More Inside the Bucket by Hibah Hussain

The night before Laura and I flew out of town, I took my dad’s twin-front ladder out of the garage and tried to climb into the bucket that hovers over the KFC at 21^st and Oliver. The afternoon heat still lingered in the air and I sweated through my mom’s cardigan, the one still heavy with the perfume she used to wear.

The wind that night was all August, pushing my hair into my mouth one second and whipping it out the next, coated in spit. That’s the way the air works here. It’s not like that coastal wind, all confident and one-sided, it’s not like that big city wind, drooping lazily with dust. It just rocks back and forth, this Kansas wind, back and forth like a lullaby or a rocking horse or a pendulum. I swear I’m not making this shit up.

The ladder was tall enough to get me to the roof. My hands smelled like rust and sweat by the time I made it up, the arches of my feet aching from the rungs. I sat down next to a small vent to catch my breath and it was then, as I felt the gravel of the rooftop digging into my bare ankles, that the bigness of the bucket really hit me. Each letter, each K, each F, each C, was half the size of my body. The colonel’s beard alone took up over a fourth of the ladder. As the bucket spun slowly in place, it seemed like its own planet.

“All of this was once underwater,” Laura used to say, sweeping the air with her arms. “The entire state, below sea level.” She’d pause for moment, then break into a grin and move her fingers towards me. “It’s a hooooole, Gia,” she’d say, mimicking the voices in horror movie previews. “This town is a hooooooole. And we’re never getting out.”

We both knew she was joking, but sometimes, as we would drive around the same streets, skip the same classes, eat the same burritos from the same little restaurant, that’s exactly what it felt like: a hole, a dent, a wrinkle, the middle part that sags down while the rest of the country builds up. We’d try to drive fast, try to blur the view, but even catapulting down the highway felt like rolling across the bottom third of a licked out bowl, tumbling back and forth over concrete and watering holes.

Spreading my body carefully over the roof’s pebbly lining, I looked up at the bucket, watching it rotate exactly the way it had for all eighteen years of my life. Maybe, if I had managed to climb into it, I would’ve been dazzled by the stars spinning above me, the cars spinning below. As it was, I felt exactly how I’ve always felt. And now that my mom was dead, there was absolutely no reason to stick around this town.

#

We spent that those spring months after the funeral in Laura’s basement, sitting on the floor, legs out, palms down. There was a small window where the wall met the ceiling and I could see the dandelions pushed up against it, crowding the glass as they pushed their roots down and petals up. I didn’t have much to say at the time and Laura knew it well enough. She’d spin on her dad’s broken swivel chair or look at shoes online or bring me lemonade or homework or whatever and everything she did made everything better because she was my best friend and had been and would be forever.

“But what if we can’t?” I’d ask every now and then, imagining a future in this town, imagining a lifetime of rattling around its potholed streets and rusty offices. “What if we just can’t get out?”

“We gotta,” she’d answer, “Just wait.”

And so we waited and waited, wading through those last months of high school, counting down the days until our mailboxes might be full of envelopes and admissions offers, glossy, thick-inked passes outta this place where everything goes to the ground.

#

My mother was five foot three inches and weighed 105 pounds but couldn’t walk into a room without drawing all eyes. Our kitchen was always full of her friends. They’d drink cup after cup of tea and watch her cook, gossiping until dinner and then filtering back in.

“They’re always here,” I’d complain. “They’re stealing my mom.”

She’d grin and apologize, promising me lunch dates and shopping excursions. After she died, I’d sit in the corner of my closet, knees pressed to chin, thinking about all those times she took me out after ballet lessons. We’d go to the KFC just down the block and it’d be mostly empty and smell like grease on grease, the streaks of cheap cleaning fluid eclipsing the setting sun. But it’d didn’t matter to us and we’d just sit there, just the two of us, just smiling stupidly because even then we knew that things weren’t going to stay that way forever. We always knew that; I don’t know why.

Just last year, we drove all over town looking for my homecoming dress. We drove and we drove and tried dress after dress until we realized that we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “I feel like something different today,” she had said, pulling over by the grocery store and buying a loaf of French bread and some cheese. We ate it right there in the parked car, leaving the doors open and the radio on.

After she died, after I started sleeping in my closet and eating uncooked spaghetti, I kept remembering all of those days: the time we bought sandwiches and ate them outside by the freeway, the mornings she woke up early to make Halloween costumes, the nights I couldn’t sleep and she’d sit up with me until dawn, making fun of television salesmen and flipping through magazines.

