The Safety of Objects: Stories by A. M. Homes Read Free Book Online Page B

basketball. I turned and ran back through the yards. I ran until I didn’t know the names of the people in the houses around me. I ran through backyards until I stopped hearing Rayanne’s voice calling Error.

Chunky in Heat
    Her thighs spread across the vinyl ropes of the lawn chair. In the heat they seem to melt into the plastic, seeping out from under her shorts, slipping through the vinyl as though eventually she’ll begin dripping fat onto the lawn.
    “Chunky?” her mother calls through the sliding glass door. The voice is muffled and sounds like a drowning person talking underwater. “I’m running errands, are you coming with me?”
    Cheryl shakes her head. Her second chin rolls across her chest, gliding on a layer of sweat.
    “Why not?”
    Her mother seems to be gurgling behind the glass. Cheryl doesn’t answer.
    “I’m leaving now,” her mother says, and then waits at the glass for several minutes before walking away.
    Cheryl lays on the chair in the center of the backyard, her right hand plucking individual blades of grass, her eyes not focused but aimed at a bald spot of lawn, a remnant from another afternoon when she had a similar problem.
    They call her Chunky in part after the candy bar, which used to be her favorite. Her mother started it.
    Cheryl was eating a bar and refused to give some to her little brother. “Too small to share,” she said, popping it all into her mouth, ending the discussion.
    He called her Fatty and poked her in the stomach; his finger sank deep into her flesh.
    “Your sister is just chunky,” her mother said.
    “You bet she is,” he said.
    After that he called her Chunky and then everyone called her Chunky, and then as if being called Chunky actually made her fatter, she truly was Chunky—and she hated that candy bar and switched to Mr. Goodbar but didn’t tell anybody.
    Cheryl is fat, only she didn’t know it until now. Before this she always thought of herself as a big girl, a growing girl, a girl who could do anything. Now, in the heat, in the sun, she lies immobile and swollen. She feels larger and larger as if her breath is actually inflating her. She tries not to breathe as much, as deeply. Her double chin presses down onto her chest, onto her windpipe, and she feels like she is suffocating. Cheryl tilts her head back, establishing an airway.
    She tilts her head and thinks of models in
Vogue
who seem like they can tilt anything, like they aren’t people but fully articulated dolls like her brother’s G.I. Joe—G.I. Joke she calls him. She thinks of thin people on beaches, with a breeze slipping over them. She realizes that because they are thin, they are aerodynamic. She pictures herself on the sand and sees a blob exactly like a jellyfish.
    Two incredibly large insects, with wingspans like small airplanes, buzz past Cheryl. They buzz back and forth within a foot of her head, and on their second pass-by they lock together belly to belly like Siamese twins. Their wings beat against each other with a faint clicking sound. They are mating; Cheryl knows that. She knows what they are doing, but she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know what they are doing it with. She can’t see anything. The insects’ green eyes bulge out of the sockets, their front feelers claw at each other, and Cheryl feels sick. There are too many sensations, too many distractions. She is writhing in her lawn chair, shifting her limbs, her balance. The chair rocks and lifts into the air as if it might tip and dump Cheryl onto the grass. She grips the armrests, thinking that holding tight will make her safe.
    “I’m gonna get you, I’m gonna get you.” Cheryl hears the voice of her next-door neighbor. “Oooh, I’m gonna get you now.” There is a high-pitched scream, a squeal of pleasure. Her next-door neighbor is chasing his daughter around in the backyard. She is six years old. “Bet you can’t get me. Bet you can’t,” she mimics and taunts her father.
    “Oooh, I’m