TanisNikana

So I wanna tell you a story about a place. Way back in the day, maybe back in '94 or '95, there we were, my brother and I, and we were in the house. The house had a little furnace separating the living room from the kitchen, just a grated square in the floor covering the space right beneath it, and the dog would always walk around it. It was a pitch black hole with a grating over it and it was supposed to emit heat, but mostly it just emitted fear for whatever eight- and nine-year olds spent their days leaping their tiny legs over it so they wouldn't fall inside, cause if it wasn't good enough for the dog, it wasn't good enough for us. And there was also that cousin of mine, what's-her-face, the one who would get drunk and angry and was maybe twenty years our senior, really probably closer to thirty years, seeing her jaded outlook on life and propensity to slap the shit out of her own kid, our second cousin who stayed in the same house with us. She didn't deserve it, the slapping.

When you're eight years old or so, you kinda just go where you're taken. Sometimes. That dad with his protective warmth and his general existence being tantamount to a talisman of protection sometimes was distracted. Back in the town I lived in, back in those ephemeral single-digit summers away from my divorced mom, dad's hugs were a glowing heat on a frozen plain of co-dependent abusive parenting from my mother. Six point two million feet away from her was enough to feel comfortable. He'd get distracted with the rest of his softball team, the team he played with had a schedule and played against other teams and they had fans and there was concessions, and although the games were always played in city parks, those softball fields had to be used by someone for something, so they may as well have been used by actual softball teams with real uniforms playing softball that people would come and watch. Those games would take nine innings, and that's about forty hours to an eight year

He'd drop us off at the house of one of his coworkers, and she was a broken and sad woman through and through. We had to pile out from his tiny blue talisman and go unprotected to the house nearby. Milt-Rose or so, out east almost to Burns. No way a nine-year old girl and her brother could get home from here, hundreds of thousands of feet of sidewalk-less paved road flying along at above highway speeds, cause the cops who ever showed up were intermittent and arbitrary at best. The place was encrusted despair in prairie form. Before me were two irredeemably damaged singlewide trailer homes. I wasn't sure which one the coworker and her kids lived in. Ostensibly, she worked at the air guard too, but I always wondered why, if my dad was going to work in the morning, was I getting dropped off here? Wouldn't she be going to work with him? I guess I saw her in her air guard blues once before, maybe a couple times, back when she lived at her old place closer in town. Her new place was the

Bored at home, did the vacuuming and washed the dishes, got all the stuff put away and generally cleaned up the house. Tall enough to step right over that furnace grating in the floor. Or on it. Whatever. Doesn't matter anymore. Learned how to talk, learned how to listen. Learned how to have verbal dialogue, but it was still so new to me, the act of conversing with others, that I didn't do it cause it took effort. I mean, it still takes effort. But it did then too. Nothing to do. All the games on the old NES were beaten and finished. The junkyard out back was a raging mess but climbing around amongst the vehicles and garbage didn't appeal to teenage me anymore. Whacked a golf ball around the back yard for a bit, landed it in the treehouse. Bored enough that I was going to try something for the first time ever in this town, I was going to go somewhere else. And not just the corner store at the end of the road and over a bit, but somewhere way far away. I hopped up on my bike, the