Daydreams of Angels

THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

The whole lot of us are at the rental board: my mom and my dad and my three brothers. We are all dressed up. I have on a black sweater dress that is too hot. There is a big hole in the butt of my underwear, but no one can tell. We all sit in the blue plastic chairs while the landlord’s lawyer explains why we deserve to be evicted. We have been going to the rental board for as long as I can remember. The landlord is always trying to get us OUT. We are always so nervous, but the judges always give us another chance no matter what we do, because nobody likes to put a family out on the street. If we are evicted, then other landlords don’t have to rent to us, and they for sure never will. And then if we are homeless, child protection will put my brothers and me in foster homes. And we will all be separated. We will be doomed!

The landlord’s lawyer keeps listing all the things we have done this time. In the tiny courtroom, the landlord makes a lot of accusations against us. He says that my brothers and dad pee out of the window. This is true, because it is hard in the morning for everyone to wait their turn to get into the bathroom.

The landlord says that we destroy mail from the mailroom. This is true too. Once we took all the circulars and made them into paper crowns. That had been such a fun afternoon. All the other kids came around, and they all wanted to be able to make themselves paper crowns as well. We had all been kings.

He says my dad set some fireworks off behind the building. There were only actually five fireworks. He had made a big deal about buying them too. There was a Native who was selling them out of the trunk of his car. The rockets made soft popping noises, just like a bird being shot in the heart with an arrow. And then all this silver fell. It was so pretty. I put my hands out in case the silver would come all the way down to the yard. I would have pools of silver in my hands, like Jesus, kind of.

The landlord complains about my brother’s snow woman. He made her with really big breasts and then used buttons as nipples. Plus he used a pinecone as pubic hair. And he put an old wig that he found in the basement on its head. It caused a car accident when someone slowed down to look at it. It was a work of art.

The landlord says that we played racket ball against the building wall, making everyone who lived in the apartments annoyed. We don’t remember this ever happening. Another tenant comes to testify that we poured pink food colouring on their white cat. Which, actually, we had done, but I regret it to this day.

From the other side of his big white desk, the judge tells us that he has had enough.

He says that he has been looking through our files and that he has decided that we have been warned plenty of times. That it just isn’t fair to the landlord and the other tenants around us. And that the next time we are brought in for disturbing the general peace of the building, he will evict us.

As we ride the subway home, we vow to ourselves that we will change the way we act.

“Turtledove,” my dad says to me. “It’s your job to keep an eye on all of us.”

We get on our knees on the seats to look out the window. We almost never go anywhere, so the ride is like a vacation and we are carefree. My dad puts his arm around my mom.

My mom has a scrapbook filled with some newspaper articles about when my three brothers and I were all born at the same time. On that major day, my dad told a doctor that he was out of work and he didn’t know how he was going to afford all these kids that had shown up on his doorstep, so to speak. The doctor had been really nice about it and suggested that we call a local newspaper. The newspaper set up a hotline so that people could send money and stuff to help us out.

My dad had always wanted to live in one of the project buildings. But he couldn’t until we were born. When we came into his life all at once, he moved right to the top of the list. He climbed up that list exactly like when you land on a ladder in that board game.

We still have too many stuffed animals left over from when we were first born and people sent us gifts after reading the paper. They are always piled up on all our beds and I have to tunnel under them to go to sleep. They are so dorky. There is an alligator that wears a tuxedo, for instance. I don’t know why we didn’t throw them away, but we never really throw anything away. There is even a broken television on top of our fridge.

We love our small apartment because it is on the ground floor and we don’t have to climb stairs, and we’re lazy in that department. There is always this sound of rumbling from inside the walls. We are not sure what it is. My dad says that he thinks it is actually the sound of the boiler in the basement that we are hearing. We can’t complain about it because the landlord will tell us, well then, go on and move. The landlord hates us because we are on welfare and are doing nothing about it. Also, once my dad was drunk and told him that he was a blood-sucking slumlord and threw a beer can at his head, which for some reason he took to heart.

My dad said that he stays on welfare because he gets more money with four kids than he would if he still worked for the sales company that he used to work for before my mom got pregnant. He said that looking after us is a full-time job. He also said that he has Type 2 diabetes. He doesn’t want to have a diabetes attack, so he can’t do anything too strenuous, like putting on shoes at seven in the morning.

