Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Twenty-Eight: Hazard, a Guess

323 One thing you oughta know about Vivica is’t she ain’t half the warrior princess she thinks she is. Sure, she’s big and prickly as a goddamned Douglas fir, but her roots, they’re shallow, which means she can be toppled by a stiff and pigheaded breeze that refuses to curb its blustering, and from an early age that’s what I, Hazard Planet, revolting brother, aimed to be. My sister, big sister, plump as Jupiter, plumb never got over the fact of me. She had what-you-call-it an unnatural attachment to our father, broke out in a leaky plumbing kind of sweat whenever he so much as patted me on the melon. Full-blown dandling would cause her to let loose with a hyena shriek and enough jealous perspiration to flood the house: she fancied herself biblical. She was mean as a blister and hissing and diving at everything all the time like a swatted twenty-eight Hazard, a Guess 324 wasp. She used to stuff my piehole full of dirty socks, fold me up like a handkerchief, and squeeze me into the smallest spaces she could find, like I was just spackling for a crack in the wall. And I think our father, wandering salesman, had had one tired dog out the door since the minute her highness dropped big and as eager-to-bruise as a medicine ball from my mother’s poor put-upon loins. It was Vivica who carried my mother on her fetal back when she was ballooning-tobreaking tiny Ma’s tiny womb. I tell you, I don’t miss the lot of them. Maybe Ma, just a skosh, when I get a whiff of sponge cake. But Vivica I’m happy to be shed of. She’s a capital Dee Devil that one, lumbering demon, Elephantom the neighbor kids called her every Halloween, waving her fat can around like she’s Queen of the la-di-dah Nile or some such, always trying to get me to play the bumbling boy bonehead to her high-hatted girl-pharaoh . She wanted me dead from the moment I took root in my mother’s belly, wanted to yank me from the soil and render me compost. Sometimes she’d lie curled up next to Ma and knead her stomach, then she’d all-of-a-sudden punch our pregnant mother in the bread basket, pretend it was an accident—oops, pardon!—and I could feel those blows, and yeasty little loaf that I was, I kicked back, and once when Vivica asked to lay her ear to Ma’s belly button, I put my boot in that mush melon of a head of hers with such infant vigor to this day her skull still bears the dent. Try to flush Hazard from the womb, will you! Brothers and sisters, they mix it up, sure, good-natured sibling combat, but it wasn’t like that with Vivica and me. We were both in it for blood, up to our elbows in the guts of the other to determine who laid rightful claim to the Planet 325 plasma. We knuckled each other in secret and waited for bruises to blossom, waited to see who the last Planet standing would be. Thing is, only grudge I ever bore her was a countergrudge , due to her not wanting me in the world and all, what’s hard to overlook after the third broken bone. I mean, I got nothing against sisters in principle you understand. At least I didn’t until mine turned out to be a rat-fink royale. I had no other cheek to turn, both of them having been sucker punched at once (oh, I’m a sucker, I don’t deny it)—only the three-cheeked can risk such magnanimity amidst the quickly orbiting, deadly fists of Fats Planet! But I had a brief period of blindness resulting in cockeyed and covert devotion that eventually proved fatal. I dropped out of high school when I was sixteen, our father on French leave several years by then, reservoir, don’t wait up!, and out the door with our father went the only warmth I’d ever known, the only kind touch (Ma was sometimes affectionate , but in such a halting and miniature way, her intentions so petite, you could hardly feel it, an ant traipsing wobbly across the...