todd of tacoma

1. Today’s episode is brought to you by broccoli. With three distinct flavors: Whole Foods, Safeway, and Trader Joe’s. Steam it if you’re eating it late at night, so it’s easier to digest.
2. Today’s episode is brought to you by asparagus. With four distinct smells: toenail fungus, pancake mold, tree farts, and donkey semen.
3. Today’s episode is brought to you by ICE. If you haven’t seen an ad for ICE you’re not being properly targeted. Or you are.
4. Let’s hear a story.

Sparrow Hannah was the oldest person on the bus for three years, the oldest for and by five years when she graduated. She would have been mocked mercilessly if anyone in the school talked to her. Everyone else in her class drove.

Not that there weren’t smirks sometimes.

Actually, there were smirks all the time. That’s how people spoke to her. They would never outright disrespect her, no, they weren’t that mean. But they didn’t respect her, so they looked at her with shit-eating grins.

There was one running joke, now that I think of it. Sparrow, since she never drove a car, never had to wear an outfit befitting someone who drove a car. Never needed to maneuver from pedal to pedal or sit still enough to keep a steady speed. So she never had cause to complain to her mom that her jeans didn’t fit.

Sparrow had been wearing jeans that didn’t fit since she turned into a woman, as Mom put it. They were hand-me-downs from her. Mom jeans. And her mom was two to three sizes smaller than her.

The joke was this. It started when one of the smokers, there’s always a group of smokers in a high school story, it started when one of the smokers took a longer look at her jeans than usual and asked, hey Sparrow, you want another Camel?

It caught on and stuck, with a slight adjustment. Smokers and nonsmokers alike asked, how about that Camel?

But that was it. That was the only thing. Other than the uncomfortable jeans and the bus and the smirks and the running joke about her cameltoe, there was nothing to really make her time in high school agonizing or unendurable.

5. The first radio marketing spot aired in 1922, fifty-eight years after Nathaniel Hawthorne died. They mention that fact right up top.
6. The advertisement was for Hawthorne Court, what Queensboro Corporation called their latest “group of high-grade dwellings.”
7. Two months after the ten-minute spot aired, Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room. Three years after that, she published Mrs. Dalloway.
8. These two threads are not connected.
9. The 1922 Hawthorne Court radio spot claimed Nathaniel Hawthorne “analyzed with charming keenness the social spirit of those who [..] happily selected their homes removed from the congested part of the city, right at the boundaries of God’s great outdoors, and within a few minutes by subway from the business section of Manhattan, and he painted the people inhabiting those homes with good-natured relish.”
10. Fifty-eight years before those words aired, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral: “…there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died of it.”
11. Today, there are thousands of apartments, condos, houses, addresses, and senior living facilities in the U.S. named after Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perhaps because, as the ad says, “The cry of the heart is for more living room.”
12. The first Sesame Street episode on 11/10/1969 was sponsored by W, S, E, 2, and 3. It is a feast for Numerologists.
13. Back to Sparrow:

Sparrow sat down in her seat with the usual squeal of her skin against denim and the squeak of seat vinyl. The noise woke up Eddie Harold, who dropped the book in his lap onto the floor. Sparrow picked it up for him. Its title was Alone. Eddie had said the author was Unknown.

Do you wanna see what else I’m reading? Eddie said.

I guess I do, Sparrow said.

Promise not to tell anyone? Eddie said.

I guess I won’t, Sparrow said.

Okay, Eddie said. And he pulled a book out of his bag carefully. It had a thick bookmark. Eddie was squeezing it hard, it seemed, so the bookmark wouldn’t fall out. It was a children’s book, the story in pictures of Adam and Eve. On the cover, they were naked, God’s two creations, but there were plants covering Adam’s penis and Eve’s vagina and tits.

That’s a kids’ book, Sparrow said.

I thought I could see Eve’s boobs, Eddie said, when I was little. Like this.

He put held the book to his face, right below his nose, perpendicular to his face, and squinted his eyes trying to peek beneath the leaves covering Eve’s tits.

Sparrow cackled, like a guffaw, only kind of witchy.

Do you wanna see my bookmark? Eddie said.

I guess I do, Sparrow said.

Eddie opened the book carefully in his lap keeping it perfectly level and keeping the spine kind of pinched so the bookmark wouldn’t fall.

It was a kitchen knife. Long and kind of dull-looking, but with the handle removed and the tang naked. Sparrow thought she might as well be looking at a sawed-off shotgun.

You’re not supposed to take that to school, are you? Sparrow said.

I guess I’m not, Eddie said. He closed the book and slid it in his backpack. His fingers were white from squeezing the book together so hard.

Did you take it from somewhere? Sparrow said.

No, I found it. In a snowbank. In the ice, Eddie said.

I didn’t see any rust on it, Sparrow said.

Ice doesn’t make knives rust, Eddie said.

Sparrow didn’t challenge him on this.