We always say that I am the baby, even though we have no idea who the baby is. When you are a girl, you are always going to be littler than boys. Sometimes it is annoying to have so many brothers. Like, let me tell you this: I like to wear lollipop rings. They always grab my hand to suck on the ring, which is gross and nasty and against my rights.

It’s Friday after school, and my mom pushes us all in a grocery cart at the same time. But we get into a fight because nobody wants to carry the piece of ham on their lap. Then the manager comes to complain to my mother about it and to say we can’t all be in the damn basket at once. Maybe it’s a fire hazard, because almost everything good in life is a fire hazard. Anyway, we climb out, one by one.

My brothers and I are very lucky that we were all born together, because nobody else will have anything to do with us. All the kids think that we are weird. Like my brother Sparrow, who wears the participation medal that he won in day camp around his neck every day, will show anyone his penis if they ask him.

Robin got to take the hamster home for the weekend. The hamster escaped and it most likely got accosted and murdered by some rats in the alleyway. On account of that, none of the other kids would talk to him after that.

The science teacher is always picking on Robin. He gave him a zero on his assignment about his favourite animal, and he said that he wished that he could have given him less. My mother said that chicken pox affected him harder than it had the rest of us.

Jay threw a ruler out the window in math class and even he had no idea why in the world he did that. The teacher told him to go sit outside the class until he figured out why he did. He sat there for three hours and he still didn’t know.

The teachers in our school give my brothers a different diagnosis each month, it seems. For example, once Robin had ADHD and Jay had something called dysgraphia, and then the next month they swapped. Sometimes they all have the same diagnosis and sometimes they have different ones.

I guess I am the smart one. I base that in part on the fact that I like to read a lot. I don’t only like books though. I like to read things like the backs of cereal boxes and the warning labels on bottles of poison. I love reading the IKEA catalogue. I enjoy discovering new words too. But most of all, I like to smell books. You know, I can stick my face in the spine of a book and leave it there, breathing in and out, for hours. Despite my extra knowledge, my mom loves us all just the same though. That’s the way that she is.

My mother starts singing along to a song on the loudspeaker in line at the grocery store. But she sings it too slow. So she is still singing once the song is over.

On the way home, the garbageman whistles at all the women. But he doesn’t whistle at her. I ask my mother how in the world she got so fat.

Was it because she had eaten too many cupcakes? Was it because when she was little, her own mommy had only ever given her hamburgers and milkshakes from McDonald’s?

She says no. She says that the reason she is so fat is that she always held so many things in. She was so shy when she was little that she was afraid to express herself. She would never put her hand up in class, so she kept all these ideas inside of her. And each one popped like a kernel of popcorn, until she was like a big bag of microwave popcorn.

My mother says that there are all sorts of opportunities that I have that she did not have as a girl. She says that she always had to stuff her bra when she was little. She says that she had to laugh at all the boys’ jokes all the time, even if they weren’t funny at all. She says that she wishes she hadn’t, because she wouldn’t have as many wrinkles now and her teeth wouldn’t be so yellow.

When she won an award for her handwriting when she was in Grade Three, she thought that for sure after that happened she was going to make something out of her life. But she didn’t. She decided to have a boyfriend instead.

On account of the general conditions of the kitchen, we eat the ham in the living room while watching TV. My mother does not know how to clean up a kitchen. She has been trying to straighten up ours for like eight years, but the more she goes at it, the messier it gets. It is impossible now, cause there are too many dishes. The counters look like a landing pad for all sorts of dirty spaceships. We don’t know why there are more dishes in our sink than in any other place in the world. Sometimes we all pitch in to wash the dishes, but then we get bored and we go do something else.

After we eat and we’re all crammed together on the couch, we don’t pay attention to the TV that’s still on and we beg our mother to read to us from The Guinness Book of Records. I think that it must be so lonely to be the world’s tallest man, with your head way up in the clouds like that. We all feel so sorry for the tallest man that we all start to cry. We hope we never grow like that. It is much better to be ordinary.

