stay overnight while we were going to be here, and I had to tell him no, that you weren’t ready. And it would have been easy. Harry is actually visiting his daughter in Pennsylvania.”

   “I would have sucked it up.”

   “Yeah, right. All I’m saying is it would have been nice for him to be here.”

​

   Kain stuck his head out of the back door, waited for a break in the cicadas’ song and hollered that dinner was ready. On the island and surrounding counters were bowls and platters of fruits, fish, salads. A feast. All the kids had pushed to the front of the line to get food, and I stood behind Mom and Sherry, listening to them yap about their boyfriends as if the ghost of Dad was not standing between them. I opened a Heineken and chugged; whatever craft shit Kain had given me earlier had tasted like Mary’s sins.  

   Sophia ran past me and raced around the corner of the island cutting in between Mom and Sherry. She belly-flopped on to the counter and reached for the ladle in the platter of tater tots. She tried to grab the handle but accidently, pushed it away from her, and the platter of tots moved a millimeter and nudged the eggplant off the counter. It broke against the top of Alby’s foot, and hundreds of sequins of glass burst on the floor.

   “The fuck, Sophia!” Alby yelled.

Kain shoved Alby into the cabinets. “She’s a kid. Chill out, dude.”

   “There’s glass in my foot, asshole,” Alby winced, lifting himself on to the counter to inspect his foot.

   I stood at the perimeter of the kitchen, drinking beer and watching the chaos. They were like zoo animals that had escaped.

   “Caroline,” Kain bellowed as he stared at the mess. “Caroline!” She ran in through the patio door, stopping short when she saw the purple shards covering the kitchen floor like rocks in a fish tank. “How did this happen?” Caroline asked Kain.

   “Sophia.”

   “Is she okay?”

   “She’s fine. Alby just scared her,” he said pointing to Sophia, she had taken refuge beneath the kitchen table and was whimpering. “Clean this up, will you?” he said to Caroline.

   “Help?”

   “Ask Mom and Nancy. I planned on having dinner with Eden anyways, and Alby’s going to need tweezers.”

   “Fine.”

   I had seen Dad be shitty like this to Mom, too.

   Kain walked over and asked me to eat dinner with him, as if I hadn’t been in the audience listening and watching along with everyone else.

   “How about the basement?”

   “If we have to.”

   I followed him down the stairs, past the door of the guest room, to the bar that he had installed on the far wall of the basement. Cold air blew from the vent, and I shivered against my damp bra and shorts. Kain poured scotch into a glass. I put my plate next to his on the walnut surface and sat on a stool that was fashioned as a saddle. I waited.

   “Promise me, you won’t tell your Mom what I’m going to say?” Kain asked.

   “Sure.” It’s bizarre how people made you swear against what you both knew you’d do.

   “Dad was always going on about people fucking.”

   I had no idea what he was referencing, but he had my curiosity. I nodded for him to go on. I craved to know everything I didn’t about Dad.

   “He screwed Alby and I.” Kain took a hurried sip of scotch. “He had promised Alby that he would pay off his law school loans and promised me he’d open college funds for my kids, that he’d spilt the money evenly amongst Alby, me and you.” He sounded more excited than I had heard him in years. “Then, Dad died, and the loans weren’t paid, no accounts had been opened and your Mom inherited most of his money. Fucking prick.”

   “Why not use the pay outs for the college funds?” I asked trying not to smirk.

   The fire that had cremated Kain’s heart blazed on his face. “Your mom is blowing all Dad’s money on some other dude and handbags. I haven’t missed Dad, not even once in the past four years, and it’s his damn fault.”

   If there was a portrait of Kain that was locked in the attic, I imagined it was more savage looking than ever.

   “Do you understand why I’m pissed?” His voice curdled with bad blood. “What does your mom do? She does nothing. She goes to the gym and hangs out with her friends. Why doesn’t she get a job? I’d be so bored and unhappy.”

   A bloody gushing tsunami like The Great Wave off Kanagawa gathered force within me. Mom had done everything for Dad when he was sick.  She was his caretaker for five and a half years; with him, she had traveled to Chicago for chemotherapy, to Alabama for hyperbaric chamber treatments, to Austria for doping and virotherapy and had done all this while raising me, and I had been a fucking tornado and got kicked out of nearly every school I attended. Kain had been two thousand miles away. He had been there via a phone call. He had no idea what it had been like. It was a cheap shot trying to wound Mom by unloading the gun on me.

   “You are talking out of your ass. My mom has her own money, family money,” I said staring at the blue wall beyond Kain’s shoulder trying not cry, trying to contain the air bubbles of screams below my throat. “What do you want me to say? That yes, she works out and goes to happy hour almost every day. She’s 56 years old with no skills, a large life insurance policy and a beautiful face. Would you work? I’d be exhausted from loving and losing and loving.”

