Explorers of Known Spaces

Explorers of Known Spaces

By Kyle Barr

There was her child, running to the edge of known spaces then back across the room, back and forth like the intellectual who paces to keep their mind sharp.

But you don’t have to think like they do, you have something better to offer, the child’s mother thought, watching her son. You have a knowing without knowing, a sensory kind of intelligence.

“You’re an explorer,” she called to him across the room. Her child beamed back at her.

Looking at that face, with all those qualities she did not have, or all those she lost in just a few short years since leaving home, she could tell there was hope there. He was only three years old, but she didn’t know what he knew, what he already understood.

The morose thoughts were slinking back into her brain. What was she supposed to understand about motherhood? She had barely finished high school. She took her finals with that little fiend kicking in her stomach, making her almost drop the pencil as she filled in the bubbles on the scantron.

And there was another voice in her head. Remember when people thought you were a poet, that you’d get a scholarship to somewhere like UT? That last year was wasted, wasted on a boy. You shouldn’t have graduated, but they expected all the kids to leave. High school isn’t the end anymore. They expected you to go to college to do anything more than take orders at the drive thru. So, they push you out the door knowing you weren't going anywhere.

The young mother was sitting in her kitchen trying to scrape together the general will to put out the cigarette between her fingers. She’d stopped smoking while her son grew inside her but took it up again as soon as she left the hospital. It was one of those things, probably just another tab in a scoreboard of examples for how she thought the child would change her for the better but hadn’t. She also thought she’d become like those moms you read about after some successful kid from a rundown home is talking to a reporter, telling them with pride how their single mother supported them by working three jobs and still coming home to cook dinner. It’d be tough, but in 30 years she’d look back with pride as her little son supported her into retirement.

God, that’s so selfish. The smoke was burning down, but she finally let go and put the cigarette up to her lips. Withdrawing the stick, she left a mark of crimson on the filter. She forgot she still had the lipstick. Date night, date night again. You should be working, but instead you’re trying to find a camel willing to take you both his back.

It was well past night, even at 6 p.m., but that was winter this far north, a kind of dark she still wasn’t used to. Should she put the kid to bed soon? Or would he complain and whine and would she give in, let him stay up? You can always find new ways to be worse. You discover them every day.

The two-room apartment was full of furniture left over from the previous inhabitants. There was two feet of counter space and an oven in one corner, and in the other a small couch and TV stand without a TV. The young mother sat at an old, green, smoke stained 70s style table with matching chairs, the cushions patched with lengths of duct tape. A lone overhead lamp illuminated the small kitchen, but the light did not penetrate into the corners of the room, like the singular bulb cops use for interrogation in small, concrete cells.

Her child crawled up on the short loveseat in the corner of the apartment and stood up on still-uncertain legs to look out the window. Outside, the tinkling streetlamps buzzed through the cold winter rain. She’d originally thought she’d stay here, let her child see snow for the first time. She herself didn’t see snow until she was going on fifteen, and never sled down a hill or threw a snowball. Last winter, back in another apartment, another town, she begged her parents for the money to buy her son a coat and snow pants. Both were still in the closet, and still had the tags on them. Even this far north, even living up north two of the boy’s past three winters, and it still hadn’t snowed.

And on the table in front of her were the bills, the big one for rent. She’d spent all her parents’ money already. Now what?

“Are you having fun, child?” the young woman asked the space between her and her son, the words lacking a presence and direction, even to her ears. She knew on a deep level she wasn’t really talking to the boy, but even still he didn’t respond, or at least not with any sense. He pressed his face up to the glass and started to breathe heavy, forming the cloud on the window he’d use to draw random shapes. Perhaps she should be reading to him more. Perhaps she should be taking him to art classes as well as preschool, the preschool her parents paid for. You don’t have the money for it. He should be getting a leg up on life instead of stranding himself in the mediocrity of your shadow.

This place — it looked too much like the worst parts of anywhere. It was barely a mile off the interstate, where the McDonald’s and the Sunocos are spaced like gravestones along a two-lane road to service all those long haulers and road trippers who wouldn’t dream of staying. On a clear night, you could see the neon at night and the glow of the golden arches. Everything else is away. There are suburbs a half hour east along the interstate, but here was a cul-de-sac for the lost. She was seeing that now.