My mother lies about what our first words were, when we ask her. But I can’t blame her. She does it to make us happy. She tells my brother that his very first words were, “Beam me up, Scotty.” His face gets red because he’s so proud of himself.

We beg our mother to count our toes. We don’t know why we like it so much, other than that it reminds us of having been born.

My mother didn’t throw out those little tiny jars of food that you buy when you have babies. They were too cute to get rid of. And if you don’t ever chuck them out, you would not even begin to believe how many little baby jars you will have. I am so glad that she kept them all because we keep everything tiny inside of them. Like one bottle is for buttons and one is for thumbtacks. We are like scientists, because it is in the nature of scientists to collect tiny things.

When we were tiny little babies, we were all inside her belly and it was like we were all inside of separate baby jars. I was mushed-up peaches. Jay was mushed-up peas. Sparrow was mushed-up pears. And Robin was beef stew melee.

My favourite time of the night is when after the news they let the balls fall out of the lotto machine. That means that it is time to go to bed. The boiler is making a gurgling noise, like your tummy makes in class before lunchtime. It doesn’t keep me up for long, though. We are so happy here, I have to make sure that we don’t leave.

I have to garden today. I have a little square at the community garden right behind the Children’s Library. My brothers did not understand why I wanted to sign up for that type of thing. But I always have to have a project. I cannot keep still. I audition for all the plays at school even though I never get a part.

“Goodbye!” I scream again at the front door, but nobody answers.

I find a Virgin Mary statue sitting on one of the window frames in the hallway. She just sits looking out of it like a sad little old lady. I decide to bring her to my little garden. She’s actually kind of heavy and she keeps being asked to be put down to walk. Most of the other gardens don’t have statuettes or things like that in them. The gardeners are too busy using all the room that is there to grow all sorts of vegetables and things to eat. I gather up some broken bricks and carry them over to place them around the rose.

I have a rose bush that has no flowers on it. It is nothing but an ugly little shrub with thorns on it, but I believe in it. I know that it will be beautiful someday. I sit on an upside-down laundry bucket and read The Little Prince to the rose bush.

I till the soil for an hour. My favourite thing is to look underneath the rocks and see everything that lives there. The soil is crawling with worms and earwigs and centipedes.

You would not ever believe how many different species of beetles there are. They have these entire complicated cities with their own miniature subway systems and roadways and underpasses. They have mossy little condominiums where they can have babies. It’s really like another Tokyo under my bare feet. They do so much work! They are busybodies. They are just like me: too busy to make trouble.

When I get back to the apartment, there are a bunch of naked people drawn in chalk all over the cement in the front of the building. Jay must have drawn them. He isn’t a very good artist or anything, like he can’t do animals or horses, but he is very gifted at drawing naked people. The drawings are doing really dirty things too, like oral sex. A man who lives across the hall from us shakes his head when he steps over them. I rub out the chalk people with the bottom of my running shoes as fast as I can.

As I walk into the building’s cement courtyard, I see another one of my brothers. Sparrow has a black nylon sock tied around his forehead. He is practising kung fu moves, which involve kicking his leg up as high as possible in the air and yelling, “Assassinate!” and then stranding straight, putting his hands together in prayer and making a bow. An old lady walks by him nervously, afraid that he’ll karate-chop her, I guess. But it’s Sparrow who screams out, because an empty plastic bottle hits him on the head out of nowhere. I look up to see Robin throwing garbage off the roof of the building. When he sees us noticing him, he yells out, “Assassinate, my ass!”

“Get down from there!” I call up.

“Assassinate, my ass!” he yells back. I have to run for cover, with some other people who live in the building, as an empty tin of beans comes out of the sky like an asteroid.

Robin only comes down when he runs out of garbage. Then I can finally get all my brothers together to tell them off at once. After I’m done yelling at them that they are scaring and seriously disturbing all the neighbours, the sun has already gone down and it’s chilly. The night sky is an air conditioner.

I say we should all put some turtlenecks on and pretend to be worms. We stand outside in the yard with the necks of our shirts pulled all the way up over our heads. We wander around yelling that we lost our heads, until someone calls from a window that if we don’t shut up he’ll call the police.