“But it was so obvious that after he died your mom would find another wealthy guy to take care of her, and that’s exactly what happened! Why give your mom all the money?”

   I had known Dad when I was a child, there had been many nuisances I had never picked up on, dynamics I would never understand; Kain’s version of Dad wasn’t the Dad I had known; my Dad had showed up to my last varsity basketball game in a wheel-chair and with an oxygen tank two weeks after getting out of ICU. My Dad had taken me fly fishing in the great rivers of the West. My Dad had made sure Mom and I lived a life no less luxurious then when he had been alive. “What do you want me to do? Ask Mom to pay off Alby’s loans?”

   He clenched his teeth making his face even more square than usual. “Don’t say anything to her about this.”

   “Why tell me? Spite?” I grabbed the glass of scotch finishing it in two gulps.

   “You should know how Dad had left things with Alby and me.”

   “You think Dad owes you?”

   He slammed his fist like a gavel into the bar. “It’s not about that. It’s the principal.”

   “Then, why is the money talking?” I choked, and the tsunami crashed on to shore and sea spray shot out of my eyes dripping down my coral colored cheeks. All this proved how little he knew me, that he had assumed I’d care as little for his feelings as he did for mine.

   “Don’t go running to your Mom. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Kain laughed in his throat nervously.

   "I need to be alone," I told him, went into the guest room, and buried my face deep in the pillows. I cried for Dad. I cried in confusion and with acknowledgement that I’d have to reconsider my memories. I cried for truth in perception. I cried for things that no longer existed. I cried until the pillows were soaked and my eyes could scream no more and fell asleep exhausted.

​

   The doorbell rang. It was early morning, and I was in what felt like but looked nothing like my childhood home laying on a tie dye bed, reading ‘Infinite Jest.’ I yelled for Mom to get the door. She didn’t answer so I walked through the kitchen, down a short hallway, and opened the door to Mom and Dad’s room. The sun was rising over the wall of the bed and I stepped over the flowery duvet cover that had been tossed to the floor. Harry and Mom were naked and sleeping with their saggy tuchas facing the ceiling. It was fucking gross. The door bell rang again. “Give me a second,” I yelled, walking to the front door. Whoever was there was now beating repeatedly. I kicked the door open, and Dad was standing on the porch, holding an eggplant like a baby, wearing his Dodger’s Jackie Robinson jersey and favorite wading pants that Mom and I had buried him in. He was caked in soil; not sterile like the air-brushed man I had kissed in the coffin.

   “I thought you were dead,” I said closing the door behind me walking on to the porch’s white planks.

   “What!” He laughed in his same-old congested way. “Mom sent me to the store for an eggplant for Kain, the other one broke.”

   “You can’t come in.”

   “It’s my house, Eden. Move.” He pushed past me and opened the door. I followed him into the kitchen. “Hun! Hun!” He yelled putting the eggplant on the counter. “Where’s Mom?” He asked me.

   “She’s exercising in the neighborhood,” I lied. My heart pounded so hard I worried he could hear it.

   “I’m going to shower. Grab breakfast at Bernie’s after?” He said as he walked towards his room.

   I ran down the narrow corridor and beat him to the door and grabbed the handle. “You can’t go in there!”

   “Why not?”

   “Don’t.”

   He picked me up by my shoulders and put me down behind him and opened the door. The duvet cover was still on the floor, and they were still naked.

   “Nancy, the fuck!” Dad jumped on to the bed and shook Mom awake. He rolled Harry over and started pounding his face as I stood in the doorway, just watching.

   “Stop! Stop!” Mom screamed and climbed on to Dad’s back trying to rip him off Harry’s body.

​

   I must had fallen asleep for some time because when I woke up Mom was standing at the end of the bed telling me it was time for cake. I brought my knees to my chest and watched my toes. My eyes felt like balloons and my head splintered from scotch and gnarly dreams.

   “What happened?” Mom’s brows were penciled-in and buried with worry in her frontal lobe. I didn’t want to tell her what Kain had said, what he had said about her lifestyle, especially not to her face. I was ashamed for even allowing him to have said those things in front of me. People kill people over shit talked about their mom.

   “You have to tell me. You look like you were punched in the face.” She sat on the bed and tried to hug me, but I swatted her arms away. I felt like I was strapped to a pillory.

   “Is it true Dad told Alby he’d pay off his law school loans?”

   “Who told you that?”

   “Kain.”

