By Jessica Lee Richardson

Maybe it’s because I was born with my feet turned in and the doctor had to break them and stick me in casts as a little kid, but I’m always afraid I’ll lose a body part. Lately it’s my fingers. I wear double mittens and chicken-squawk them in my pits when it’s cold. My mom says I have to take them out when we’re shoveling shit from the rottweiler cages or else I drop the shovels too much. I like the rottweilers. I feel bad for them stuck in cages with their shit until we come, and they pant like crazy to see us. We complain about the dirty quarters, but it’s not like it’s clean anywhere else.

The dogs belong to my mom’s friend who plays the piano. I’ve never met him, but we go to his house and clean the shit, and I play his piano to warm up my filthy hands. It’s always dark in the house and I don’t know why we don’t turn the lights on. The only other person I know with a piano is my mom’s friend who goes to Puerto Rico in the summers and collects sea glass and jars of cherry Jolly Ranchers. She thinks she was taken aboard an alien spaceship, which my mom thinks too. I’m crazy for the cherry candies.

When I tell my friends about the spaceship, they say that’s impossible, but don’t look so sure. “Wow,” they say. “Do you think they did experiments?” I don’t think so, but I go with it, because these friends have pretty voices. I like listening to them sing in the school bathroom with the square tiles like hard pieces of gum. All I bring to the table are secondhand aliens and a talent for doing U.K. accents.

“You’re not going to lose your fingers unless you get a job in a factory.”

“A hot dog cutting factory!”

“What about the cold?”

“Only if you get left in the woods in Alaska.”

When we drive past the Jaguar dealer, I always feel safe. My mom says it’s the fancy cars, and I do like their glittery paints, but it isn’t that. There’s a field across the street where no one lives or mows and it’s surrounded by pine trees. I imagine running through the field and hiding in the thicket and I don’t believe that I’ll lose my fingers roaming in the underbrush. I’d know the animals and they’d keep me warm with their fur, plus there’d be all the running.

I overhear my mom say a terrible thing on the phone with her friend and I will never tell her. I don’t know if she was talking to the friend taken by aliens, or the one with the rottweilers, or the one with the kid that always streaks naked. It doesn’t matter that much, because what I hear her say is that she sometimes wishes she didn’t have me. That I was never born. She’s tired of shoveling dog shit for beans, I guess, and wants my dad to come home from prison, but I don’t think any of that, I think my heart has fallen out. I start screaming and my mom takes me to the hospital, and I stay there for three days.

They give me plenty of pudding and all the TV I could want, so I’d be happy to lie there for weeks. After listening to me on their machines for days, they tell my mother I have an arrhythmia. My heart didn’t fall out, but one of its beats did, so I know I was right all along. In this life you can be whisked away or lose a finger, or a foot, or a beat right out of your heart.

At school we’re reading The Secret Garden and my teacher says there are situations it’s best to release. She becomes sweaty when she says it and pats her neck, like she’s thinking of something embarrassing. That’s how I know what she’s saying is true.

“Do you think our parents will release us?” I say to my friends by the gym bars. They’re busy doing backflips and I look out at the field around us surrounded by forest. It’s almost like the one by the Jaguar dealership, but tamer because I see it every day. I pick its onion grass and secretly eat the clover by the back fence.

“I wish!” they scream.

The dirt beneath the bars has been hammered into a pit from so many dismount landings. I don’t like doing backflips, I prefer front flips where I can see where I’m going, but soon it’s my turn. I try to sub in a front flip. I wave my hands straight up in the air like an Olympian when my feet hit the ground, but they say I’m cheating. I think about distracting them by telling them about a dream I had in a U.K. accent.

“I was dancing with this lad,” I hear myself say. “We loved each other but we weren’t snogging, just holding each other.”

They look uncertain, but they’re giggling, and I know I have them. I might not always have my fingers, or singing lessons, but I have a way of distracting people so that they look away from what’s missing. Like the back flip.

“Was he cute?”

“Aye, he was. I loved him.”

“Ooh!”

“But I pulled away from the wee dance.”

“Wee!”

“Why?”

“Because the house needed cleaning.”

It’s true, but my friends are annoyed with this turn in the dream story.

“Why would you do that?”

I start to answer, but they’re bored with their own question.

“Do your backflip!”

“It’s your turn.”

The house in the dream was just a brick square painted a silvery white, and it was so clean, so empty of dirt. Gleaming and empty of anything. Exactly how I wish my house could be and I could be. I’d stop dancing with almost anybody for that to be true, even the love of my life.

I climb up on the bar and sit, balancing my weight on the hot metal. The whole trick is to secure your butt on the medium bar until you’re not shaking back and forth and then remove your hands and fall. Hurl yourself backward. You have to trust you’ll flip, and the ground will just arrive beneath you, and your feet will land under you instead of your face.

In the dream, my love walked away, but I knew if I ever stopped imagining every speck of dirt in my house could be gone, all that love would rush back in.

“Is it the love you release, or the clean house?” I ask without an accent and my friends look at me like I’m unfamiliar. But I really don’t know the answer. My forehead thumps and I feel a breeze on my cheeks as I watch a contrail in the sky the shape of an ear. It unfurls. Probably off to Alaska.

“You’re backing out,” they’re saying, or maybe I’m saying, “Don’t leave.” I don’t want to let go of the bar, there’s a fire between my ribs, and I’m sweating just like my teacher. Which is why I know I will.

When I unclench my hands, first the world changes. The baseball diamond and the brick ladder and the oat grass and onions beyond are upside down, and I whoosh through them as if I belong to this streaked green life I can barely see. A laugh builds up in my missing beat and my heart increases like the field is inside it. I hit hard against the dip of earth inverted like a smile by a million falling children releasing straight into the wind. There my feet are on this perfect dirt.

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Jessica Lee Richardson (she/her) is an Associate Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is the author of It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides (FC2). Her work has been honored at The Short Form, Zoetrope, and Short Fiction and has appeared, or will soon, in The Commuter at Electric Lit, Evergreen, and Gulf Coast among other places.