It’s early Saturday morning and we all get woken up by the landlord banging on the door. He is mad because we keep our shoes lined up in a neat row all the way down the hallway past everybody else’s doors. He throws a pair of shoes at my dad. My dad catches it and, before thinking too hard about it, throws it back at the landlord and pings him on the head.

“I’m taking you to court again. You’re a lazy, filthy welfare bum.”

We all eat breakfast really quiet. Nobody wants to think about going to court again. Nobody wants to think about how bad my dad’s feelings have been hurt. It always makes us really sad that our dad doesn’t have a job. We don’t like to bring it up to him. We like to pretend that we have never really noticed that he doesn’t go to work every day. If ever he gets into an argument at the grocery store or with one of the neighbours, they just tell him that he is a welfare case. Then his cheeks get all purple and you can see all the red squiggly veins in them, and he feels ashamed and, right away, he wants to go home, where he sits in his bedroom with the door shut.

My dad also makes us go to the food bank for him because he is too embarrassed to go himself. We pull the grocery cart down the street and present the welfare stub to the woman at the front table. We don’t mind.

Sometimes when he is awake, my dad puts on his fur hat and gets on his hands and knees and snarls like a wolf and chases us around the apartment. We always play the big bad wolf and the four little pigs. Even though there were only three in the original story. We are never sure whether we like this or not. When he catches us, we are always laughing and crying.

My brother fell over a chair while my dad was chasing him. He ended up with a bloody nose and a black eye. Child services came over and we had to re-enact the whole game for him.

Later that day, to make things more cheerful, we beg our dad to see his bow ties. My dad says that when he was a young man, he used to work as a salesman, but he never liked to wear ties. They always made him feel like he had a noose around his neck and that he was strangling himself. So he would wear bow ties. I think that he has the most top-notch collection of bow ties in the world. He has them all laid out at the bottom of a drawer that he sometimes pulls out for us to see. There is a red one with white polka dots. There is a yellow gold — coloured one. I don’t know what bow ties look like anymore, but they can’t still be making them like this. They look like the world’s most gigantic wrapped candies.

He worked for a company that made fancy silverware. There were little roses carved into the handles of all the spoons and there were forks that had handles that were shaped like leaves. We love hearing stories about our father’s magnificent cutlery.

One other thing that you should definitely know is that he used to play the trombone. When he was at elementary school, he won a medal for being the top player out of all the students. He had wanted to be in the International Symphony Orchestra, but he wasn’t quite good enough. So instead he got a job in sales.

Finally he takes out his bow ties and he lays them on the bed like they are exotic butterflies. We spend half an hour trying to decide which one is our favourite.

My brothers beg and beg him to let them wear them. But my dad says that they each have to wait for their first office job and then he will give each one of them a bow tie.

I’m not sure what I am supposed to wear to my first day. My dad is really old fashioned. I don’t think he thinks that a girl is supposed to work.

Maybe I was the last of the four of us that was born. It was as though there wasn’t enough material left to make another boy and so I got made. I’m like the last funny cookie on the tray that there wasn’t enough dough for.

Now it is Saturday afternoon and time to go out. My dad always has sore feet because, like I said, he has Type 2 diabetes. The other day he found a wheelchair in the basement and now he wants us to push him around in it when he goes out. He says that he doesn’t have to stop at red lights because he is handicapped. He yells at us to push him right out into the middle of the street even though the cars are all honking at us.

We push our dad around to see all the different people who will listen to him when he talks. My dad has a friend from the bakery and he is able to get my dad really huge jars of maraschino cherries for cheap. We cover our ice cream in maraschino cherries. It’s like clowns were caught in an avalanche and all you can see of them is their noses. We have maraschino cherries in our orange juice in the morning. We often think that we are so lucky that our dad is likeable.

He knows the owner of the little pharmacy. We like stopping there okay. When we do, we read all the different Hallmark cards. We especially like when one of them happens to be a little bit dirty. And we like to read the backs of all the paperback murder mysteries.

But our very favourite place is the pawnshop! That is where we head today. There is a bookshelf and, instead of books, the shelves have tiny teacups with flowers painted on them. We kneel on the floor and look into the glass cabinet. I always like to look into glass cabinets because it is similar to looking into an aquarium of amazing things.