#

Of course, once April rolled around and the letters did start coming, Laura and I didn’t know what to do. We’d hold them up open and underline the words, circling the Congratulations!’s like the words were gonna crawl off of the page and disappear. We knew there were better ways, but we picked the schools that gave us money and distance, buying the plane tickets as soon as our parents would let us. I put my ticket in my desk but Laura carried hers everywhere, wrapping them in towels and paying her brother to guard them as we tumbled into the county pool.

“Shiii-iiit,” she murmured one day as July wound down, wading to the pool’s shallowest steps and cupping her face. “Not even a month left.”

“Thank god.”

“Gia,” she said, scowling shadows, “we gotta kiss this town goodbye.” She pulled herself out of the pool, grabbing her car keys and cradling her towel. “I mean, slowly, properly.”

And so we drove across the city once again, our hair too wet and our skin too dry, imagining the tar melting underneath our tires. We drove and looked and talked and drove some more, past the tree that looked like overgrown broccoli, past Cat’s Catfish Shack, past the Ken-Mar Liquor Store, the one that posts a different rhyming slogan on its sign every week (Take it from me/ Drink Long Island Iced Tea, You’ll feel fine/ With a goblet of wine, Come on in/ grab some gin. Life becomes a dream/ with a smidge of Jim Beam, Don’t be uncouth/ mix vodka with vermouth). We drove past my old school, my old dance studio, the neighborhood my parents lived in all through grad school.

Back then we lived in ground-level apartments, crumbling and connected. Patchy front yards extended from each unit, littered with plastic shovels and tricycles. My mom drove an enormous white station wagon that she’d bought for $400 at an auction. In between summer classes, she’d come home and take me to the Bagatelle, where we’d split pastries and chocolates. Driving home, we’d look into the other cars at intersections and imagine that we had air conditioning too.

“Oh it’s soooo coooold,” I’d say, hardly able to keep my bare legs on the white hot leather seats.

“Yeah, Gia,” mom would grin, “this air conditioning stuff is overrated.”

#

One day, when I was six, when we still lived in those apartments, when my dad was always out working at the Pizza Hut, my mom dropped her book, looked up at me and said, “Gia, I’m getting a message from the car.”

“Mommmm cars can’t talk.”

“Gia, our car is telling me that we should get dressed and leave the house.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Really, it says it’s going to take us somewhere, somewhere we’ll like.”

And so I pulled on a dress and we buckled our seatbelts and the car took us out of the neighborhood and onto the freeway.

“Where are we going?”

“It won’t tell me. Says it’s a surprise. Now close your eyes.”

I kept them shut for two turns and three traffic lights, until the car stopped and she told me to open them. A rollercoaster hovered above us, arching over merry go-rounds and tilt-a-whirls.

“Joyland! Do we have enough money for this? Mom we don’t, do we?”

“Tonight we have money for anything,” she replied, taking my hand and walking to the ticket booth. I rode the merry go round five times that day and she waved and smiled every time I passed by. But every now and then, when she thought I couldn’t see, her eyes would glaze over, staring over everything. I still remember her thin bones leaning into the railing, face cupped in her hands, eyes moving back and forth with the clouds.

#

Between packing, working the Java Hut, and Daniel’s weekend bonfires, the rest of that last summer in town evaporated, getting shorter and shorter until Laura and I found ourselves at its very end.

“Go to sleep, Gi,” Laura said as she dropped me home after our last evening in town. “I wanna get to the airport early.”

I was planning on an early night, but after dinner with my dad, I went out for one more walk around the block, stopping at the tree my mother had taught me to climb so long ago. I sat under it for a while and then stood up, my body frozen for seconds, staring at the gold pouring out of the streetlights. It looked pixilated, cheap. I wondered what a streetlight would like in a room, how bright it would be. I imagined a room soaked in gold light, the walls and ceilings brighter than all the smiles and teeth in the world.

And then I ran. Past the house, past the broccoli tree, past Laura’s house, past the dry cleaners and all the way to that KFC my mom and I used to lunch at while my dad was in class.

“Can we go in that bucket?” I’d ask every time.

“It’s better from the ground,” she’d always answer.

But that night, as dandelions grew roots around my mom, as Laura slept with her ticket under her pillow, as my suitcases stood packed and ready at my door, I unfolded the ladder and promised not to leave until I had seen the bucket inside and out. I imagined myself leaning out of the top, my small head poking out over the colonel’s colossal one, watching everything go round and round, back and forth. I’d be untouchable and unfindable and everything would be fine. How could it not be? I thought to myself as I unfolded the ladder and started climbing to the restaurant’s roof. I’m eighteen and it’s August and the air is pulsing with heat and I’m climbing to that bucket and once I’m inside of it, how could it not be perfect? How could it not?