Carla's Summer

Once she got going, the thrill of it never made her want to stop.

Until the day Carla Rajabali saw a dead cat in the empty lot at the end of Chelmsford Street.

It was funny the way the cat looked at a distance. Just the way cats acted, freezing still in the midst of walking when they wanted to signal to another cat they meant no trouble, that they were just passing by.

The two girls, a good full eleven years, and the boy, just a little older, approached the cat, expecting it to lunge ahead any minute, hearing the shuffle of their feet in the low, dry grass. But it never ran.

Eyes open, haunches taut, tail held inches above the ground, the cat stood where it was, until Rick poked it with a stick and it tumbled over. The three watched the posture of the feline in surprise and quiet terror. Like a clay statue lying on its side.

Then a fly buzzed out from between the cat’s parted mouth, shook by the unexpected tremor in the carcass.

Carla and Lorraine Whitaker gave each other a blank stare and Rick swung the stick to the ground.

“I told you we might not be able to control it the way we thought we could,” he said. “Freezing someone midway, that’s fun. This isn’t fun.”

“I want to break the triangle,” Lorraine said. Her breath was fraying and she slapped her pockets for the inhaler. Her fingers found it and she smacked it into her mouth so hard, Carla thought she might choke on the mouthpiece. She frantically jabbed the canister, unable to get it to spray, before she pulled it out and saw she’d forgotten to uncap the thing.

Today was the third week of summer. Rick had come to his two friends during the last week before school had ended and blabbered about being in the middle of a stick-up at the Heartland Variety Store down on Blaze Avenue.

“Slow down, please, Rick, we can’t understand one thing you’re trying to say,” Carla had told him, as she jumped off the swing behind the modest building that was part of the Antonia school district.

“I’m telling you…it happened, I don’t know what it was…” The words kept tripping on each other and the veins in Rick’s neck were making a racket. Perplexity glowed on his face.

“Bullet…” he went on. “It wasn’t moving.”

Carla said, “Bullet? Where?”

“Just hanging there. Not moving. The man shot that bullet. It’s the first time I saw a bullet in my life.” Rick broke into a coughing fit. Carla and Lorraine could see he had been running. He had arrived at school in the recess and he’d made his way to them right away without bothering to straighten it out with the lady in the homeroom.

“Hey, I’ve seen bullets before,” Lorraine said. “One day my older brother was trying to reach for the smaller toolbox daddy keeps in the pantry above the top shelf. He hit his hand on something else, and it fell over his head and crashed on the floor. Mom heard the noise and she came. There were these”—she held up her index finger, digging her thumbnail a little past the first finger-joint—“this big, golden things lying around everywhere. Mom nearly skidded on one, and I asked her why she kept her lipsticks in the pantry. She told me they weren’t lipstick.”

“You thought they were lipstick?” Carla was sniggering.

“Well, when I picked up one it looked more like a small…” Lorraine’s eyes quickly widened and narrowed before she relaxed them. Carla caught the meaning.

“Shh…don’t say that,” Carla said.

Rick was frowning at them. His breath ran blunt now. “What are you two talking about?”

“What are you talking about, Rick?” Carla said.

And so, Rick told them what had happened that morning shortly after he left home to walk to school.

What happened was it’s nine-thirty and Rick’s still standing on the corner of the hairdresser block, wondering whether he should walk a little under a mile crosstown and head down Santa Road to reach the movie theater from where school lies a mere short three blocks west. But he wants chocolate. For some reason, the middle school cafeteria has a policy of allowing only low-fat unflavored milk alongside lunch and he’s had enough of that.

So if he heads down Blaze Avenue from where he is, he can walk into the Heartland Store and then move on to Manilow Street to turn west toward Santa. Heartland is the only place between home and school where they’ve got a mile-long chocolate aisle. He thinks about getting a Hershey’s and maybe a Starburst.

But there’s more to the detour this morning, even though school has already let in.

He wants to try if the trick works in larger places the same way it worked on the butterflies he caught and let free in his room. They froze when he said the words aloud. The same words that the AI chatbot divulged when he typed in the question: Can I stop time?

