Her hair was made out of mostly garbage. Her braces were full of what looked like seafood and her skin was like a new burn. Her dress smelled like old milk. On her way home from school, after a day spent mostly running from the outstretched hands of her classmates, who were trying to hit or shove her, she'd crawl under a chain-link fence, into an abandoned lot and sing. Quietly, so that no one would find her. She would tap out beats on the back of her hand and stutter.
The best time of the year for her was when the barn spiders started to come out, in late spring. She would pick through the shrubs that crowded the lot and watch them grow from tiny little spiderlets into big, bloated fruit in summer, ripening to kinked tigers that would ultimately go immobile in the fall. There were some blackberries, but they were tart and had the texture of wet ash. They were delicious to her.
She saw no one here, was brought out of knowledge of herself, transfixed on the weeds and amazed when a hundred ants would carry off a writhing caterpillar on their backs into a tangle of grass. She could see the sun, same as anyone's, through one weird old apple tree that looked dead but was barely alive.
When they built a grocery store on that lot, she fucking burned it down.
