Eye Black by Lindsey Stoddard

The summer heat trapped in the basement storage room of the JC Penny store is relentless. From there, Darsen can’t hear the sirens outside. From his spot buried amidst the naked mannequins on the bottom shelf of a steel unit, he can’t see the cops questioning his sister at the ten-items-or-less checkout line. He can’t see his mom crying or hear her cursing in the back seat of the cop car. Darsen lays there, sweating into his white t-shirt and black jeans, his breath collecting on the plastic body parts pressing in on him from every side, until a narrow streak of light from the opening door passes over his face. He holds his breath and closes his eyes.

“It’s Nisha,” she whispers. “You can come out. They’re gone.” Darsen pushes the plastic bodies aside; some fall lifelessly to the floor. “You should stay here tonight, though, Dar. He’s pressing charges, and Mom’s not saying anything.”

“What a fucker,” Darsen whispers back, punching his right fist into his thigh.

Nisha snuck him to the bathroom across the hall. “This is it until we open at 7:30 tomorrow, so make it good, little bro,” she says, and waits outside. In the small bathroom mirror Darsen sees his face for the first time since his reflection was splintered in the windshield of Rick’s black Neon. It’s the first time he’s washed his face since a sliver of glass windshield nicked the skin beneath his eye. It’s the first time he’s washed his hands since he convinced his friends Dean and Tameron to grab their baseball bats and skip their morning classes to bust Rick’s car. Now, in the mirror, dried blood cakes the cut below his right eye.

In the storage room, Nisha empties the contents of the front pocket of her JC Penny apron: a half full Poland Spring water bottle, and small bag of pretzels. “I’ll bring something better tomorrow,” she says.

The room is hot, and Darsen tries to sleep amongst the mannequins, clutching his baseball bat to his sticky chest. When he turned eleven and Rick brought him to his first game at Yankee Stadium, Darsen ran down to the first row and leaned over the wall during batting practice to have Bernie Williams sign his bat. It was hot, and Bernie’s eye black was dripping down his dark cheeks. Darsen giggled and reached out over the wall to touch the small drips. Bernie smiled, wiped the drips from his cheeks and smeared them with both his thumbs under Darsen’s eyes. “There,” he said, “Now you look like a fighter.” Rick led him back to their seats in the second to last row behind home plate, Darsen clutching the bat close to his body.

Darsen touches the cut below his right eye where a piece of glass from Rick’s smashed black Neon windows had nicked him, where Bernie Williams had smeared his eye black. He sleeps amongst the bodies, bat clutched to his chest until the narrow streak of light passes over him.

“He’s not dropping the charges. Mom’s not saying anything. I don’t know what to do, Dar,” Nisha whispers.

“I’ll stay here until mom figures it out.”

He thinks this is what his mom must have felt like when she was pregnant with him. She laid on the cement floor of the cell searching for coolness on her back. She laid there until they brought her to the hospital, her orange suit dripping with amniotic fluid, handcuffed to armed guards and wearing shackles.

There are no windows in the storage room and sometimes Darsen can’t tell if it’s day or night. When Darsen can’t stand it anymore, he pees in a bucket in the corner. He plays with the deck of cards Nisha brought him. He organizes them by number and suit, shuffles and organizes them again. He plays every variation of solitaire that Nisha can remember to teach him. With his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he notices the patterns in the cracks of the cement wall. The lines move out from one large chip as if someone else had been hiding with the mannequins, trying to escape by chipping away at the wall. The lines spread out across the wall like the cracks in Rick’s windshield.

“Son of a bitch!” Rick had yelled running out of the apartment to see his smashed car parked on the street. “You little fucker, you’re gonna pay for that.” At the first sound of Rick’s voice Dean and Tameron ran back toward their high school and Darsen ran to JC Penny to find Nisha. The sweat on Darsen’s palms made even the grip tape on his baseball bat slippery as he ran to find his sister.

Through the thin walls of their small apartment, Darsen has heard Rick yell worse things to his mom. He has heard him yell louder. He has heard his mom’s screams turn to silence.

Darsen’s hands still sweat into the grip tape as he tries to sleep on the storage room floor with the bat clutched to his chest. There it seems like the room is rocking. He focuses on the chip in the cement, but the sides of the room seem to sway back and forth. He is repulsed by the smell of his sweat, the faint smell of urine in the bottom of the bucket in the corner. The air is thick and used and in his dehydration, even the mannequins seem to be moaning with discomfort, their plastic bodies sweating the moisture from his breath.

This is what it must have been like, Darsen thinks. This is what it must have been like moments before his birth when she was sweating into her white hospital gown and bleeding into the white sheets. This is what it must have felt like with one hand and one leg cuffed to the delivery bed, unable to move for her nineteen hour labor.

Now Darsen lays on the cement floor, searching for any coolness he can find in the small room. He can’t live there much longer. He wants a shower, longer than the quick rinses in the bathroom sink across the hall. He wants a warm meal, and unlimited water. He wants to see Rick’s crumpled Neon. He wants to look his mom in the face and ask her to press charges against Rick so Rick will drop the charges pressed against him, so that the cops will stop questioning his sister, stop looking for him in all his friends’ basements. If she could only see his face, he believes, eye bloodied for her. A narrow streak of light passes over his face, and Nisha enters opening the door all the way, flooding the room with light. Darsen shields his eyes from the rush of light, and as his eyes adjust, he notices that some of the plastic bodies have lost their limbs. Arms and legs lay on the floor, headless torsos rest in his sweat stain on the cement.

“Let’s go home. She paid him off and he dropped the charges,” she says.

Darsen looks at his mom just once before he moves in with his sister and her new boyfriend for the last three weeks of summer, before he moves into his small dorm room. She sees the cut beneath his eye where Bernie Williams smeared his eye black. “You paid that fucker?” he asks. The look on his mom’s face grows more injured, the three lines across her forehead, deeper.

From his dorm room, Darsen can hear Rick’s voice in the background of a telephone call. He remembers leaning over the wall at Yankee Stadium. He remembers clutching the bat to his chest, listening through the thin walls. He remembers his mom’s choked cries. Those cries were the first sounds that Darsen heard. When his mom was shackled to the bed, when the doctor raised the silver scissors to cut the umbilical cord, she fought the chains, and she cried and wailed with her newborn son.