“You can talk to this version about anything you want to,” his older brother Stan had said, showing him the premium version of the JuggleWorld language bot.

“Anything?” Rick stared at the most bewitching UI design he’d ever laid eyes on.

“Practically. It’s got a way improved UX than the free version. It’s much brainier and understands the human response system way better.”

“What’s UX?”

Stan had grinned. “That’s something you get to see and feel when you use it, Ricky boy.”

“Can I try it?”

The grin was gone. “You know I hate it when you touch my stuff with greasy fingers.”

Rick had promised to be careful and while Stan was mowing the lawn, he’d sat down to type into the upgraded AI model and asked that one question.

The skin on his arms tingled as soon as he said the words that appeared on the screen. They didn’t make sense to Rick, even though it was English, because they were out of turn. It was an abnormal and incorrect string of words. Nothing clumsy about it because it looked like the words were arranged that way on purpose.

He said them again in the heavily curtained room and Stan’s laptop went up in flames.

He could hear the lawnmower humming, and the sound of footsteps rushing up the stairs. Stan crashed into the room and the next hour had been a wild chase with Stan hollering at the top of his lungs, and Rick shouting back pleading he didn’t know what happened.

What happened was it’s gone past a quarter of ten and Rick’s goggling at all the brands in the chocolate aisle at Heartland. He should make up his mind soon what he wants so he can test the words and sneak past the front counter.

There’s a noise from the front of the store distracting him. Something falls and someone grunts in shock and someone swears. He’ll have to come out of the aisle at the far end to see what’s going on and Mrs. Hudson will be waiting to have a talk with him in the homeroom, so he better hurry.

He scoops up three bars of Hershey’s, two Starbursts, and a Reese’s. If everyone in the store is not the same way the butterflies got the moment he’s out of the aisle, he’ll come back and put the chocolates where they were and head down to school.

The words are out of his mouth and he’s standing outside the aisle now, his mouth gaping, his pockets bulging. He should have worn his cargoes today for bigger pockets.

There’s a man with long, slicked hair, hanging in lanky curls just above his shoulder, the lower end of his overcoat has flapped high in the air behind him, pointing a gun straight at the woman behind the counter. Fear contorts the woman’s face, her mouth open wanting to scream, with her hands held up close to her ears. All this Rick sees like a tableau vivant. Nothing moving. The other people in the store are motionless too.

Then he sees the bullet, frozen in the air, no farther than a foot from the counter woman’s face.

All he needs to do is say the words again and the bullet will kiss the woman right in the middle of her glasses.

Rick panics, but before he runs out, he clambers up on the counter and shoves the woman. Down she goes like a statue of clay. He hears her eyeglasses smashing as he leaps toward the entrance, slips, rolls on the floor and hits the doors. The next instant he is out and running down the block and around it on Manilow Street.

Carla and Lorraine stared at Rick like he’d lost his mind.

“That doesn’t sound like a nice excuse for being late, when Mrs. Hudson asks you where you’ve been,” Carla said after he’d finished telling the absurd story.

On the last day of school, Rick finally showed Carla and Lorraine. Angelina Farooque had been overstepping it with Lorraine during recess time. Everyone knew the ball had knocked over Lorrain’s lunch on purpose, while Angelina played dodgeball with the other kids. Carla had seen it happen, playing from the opposite side.

The three friends had stood by the window of an empty high school freshman room and watched Angelina cutting an ever higher arc on the swing. She was by herself.

Rick scribbled it on a piece of paper and handed it to Carla. “Say it,” he told her.

Carla looked at the jumble of words in her palm. “What’s it mean?” she said.

“Just say what you see aloud but do it while you’re looking at her.” He jerked his head toward the tall girl outside whooshing high up in the air and back again.

Carla said the words and Rick began to giggle as Angelina stopped midair, while the swing was on its way down, the girl looking at the ground, her hair flailing behind like a small cape.

Carla and Lorraine could have crashed into each other with surprise.