   “What a little shit.” She rolled her knuckles on the mattress. “Your brothers, especially Kain, harassed Dad for money.     They wouldn’t stop calling when he was in hospice. Dad told the boys whatever they wanted to hear. The stress was making him sicker.” She spoke as if she had discussed this many times to everyone but me, to everyone that had nothing to do with it. It was easier to do that, this I understood, but still, she should have told me, it hurt all the same. I wanted to yell into the pa system in Dad’s coffin to tell him that he was a fucking hypocrite, that he had only bothered to preserve harmony for himself when he was alive; he hadn’t believed in the ‘after-life,’ though ironically, I was now being mauled by his corpse, wishing his dirty lies had died with him.

   “I’m sorry baby. Kain should have never said anything to you about that.”

   “I want to leave. I’ll pay for a hotel room, I don’t care.”

   “With what money? Wash your face and cleanup. We are about to sing happy birthday. Your name is on the cake. This is our family.”

   “This is family?” I chuckled.

   “You will have your own too. Don’t worry.”

   I loved my family, but I was beginning to question why and how we were so different, and if I was delusional for thinking I was any different?

   Mom got off the bed and looked in the mirror pulling her cheeks down so she could rub cream in the crevices beneath her eye. “Sometimes shit is uncomfortable.”

   "I am pissed at Dad.”

   “He was dying.” Through the mirror she was looked into my eyes and her pupils were lost in the seperteine sea.

   “He didn’t have to die a coward. Don’t you at least agree with that?”

   “It’s complicated.”

   I climbed out of bed and walked to the bathroom to take a shower. The hot water hit the top of my head and slid down my face veiling me as if I was in a cave on the inside of a waterfall. I wanted to stay in here forever, in a muted world, looking through a glass curtain as foggy as my head. Mom seemed so damn happy, it killed me. She was happier with Harry then she had been with Dad. I was jealous; of the power of her beauty, of her kindness, of her gravitational pull. I wanted love, or at the very least to taste its ashes, to know that someone could kindle a fire in me. I wanted someone to save me from my family, and this struck me like lightning, resetting my rhythm. I was the hypocrite. I was holding Mom hostage from the very thing I wanted too- to be loved. I wondered what my family would look like if I ever had one.            Would I have kids? How would I have them? Adoption? Insemination? Would I flee the country if Trump got elected?    Would I get married now that I could? Anxiety was a bitch. I shook the water out of my hair and dried off with a towel walking to the guest room. Mom was sitting on the bed, loosely talking to Harry on the phone, I could tell by the spike in her voice.

   She held the phone away from her face momentarily. “Harry said if you want we can drive to Allentown and stay with him and his daughter.”

   “No thanks, but maybe next time he could come with us?” I said putting on a fresh tee shirt that smelled like the lavender incense I burned in my apartment.

   Mom smiled so hard that her lips disappeared. Her teeth were blinding like glaciers on a sunny day, as blinding as love, and she told Harry that she’d call before bed, that she needed to go upstairs for cake, and she bounced off the bed, and I followed her up the stairs.

   “Thank you Eden.”

   “For what?”

   “Granting me permission to be happy.”

   I gave Mom a sick smile; the kind you make after getting smashed silly in the face.

At the top of the stairs, Sophia was waiting. She had changed into leggings and an ‘I love Gymnastics’ tee shirt, and her index finger was resting on the light switch. She saw us and she started flicking the lights on and off and hollered,    “Ready!” loud enough for her voice to reach the kitchen, and someone yelled back for her to quit it and keep the lights off.

   “So,” she says putting her hand on her hip, narrowing her eyes.  “What were you doing down there?”

   “Just talking, Soph,” I said poking her stomach till she couldn’t help but laugh; even she could feel the tension.

Everyone started to sing happy birthday. Sophia took my hand and skipped into the kitchen, squeezing us in between Alby and Aunt Jo so we could lean on the island. Aunt Jo put one hand on my shoulder and the other on Sophia’s and smiled. The cake was over-the-top. It had three tiers- the height of a small child, and there were so many candles that the fondant looked ablaze. Such a beautiful waste of money.

   My voice sounded like not my own, like I was still in elementary school and being shamed into saying the pledge of allegiance. I studied the faces of my family as I moved my lips, acting. My words tasted like paper. The light from the candles casted shadowy smiles onto everyone’s faces. They looked happy and haunted; their pupils were dilated as if they drank the Jonestown punch. We sang the final verse, and the little kids puckered their lips and pushed as close as they could to the cake and blew out the candles.

   On top of the cake there was an oily plastic figurine; it was a white family cozied up on a couch. Their faces and clothes were black with soot, and still, they were beaming as if they hadn’t been surrounded by a ring of fire seconds ago.

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Sam Wortman is 22 years old and studies creative writing and LGBTQ studies at the University of Miami. She lives in Coral Gables with her girlfriend and their dog and snake, and loves her mother very much. She is on the staff of the Mangrove Literary Journal, and she loves to surf and skateboard. Among her favorite writers are Lewis Nordan, David Foster Wallace, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. Her work has previously appeared in the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Parenting.