Kristin FitzPatrick
Excerpt from "White Rabbit"
by Kristin FitzPatrick
published in The Southeast Review, Spring 2011, Volume 29, No. 1
In the hallway outside the college’s science labs, Ollie studies the posters asking people to fight for the hostages. In marker and in pen they draw no smoking lines through President Carter’s face and shout: Stand up! Free your fellow Americans! Leave Iran alone!
The sliding glass of the wall showcase is open. Not just unlocked but wide open, the display not quite finished. It holds three wooden model cross-sections of wombs. In first trimester, one of the captions says, human fetuses have gills and one-chamber hearts. He steps back and takes in the whole process. Behind the glass, the left half of the exhibit is blurry, but the right half is clear. Ollie hasn’t learned about anything like this in school, but the third trimester he can understand.
Inside one of the labs, his dad tells a lie to his friend Dr. Bill. Instead of admitting that his son has been suspended, he says that Ollie’s school is having a holy day, and then Ollie can’t catch all the words. “Could you let him…while his old man’s in a history department meeting?”
Another showcase caption explains the uterus, that big empty ballroom, and how the egg gets filled up and stays so small you can’t even see it, when it latches onto the wall, where it becomes a fish as the place floods, forever-and-ever-Amen, until it finally swims out, tethered. Ollie has watched enough TV and heard enough whispers at school to know that somewhere there is a wooden penis made to fit into the wooden birth canal. But it’s tough to picture it.
“Like a glove,” a voice says.
She stands in the corner with one foot leaning against the wall. Shadows fall over the left side of her. Blonde hair hangs over one of her eyes. A safety pin substitutes for an earring. Her t-shirt says God Save the Queen. Her skirt dips and folds and shows that she’s too old to go to a school like St. Luke’s, where Ollie is a fourth grade nothing, because its length would get her detention in a heartbeat. Or maybe suspension. Her and Ollie, hanging together, on a two-day vacation from Sister Mary Smelly Pits and the army of frowning nuns.
“I dare you to take something,” she says.
The womb glows. Ollie reaches into the third trimester model, when the neck is sealed up and all the thing wants is to come up for air.
From the lab, Dr. Bill’s voice rises, but his words stay in the mud. “Something something busy and why didn’t he go to the nursery with Gail?” Gail is Ollie’s mom, who is too angry to look at him. The tree nursery is her work, where, in the after school hours, Ollie sweeps the dirt.
“Please, Bill,” his dad says, “no one else will take him.” The voice spills around the corner. Ollie snaps his hand back into his pocket and looks to his right. The queen is gone.
His dad clears his throat. Ollie turns to face him. His dad opens his mouth, then closes, smiles his boarded up smile. He doesn’t open again, doesn’t tell Ollie to get away from those private parts. He nods. It is the I’m-proud-of-you look, but without the so-don’t-disappoint-me squint. Proud. Even now, when Ollie’s on punishment.
In the back of the lab, Ollie climbs onto a stool next to the queen. He swivels: left, right, spring back to center. His feet sway. He thinks of a new direction for his report on human miracles, the Houdini report he’ll present when he goes back to school. He’ll start by announcing that the Great Mystifier, the King of Handcuffs, was so hungry as a young amateur that he had to eat rabbits for dinner. Ollie hopes the class won’t say Big deal, everybody did that in the old days.
“New miracles, Oliver,” Sister Mary Smelly Pits has said. “The report has to be a current events story. Don’t waste our time with old tales.” The name of their religion book, after all, is New Life. In it, he does the commandment crosswords, and searches for letters that spell out sins. V-a-n-i-t-y, t-h-e-f-t. Problems that God needs us to fix ourselves, when He’s tired of saving us.
[end of excerpt]
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