The boy was starting to get bored with smudging his fingers into the steamed glass. She was starting to miss him. She heard of women going through a hard, hard bout of depression after their first child, but she’d found she really started to feel alone once he was at school, when she was at her apartment, alone, thinking about other things. He slid off the old sofa and wiggled his way over to her. She couldn’t help it, she giggled and cooed at him watching him walk. He was like a dog, too much like a dog sometimes, and his rear moved independently of the rest of his body. Even his kisses were wet, and sloppy things, like little leeches grabbing onto the loose flesh of her cheeks.

“You don’t need to be so clingy, you know,” she said in between little squeaks and giggles from the boy’s nuzzling kisses. “See, laughing is so much better, aint it?”

Then her son was reaching for her tablet she’d been using on the table to look at local jobs, not finding anything that wouldn’t shove her behind a frying station. She set it to the kid-friendly mode and handed it over. His fingers were already becoming practiced to the tasks. And the child didn’t even know the times tables.

She realized she still had the cigarette in her other hand. The smoke was a cloud around her frame, a frozen, white silhouette. She swore and smothered it out in the ashtray. The cloud still lingered, and she wafted it away with her other hand. She looked down, tapped her phone. She’d missed a call. It was from her mom. Her mother knew she was out of money, out of options.

“Fuck me,” she said.

As if her mother heard her, the phone started buzzing in her hand, the screen displaying an old unfocused photo of her mother’s first attempt at a selfie. Before she had time to think better, the young woman’s finger swiped green, and she brought the phone up to her ear.

“Now’s not a great time,” she said

Here she was again, her mother already directing the flow of conversation. It was a near-instinctual thing. Her mother knew she was alone. It was as if she knew her daughter had been worried, was battling back depressive thoughts, and was feeling stuck. The young mother held the phone close as her mom talked, listing in her chair like a dead tree in a strong breeze. Her child took the tablet and waddled over to the sofa. He sat back into the deep cushions and began tapping at the screen with his small, stubby fingers. The young woman watched him from across the room, trying to ignore her mother’s voice but her words were too earnest for that.

“Don’t you think I might know what I want?”

Her voice came too loud before she could stop herself. Her son’s head picked up from the screen to look at her across the room. The young mother leaned over with her elbow on the table and spoke a little closer into the phone. No, she didn’t have a job. Burger flippers were paying less than unemployment. Anyone with any sense would do the same.

“You kept telling me I would need to make it myself on my own. What changed?”

Each word was a knife spun around to stab herself in the heart. The contradictory thoughts clawed at the front of her brain. And if you could stop for a second and believe her. She just wants you to come home.

The boyfriend put a baby in her at 17, when he was only 19, as if the two extra years should have helped him know any better. He said he would be a performer. It all felt so stupid now, to think of him talking about his act, his party tricks that would make a child giggle, would make her son kick his little legs and laugh, but would bring home less than $10 in tips. Worse though, you were so stupid to follow him. Even when he left, you kept going north, like a stuck needle on a broken compass.

“People talk. That’s all they did back home. They would just talk about me, the girl who got pregnant in high school, the idiot who couldn’t make it, the girl who lives in her parent’s house until she’s 35.”

She’s right in so many ways, undeniable ways. You can taste the pride in your mouth. 

“I don’t have to be a failure, not to them, not to you.”

She noticed something in front of her face, a vague shape. There weren’t any tears in her eyes, and yet she had to blink the blurriness away. She had leaned all the way over until she was hunched down on her knees. She blinked again and made out the shape of her son. He had put the tablet down and come over to her, looking at her with curious eyes. He wanted to come up onto her lap, the one she was occupying with her thin chest.

She sat up, and the boy immediately started to climb. It was hard for him. He first tried to leverage himself up on her knees, but instead fell back onto his butt. He picked himself up, came around and found support on a chair leg. Using that, he swung up and around and up onto her lap. The movement punched the air from her stomach.

Her mother heard her daughter's cough and wanted to know if she was okay. She laughed and bounced the child once, twice on her lap.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

She hung up the phone, crossed her arms over the boy’s shoulders, and hugged him like a seatbelt, tight and safe. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t. You are moving, finding places, seeing things and trying things. That’s exciting. It can be exciting. No more need to go north. Why not west? Away and away.

“You’re an explorer,” she said. The words occupied every inch of that confined space, hovering like smoke, defining the shape of her and her son.