We have to get off our knees and move to the back of the store when a real customer comes in and wants to sell their crappy television set. One thing I learned from hanging out at a pawnshop is that people all think that their television sets are worth more money than they actually are. The reality is very hard for people to accept. Especially since they have spent so many happy hours with their television set. And a television set is really so much like one of the family.

Today the owner of the store, my dad’s good friend, says that a trombone came in just the other day. He goes to get it. My dad has always bragged about being able to play the trombone, but now I am worried that he has made the whole thing up. I don’t like finding out when people are lying to me. It makes me feel like I am spying on them or that I am reading their diary or that I am watching them undress through a tiny hole in the wall. It’s rude of me.

My dad picks up the trombone. And he tests it out to see if it slides up and down easily enough. He seems to be satisfied that it is oiled to his liking. My brothers and I stare at him, so afraid. But then he puts it to his mouth and he plays the Star Wars theme song. That is our favourite theme song! In fact it is one of mankind’s most remarkable inventions, I’d say. It’s like all the delivery trucks stuck in traffic are honking their horns, but in harmony.

Who you are is not what country you are from, or what religion you are, it is what your parents’ jobs are. You can be a plumber’s kid or a lawyer’s kid. But it sure doesn’t work to only be a welfare case’s kid. Today we are a musician’s kids. In the dark alcove at the back of the shop, my brothers and I keep looking at one another and smiling, just like when we were all together in my mom’s great belly.

Are you who you are when you are a teeny fetus? There are some people who will say that you aren’t properly you yet. But of course you are.

You are you even long before that. You are you when your parents begin to get dressed in fancy clothes one Saturday night. You are you when your mother, who is barely twenty-one years old, puts on a pair of yellow lace underwear. When she plucks her eyebrows in the mirror and when she puts on a red dress that is cut really low and burgundy lipstick: that’s all about you, baby.

You are you when your father, who is also twenty-one years old, pops a pimple on his forehead. When he puts on his fancy shiny shirt that was made by children in a sweatshop in Indonesia. When he isn’t sure that he actually looks good — but he has been lucky twice before when wearing it.

They are both riding the subway in opposite directions to meet each other and you have already begun. That is your beginning. You have just as much right to be as anybody.

But my dad is in an even worse mood after we get all excited about him being able to play the trombone. It probably reminded him of being things that he doesn’t get to be anymore. He tells us to stop at the liquor store. We all beg him not to go in and Robin even gets on his knees in front of the wheelchair. But he shouts at us to push him inside. He gets a bottle of whiskey and they put it in a paper bag for him, even though our lives are now going to be hell!

We push him down the street as fast as we can and he keeps yelling at us to slow the fuck down. But he keeps taking deep gulps and we have to get him home before the liquor hits his heart. I hope that people don’t see us behind the wheelchair. Maybe they will think it is an electric wheelchair and that it is rolling by itself and we just happen to be walking behind it.

My dad points to a man that is passing by and he says, “Hey you, you fucking cowboy. I’m sick of your ugly face. I don’t even know you and I know that you won’t get married.”

We don’t even stop to see the poor man’s reaction, and we keep right on going. Unfortunately, we have to stop at a red light because it’s a busy street. There is a woman standing next to us, also waiting for the right time to cross.

“Hey skinny,” he says to her. “Do you think that men are attracted to chickens? No? Then why in the world do you have those skinny chicken legs exposed? No man wants to see that. I can assure you.”

As soon as the light changes, we take off. We are pushing him so fast that we almost run into a middle-aged man who tells us to be careful.

“You inconsiderate bastard,” my dad yells. “Can’t you see that I’m a cripple? Can’t you see that I’m being pushed around by a little girl? You know what you are? I’ll tell you. You’re a fucking pimp. That’s it. You don’t like me to say the word to you because it rings a bell. Well, my brother. Pimp. Pimp. Pimp.”

We push him as fast as we can into the building and lock the front door.

My mom is fixing my hair on Sunday morning so that I can look so good like all the pretty black girls do. While she braids my blond hair, my mom explains to me that men get more hurt than girls. And they get more upset about being out of work than girls do. In that way, she says, it’s easier to be a girl. I don’t think this is true, because of my projects, because of my garden! I like working a lot.

