She said since it worked for Jenny and Forrest, that she thought if we prayed hard enough we could turn invisible. Back then I wasn’t sure what she meant, other than, I thought, she was calling me Forrest Gump which I took as an insult. But she held my hand and we chanted for awhile about being invisible. Then she finally relaxed. We walked the wide streets back to her house well-past my bedtime and well before we could see her house we saw red and blue dancing lights on the trees and bushes and murmuring from the crowd of neighbors at the end of her driveway.
She stayed with us for a couple weeks. They always said it was temporary, just until they figured out if she was going to live with her Uncle in Alaska or her grandma outside of Boise. All but one of those days have slipped away into the maw of the forgotten past leaving a single memory for me to horde.
For the first time she said she didn’t like her grandma and she’d rather go live with her uncle even though it’s a lot farther. “I’ve never been sledding, Uncle Tommy wouldn’t shut up about it last time he visited. Sounded kinda cool”
“I’m pretty sure Idaho and Alaska are always winter, so either place you’ll get your chance.”
“It can’t be always winter.”
“Says so in the encyclopedia,” I insisted.
“Prove it.”
But the outdated books had years ago been boxed from the bookshelves to make way for my Choose Your Own Adventure books and Garfield Large Print Comics and mom’s Danielle Steele gross romances.
Anne held one up and gagged: a pirate was swinging on a rope with a dagger between his teeth and a damsel in a wedding dress on his arm. “Who reads this junk?”
I shrugged. “Moms I think.”
“When they kiss it’ll cut her in half!”
“Gross!” It wasn’t the cutting in half part–I’d seen enough horror movies to have recurring nightmares of oceans of blood dotted with bobbing demonic puppets, it was Anne talking about kissing again. She always smiled slyly when she made me squirm with her kissing talk.
I was positive she’d try to kiss me that day, I’d even resigned myself to it, but instead we went into the attic and found the encyclopedia and learned that the Arctic Circle is higher up than I remembered and not even Anchorage was in that sphere of forever-night. Rather than kissing me, she whacked my shoulder shouting “See!” and leaving a bruise that would remain until the day we hugged at the Greyhound station. Exchanged shy “See ya”s.
My mom must remember her last name, or someone in the neighborhood would. However, like so many bike rides and meals and bedtime stories that had slipped from my memory and I was afraid that if I did any digging I’d be inserting their remembrances, writing over the few remaining memories of Anne I can scavenge.
Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, North American Review, The Southern Review, Fence, and Gone Lawn among others. He publishes the blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.