Maybe you should bury it, she said. It’s dangerous to have in your backpack. What if you fall on it and it shoots out of the Garden of Eden into the base of your neck?

That won’t happen, Eddie said.

And if you just put it back in the snowback someone else will get hurt stepping on it in the spring, Sparrow said. Maybe bury it in the ground. Tell me when you have it buried, she said. I’d like to know how it goes.

She faced forward in her seat again, making a big vinyl show of it, squeak squeak, like the matter of the knife was settled. Her heart was beating fast and that annoyed her. It was just a boy with a little weapon.

14. Did you see that Catherine O’Hara died?
15. Did you see that Jesse Jackson died?
16. Have you heard how Virginia Woolf died?
17. Where were you when Kobe Bryant died?
18. These are the kinds of questions you’ll be expected to answer as you get older.

I buried something, Eddie said. Wanna guess what?

Did you bury the knife? Sparrow said.

Eddie shook his head no.

Did you bury hidden treasure?

I’m not a kid, Eddie said.

You are a kid, Sparrow said.

Then how come I buried a grownup thing? Eddie said.

What did you bury? Sparrow was getting sweaty in her jeans. She leaned forward closer to Eddie. It sounded like a wiper blade on a dry windshield.

Who farted? a girl said five rows back. It was Kenzie and Sparrow felt comfortable flipping Kenz off, so she did. Hey! Kenzie said, followed by, do you want a Camel!

Eddie, Sparrow said, what did you do? You can tell me.

I swear I didn’t do it! Eddie said. He fell.

Who fell? Sparrow said.

Acie, Eddie said.

Acie was Grace, Eddie’s family’s rottweiler. She was not smart.

She bit it! I had to! Eddie was crying. Small tears like actors make. He seemed annoyed by them and he sniffed his nose to make them go away.

What did you do? Sparrow asked again.

Can I say a bad word? Eddie said.

Sparrow nodded.

She was going to have a fucked up mouth, Eddie said. She was bleeded her tongue off, like melting. She didn’t look right bleeding.

What did you do? Sparrow said.

I bled her all the way, Eddie said. And I buried her in Leep’s wheat.

Did you tell anyone what you did? Sparrow said.

You can’t tell anyone! Eddie said. You promised!

You never asked me to promise, Sparrow said. You know they’re going to find Grace when they plow up the field.

They aren’t plowing for a couple years, Eddie said. They got rye under the wheat.

They’ll plow it this spring, Sparrow said. The rye isn’t harvested. It’s food for the ground.

There was a silence in the bus, and you remember in silences like this one that the bus is just four wheels on the road like every other vehicle. You come out of yourself for a little bit when it gets so quiet.

Eddie waited for the quiet to end.

Will Acie melt the rest of the way by spring? he ended up whispering.

Melt? Sparrow said. Oh, decompose. No, it takes much longer than that. Plus, she’ll be preserved in the frozen ground.

What kinds of plants will eat her fastest? Eddie said. Will rye eat her? There was more silence. Don’t plants eat animals? He was beginning to pee.

Do you want to learn about plants? Sparrow took off her flannel shirt and handed it to him. This shirt’s too small for me, she said. So are my jeans, but I’m not taking those off.

Eddie laughed, like a thank you laugh. Is it so no one sees your camel?

Is that what that means? Sparrow said.

I don’t know, Eddie said.

19. More films should have intermissions. It’s only the long ones that do. Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather Part II, The Brutalist, 2001: A Space Odyssey. A chance to remind yourself you’re sitting in a chair in a room, facing forward, observing pictures moving quickly by, at twenty-four per second, or thirty, depending what you’re watching.
20. They’re just telling you they’re conscious of how long their story is.
21. Sparrow’s story’s almost done:

Sparrow’d had lately a recurring dream. She was trying to pee at a urinal, but she couldn’t reach herself over it because it was filled too high with plastic containers. Ice cube trays, baby dinner plates, laundry soaps, Drano jugs, waste buckets, slop sinks. What gaps there were were stuffed with plastic bags. When she’d wake up from this dream she’d think she’d peed the bed.

Grandma Hannah, who’d been taking care of Sparrow since Dad’s accident and Mom’s departure, said she might be perimenopausal. Sparrow was too afraid to google it in the school library to learn what it was and find out if it was true.

So, she went on assuming perimenopause had something to do with turning Grandma’s age too soon. Wearing sleeveless t-shirts and a loose-fitting bra the color of tobacco smoke–stained teeth.

On her last day of school, she finally did look it up. She was relieved to learn she was probably too young. 

She went outside into a late springtime sunshine. She noticed the school sign in front of the library for the first time. Their school logo was brick-like and gaudy, an anachronistic design, like a newsprint ad from another era. Its paint was blurring into the old plastic, too, melting there together in the hot sun. It was in the wrong place, that’s why. What felt like a hundred reflections off two long rows of class windows radiated heat there like magnifying glasses.

She thought of it on fire.

You kind of want things to burn in heat like that.