Whenever we are in court, my mom always speaks with a teeny-weeny high-pitched voice. It’s as if she inhaled helium, for some weird reason, and it makes her sound like a baby. She wants the judge to feel sorry for her. This is her defence mechanism. It’s a little bit like when bugs play dead so that the birds won’t muck with them. But I don’t think that is the way I want to act just because I’m a girl.

My mom only does cornrows on one side of my head. Then she says that she has to stop because it’s giving her arthritis and that having to concentrate like that is giving her a migraine. I beg her and beg her to do the other side, but she can’t. She has to lie down and take a nap.

The cornrows on the side of my head are too beautiful to undo, so I go out later with only half my head braided. I get made fun of by all the kids that I pass. None of the black girls at the park will have anything to do with me. They look at me like I’m crazy, like they always do.

On the way home, this man drives up alongside me in this shitty gold car. The back window is made of cardboard and duct tape. And he asks me if I want to sit on his face. I don’t know what that means but it makes my heart bang so loud that it’s like a basketball smashing up against a wall. I decide not to tell anyone in my family.

Sometimes my brothers and I drink lemonade out of a tiny tea set. None of them mind playing games that are supposed to only be for girls. We all liked to take baths together for the longest time. But then my mom said one morning that I was too old to take baths with everybody else.

I have to take them all by myself now. I feel so alone when I am in the bathtub tonight. I feel like I am ten thousand miles from my family. All the toys are covered in soap grime. They are all inside of the soap dish and in the gargling glass. They look like they escaped from the sinking Titanic and are now dealing with shock.

I am so skinny that I think I will slip down the drain and I will go down through the pipes like I am going through a monster’s intestines. I do not at all like the way that the drain sounds like it is swallowing and swallowing my bathwater. Like it cannot get enough of it. Like it has an unquenchable thirst. Like it just had a huge meal and is trying to get rid of the hiccups. Something has got caught in its throat.

I look down the drain to make sure there is no long tongue that will come out of it and lick me.

The towels don’t match. But it is easier for us to be reminded of which one belongs to who: mine has purple flowers on it; Robin has one with tiny red berries; Sparrow owns the one with little brown pansies all over it; Jay’s is a really old one with a tree with pink blossoms on it. They make up a whole natural world. We don’t really get to see all those sorts of flowers outside, since we live downtown.

Human beings have destroyed the whole island of Montreal. In class we go on a field trip to the Natural History Museum. In the back there’s this diorama that has all the taxidermied animals that used to exist in Quebec. You would not believe it. There were like wolves walking down the street. Can you imagine what it would be like to look out your window and see wolves walking down the street? It would be terrifying, but then at the same time you would like feel so freakin’ alive.

And the birds! Did you know that at one time there were so many passenger pigeons that when they flew over in a flock, the whole sky would grow dark and there would be a shadow cast over the whole island? And you only had to reach your hand up in the air to grab one. You could hold up a pot and some birds would fly in and you would seal the lid on it.

There is a tree outside our building that tried to fight back. The roots of the tree reached out from beneath the sidewalk like a giant squid underneath a boat and broke through. When I get home, I wrap my arms around the tree and tell it that I understand. That it had been really, really angry. And it had all these big ambitions and the city had got in its way.

Its roots look like an elephant that is drowning in quicksand.

My brothers have no idea what they want to be when they grow up. Sparrow says that he wants to be an opera singer. I don’t think it’s because he likes to sing, but because he wants to get fat. Robin got a detention for writing an essay about how he wanted to be a pimp when he grew up. It made everyone in the class laugh though, so he didn’t care.

I want to be a scientist. But instead of telling anyone, I decide that I will have to prove it.

Walking home, I find an old bulletin board in the trash and I get an idea. I go out at night so that I can collect a jar full of moths. I stand under a lamp that is lighting up the back exit of the Chinese restaurant and I jump about capturing the flittering creatures.

How amazing. They think that they are somewhere way, way up in outer space. They think that they have flown all the way up to the moon, but really they haven’t gone anywhere at all.