“We could walk out there and pull her off the swing,” Rick said.

Bewilderment flushing her face, Carla stuttered. “What do I do to make her going again?”

Rick pointed to the paper in her hand. “Repeat them. Aloud.”

“And look at her while I do it?”

“I guess. But I don’t think looking at what you’ve stopped matters when you only want to undo it.”

Carla did it and watched Angelina break out of the impossible pose and fly out of the swing as it swept downward. Stupefied and frightened, she screamed as she landed face-first on the Astroturf.

Lorrain’s breathing stabilized now as she inhaled the medication in short gasps. More flies gathered around the mouth of the dead cat. They smelled decay in silence.

“I want to break the triangle,” Lorraine repeated.

“Something isn’t right,” Rick said and found a small stone to hunker down. “The words aren’t meant to work this way.”

“How do we know?” Lorraine said. “We were here Tuesday afternoon, and you were juggling the rocks and Carla said it when the rocks were flying high. Carla made a circle of rocks in the air. Maybe we left behind something bad in the air, like we somehow infected it, like something foul, and it killed the cat. I don’t know. I’m telling you I want out.”

“You’re not going to tell anyone are you?” Rick said.

Carla put a hand on Lorraine’s shoulder. “Oh, come on, Lori, this is the most awesome summer ever. Don’t you feel great that you can get away with almost anything?”

Something dropped out of the cat’s mouth and thrashed around. Then another one crawled out and fell near its partner. They were the shade of a light rusty cinnamon, greyish at the ends. Rick picked up the long twig and thrust it between the cat’s half-hidden fangs. He pulled it out with several more clung to its end. His mouth curled with disgust and he flung the twig away.

“God!” Lorraine covered her mouth with a hand. “Look, what we’ve done.”

“We didn’t do anything.” Carla held her arm akimbo. “Cats die every day. Only because we found one in this lot doesn’t mean we are the ones who did it.”

“Cats die. Not by turning to stone while they’re walking.” Rick scratched his arm morosely. “But we just can’t tell ourselves to forget the words. Maybe if we stop saying it, we slowly will.”

Lorraine said, “If we found something else to do this summer, it can make us forget. We can kill the memory if we try. It’s like cramming math sums before the exam and never going back to it once you’re through. You forget about it, right?”

Carla flung back her shiny black hair. “I can’t believe you guys. After we discovered this secret and after having so much fun with it, you just want to quit?”

“We have a long summer ahead of us, Carla. We can have fun doing stuff.” Lorraine took the girl’s hand, but it pulled away.

“Doing stuff like what?”

“At least we won’t be dying to stand on Main Street and pull the trick on passing cars.” Rick stood up and raised his chin.

“So?” Carla glared at him. “If only you two hadn’t been so scared of trying it—”

“Carla,” Lorraine tried to take her hand again, “we don’t know how it’d work around such a huge place. What if some car didn’t freeze and crashed into the one we froze?”

Rick stamped a foot in the grass. “She doesn’t care about what this secret might get us into. She’s selfish. I wish I’d never found out about this.”

Carla said, “You wish you’d kept it to yourself. You’re sorry that you shared it with your friends, aren’t you?”

“I’m with you, Lori. I want to forget.” Rick looked at Lorraine. He walked away, saying, “I’ll catch you two later.”

Soon the only things moving in the empty lot were the breeze, and the maggots eating into the cat’s carcass.

Sitting up late that night, when Carla heard the shouting, she took out the picture of the man whose hair looked exactly like hers. She put the picture on her desk and stared at it for a long time. The shouting grew and grew. She could pick out the words they were flinging at each other like knives. Words of hate, words of naked derision.

Then her mother screamed in pain. Carla closed her eyes. Scream after terrified scream rose from downstairs, outrageously blending with the growled curses spilling from her father’s mouth.

Carla Rajabali opened her eyes and ran her thumb slowly around the head of the man in the picture.

“This is going to be a summer I’ll never forget. Goodbye daddy.”

Then she said the words Rick had taught her. They still made no sense. The only thing new about them was they were arranged differently.