Two policemen drive up next to me in their car and one of them tells me that I shouldn’t be outside. He says that it’s too dangerous for girls to go out at night.

I have enough moths anyways, so I take their advice and hurry home. All the rapists are two inches behind me. They are going to catch up with me any second and they will rape me and then I will have to go home and tell my parents that I have been raped.

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be in the jar, trapped and banging on the glass, trying to be let out, like the moths. I remember when Tinker Bell was trapped in a jar in the movie. I had really felt for her. I really had! Nonetheless, I put the jar in the back of the freezer, behind the bag of perogies that has been there for seven years.

And in the morning I pull out the jar and all the moths are dead and still beautiful. I stick the jar under my nightgown and run back to my room. I pin them all to the bulletin board one by one. One of the moths has round spots on its wing that look like cigarette burns. When I am finished I step back and look.

I wonder if I could take it to school and show the science teacher. I had a fantasy of the science teacher looking at my bulletin board and being amazed. “Aren’t you clever, Turtledove? Aren’t you my most brilliant student?”

I say it under my breath so I can hear what it sounds like to hear a compliment like that. I pretend that I am presenting my bulletin board at a conference for butterfly experts all over the world. I imagine myself travelling to Brazil to catch a rare butterfly and name it after myself.

I also think that my moths look so much like my dad’s bow ties in his drawer. I decide to wait no longer and unveil my project to my family. I can’t wait for them to be struck by wonder and amazement.

My mother screams when I show her the board. My whole family runs in to see what the commotion is and they start yelling about it too.

My dad says that if the landlord were to make an inspection of the living quarters and saw all those bugs, then we’d get evicted right on the spot.

My brothers say that no man in their right mind would go out with me when they learned that I like to touch bugs.

My mother throws my whole lovely bulletin board in the garbage. I will never become world famous for my moth collection. For a second, I hate all of them. For a second, I do not want to be a part of this stupid family at all. I feel as though they are going to ruin my whole life. I don’t care if we get evicted. I so want to throw all my clothes into a pillowcase and get the hell out of here.

“At least I only had one girl,” my dad says, and they laugh and laugh and laugh.

I wonder whether every little girl feels as though she is the only little girl on the planet.

But then by dinner, I feel bad that I had wanted to leave everybody. Sometimes I think that it is my job to worry about the family. If I stop believing in them, they will cease to exist, like a bunch of fairies. I am always worried about their feelings, but I am not sure whether or not they are worried about mine.

Since it is Tuesday night we take our Tuesday night stroll. We all push our dad down to the riverbank in his wheelchair. You can see the amusement park on the other side of the river. I can see the coloured lights across the water. It is like there is a galaxy all the way over there. What are things like in that galaxy? I wonder. Are the laws of physics different? Is nighttime daytime and is daytime nighttime? Can you breathe underwater? Are paupers kings and are kings paupers? I want to go all the way over there.

There is no way that we can afford to go to the amusement park. But on the sides of Coca-Cola cans there are one-dollar-off coupons for the park. If I get enough of these together, we can go to the amusement park on the other side of the world. My brothers aren’t allowed to drink Coca-Cola because of their ADD. And both my parents have Type 2 diabetes on account of being so fat, so they aren’t supposed to have Coca-Cola. So I have to find the cans lying around the city.

I am happy to have a new project. I will always need a project in life, that is who I am. I go to all the festivals that month because that is where the most cans are at. There is a festival for wiener dogs. There is an Orchestra in the Park festival. I get into a fight with a junkie wearing nothing but jean shorts and beige sneakers when we both go after the same can under a bench. I go through every garbage can trying to see if there are cans inside of it.

I collect 170 cans. I shake the bag and the bag makes the sound of a marching band with skinny, handsome musicians playing my favourite instruments. All my family is amazed and my dad promises that we will go to the amusement park that weekend.

That night as I am trying to sleep, the boiler starts making more noise than usual.

But the next day, the celebrations are over because we get a letter in the mail saying that we have to go to court because the owner of the building wants to evict us.

We sit around the kitchen table, sick to our stomachs. Now it is for real and we can’t even eat our Cheerios. My mother says that this is going to make her hair fall out. We want her to hang on to the little hair that she has because we surely don’t want a bald mother on top of everything. Our dad says that he doesn’t know what we will do if we get kicked out. We can’t afford to live anywhere else. We will be homeless.

We will have to live inside of grocery carts forever and not just for a joyride down the grocery aisle.

My dad spends the day in bed because he is depressed. We don’t talk about the amusement park even though I have all those cans under my bed and they are trembling with excitement.

My dad says that we should all go to court again, so that we can elicit sympathy from the judge. He tells us to put on our fancy clothes.

He is wearing a tweed jacket and some grey pants. He wears a brown V-neck with little diamonds on it. He has a white shirt underneath. The collar coming out of it is kind of yellow. It is the colour that white things turn when they can’t handle being white anymore. He puts on one of the bow ties, but I don’t think that it helps him. He just doesn’t look employed. It’s one of the strange facts of life that you have to have a job to look like you have a job. Nobody knows why.

My mother is wearing a dress that makes her look all bulgy, like a melting candle. Her tiny heels look like they will break every time she steps. Her makeup is all half a centimetre higher than where it should go.

I am wearing a pair of burgundy tights that have really big holes in the toes, but you can’t see these when I wear my loafers. I wear a grey wool dress and it feels like there are two thousand ants going up and down my arms. My brothers have to wear what they ordinarily wear, because they have nothing fancy.

It costs us a fortune to ride the subway all at once.

In the tiny courtroom, the landlord makes a lot of accusations against us once again. My brother Sparrow tied a toddler to a telephone pole. Robin peed in a squirt gun and fired it at the janitor. Jay scratched his initials into the window of the front door of the lobby. My dad stole everyone’s shampoo samples from their mailboxes. I hung some dolls by their neck from the jungle gym in the courtyard. We all look at one another. What the hell is so wrong with hanging dolls?

The landlord says that we stole a wheelchair from the basement. We thought it had been abandoned. We hadn’t even really needed it. It was only for my dad’s convenience. If we had known it was stealing we wouldn’t have taken it.

Things do not look good for us after the trial. We know that they probably have us with the theft of a wheelchair. But there is nothing for us to do but wait for the results of the judge’s decision to come in the mail in two weeks.

That night I know I am going to have trouble sleeping because of what happened. But I really can’t sleep because the boiler is bubbling and burping all night long. Like it had a huge meal and now has indigestion.

My dad says that we should all go to the amusement park, to get our minds off things.

What a clamour all those cans make coming up the stairs of the subway! We’re like wasps coming out of a nest that has unfortunately been disturbed. The cans say that we have arrived.

The park is more amazing than I could have ever imagined. There are airbrushed waves on the sides of the little ships, and statues of mermaids on the back of them. There are dragons that you can climb into. There are swings that swing out from a giant post that has paintings of shepherdesses laughing on them. There is this strange imaginary hand that pushes your swing.

We ride all the rides and we make sure to scream louder than any other family in the park. I love the bumper cars the most. What would it be like to steer the bumper car out of the way so that no one could hit you, and then to drive it right out of the park? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to ride the bumper car right down the highway and forever?

We are too afraid of the haunted house. There are papier mâché witches hanging out of the windows, and a giant snake coming out of the chimney that keeps exhaling smoke. And you can hear children screaming inside, all terrified, but they come out laughing with tears in their eyes. What is nice about the amusement park is that it makes it okay to be afraid all the time.

Robin and I sit in the Ferris wheel cage together. We rock back and forth. And then we start to slowly climb up and up. I can hear my other brothers screaming in their cage. Saying things like “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” I can hear my parents laughing in their cage.

All the bright lights from every ride at the amusement park are all around me: orange and red and yellow and green and blue, as if we are in a meteor shower. And as I look out onto the city, all the little street lights are like strings of pearls. All the windows are lit up. We are right in the heart of the Milky Way.

We cry on the way home from the amusement park because it has been such a fun day and we are sad that it is over. We know that we might never get to go again. Not as kids anyways. And when we are old enough to finally afford tickets, the magic will be all gone.

Now it is night and the boiler is making a kicking sound. It sounds like there is someone trapped inside it. They have pretty much given up and reconciled themselves to their fate, but every now and then they give a violent kick to the side of it with their boot.