Content Warning: violence, gore.
After weeks on end of Epsom salt baths and scrubbing away dried blood, Michael itched for a way to open up his cuts and scrapes, for his skin to become raw again. He searched for whatever loofahs, washcloths, and brushes he could find. What he had found laid across the edges of the tub, an array of tools to scrub his body. After some time, swirls of dried blood cascaded through the tub, dripping into the steaming water and fading into a light pink as they made their way to the bottom.
Reaching for the shampoo bottle, he began massaging the shiny liquid into his hair. He gazed into the frosted window above him, the chilled glass meeting waves of heat that rose from the bathwater. Michael clung to the heat in the water, submerging everything but his head.
The drain gurgled, his foot kicking its stopper out of place. He sighed, inching away from the drain and upwards to close it. As his hand went to do so, he peered into the unclogged drain and saw the faint lines of blood being sucked into it. The drain, silver and rusted around the edges, had probably twenty holes poked into it leading to the depths of Hell. Meanwhile, the tub was swallowing his blood, his genes.
“Michael!” a voice yelled from the next room.
He pushed the drain closed, shut his eyes and sank himself underwater, diving into the tub with a head full of shampoo bubbles.
“Michael!” they persisted, the stern voice echoing underwater.
Everything was quiet, peaceful. Echoes of birds chirping outdoors, neighbors yelling across the street; it was all muffled through the glass. He squinted his eyes, stinging from the soap, and peered at the water. The dissipating shampoo had created a shiny quality to it, almost silver-looking, that stood out against his pale skin and blond leg hair. Patterns of silver and pink now collided in the bathwater, coming together and falling apart as they filled the tub.
"Michael!”
The door swung open. Michael’s head popped out from under the water. His mother stood in the doorway, holding the lock-pick she had bought years ago.
“It’s 8:00. Your father is waiting for you to rake the yard,” she said.
His mother’s eyes glanced down in agreement as they returned to folding a bath towel, undoubtedly strewn across the floor by one of her boys. She then opened her mouth as if to say something to her son, but her lips returned to their tight line, and she left the bathroom.
From the upstairs window, seemingly aways away from the rest of the world, the Strickland mother could be seen with a thread and needle. She often sewed at the end of the night, with a lamp beside the rocking chair she used to rock the babies in, mending holes and embroidering underwear. The children loathed this practice, but regardless she stitched all their clothing with the family name. Their mother had done this for years, her chair rocking back and forth, carefully adorning her children’s clothes into the night.
The worst was the socks. Shirts, underwear, sweaters, and even pants made sense to Michael, but the embroidered socks drove him crazy. They initialed on the ankle, which dug into his flaky, freckled skin no matter the weather. Leaving the bathtub, he remembered the socks and rubbed his ankles to feel their latest dry patches. The left was worse than the right.
Michael knew that she had never sat in a bathtub for hours on end. He knew that she had never opened up her scars and allowed them to bleed. She had scoured them for only a moment in private, then hung them out to dry.
During the rare moments Mrs. Strickland was seen outside and the neighbors of Van Buren Avenue were able to steal a glimpse of her, they took notice of her deteriorating mood. After all, the babies were done being born and their house was no longer in disarray, bottles of breastmilk no longer lining the refrigerator, burping cloths and diapers now absent from the linen closet. She was out of work.
Danny Vetjasa, a boy who lived down the road of Van Buren, once got a look at Mrs. Strickland taking out the trash and waited all but two minutes to tell the other neighborhood kids.
“I saw her, I really saw her glare at me, no, listen—she stared me down like, like I was one of her kids or something and she was pissed off at me!” said an out-of-breath Danny, panting from the run across the pavement.
“She put a hex on you, man!” laughed a teenaged neighbor, clamping his palm around Danny’s shoulder. The young boy’s face turned white.
“You think so?” he said, staring up at him in terror.
“How did she look at you? Was it a glare?”
Danny gulped as he recalled the mother taking out the trash, not so much as even looking in his direction. “A glare,” he replied, nodding.
“Sorry man, you’re hexed for life. Probably doomed to be a Mormon, too.”
The collective opinions of Van Buren Avenue held the same standard of contempt for the Stricklands, or as they were more affectionately known, “the Mormon family”. Mr. and Mrs. Strickland were viewed as overbearing, stern religious people, who many jokingly remarked “held their Book of Mormon to sleep at night”, “drank Postum daily”, and that the children were more than likely to turn out the same. Most neighbors of Van Buren held private opinions of the household as well, and discussed them at length with one another at their shared fences or Sunday cookouts. Mothers eyed Mrs. Strickland’s long dresses that she wore year-round, that covered her arms, chest, and legs completely. These dresses were exclusively seen in shades of navy, black, and gray, and while the mothers of Van Buren understood the importance of modesty, they wondered how she could bear full-coverage clothing in the sweltering July heat.
Her crow-like, scowling demeanor was daunting to approach for parents and children alike. Neighbors found themselves holding their breath as they welcomed her to the neighborhood, introducing themselves but providing as little information as possible. Once they rapped on the front door of the Stricklands with a platter of cookies, anxious to meet their new neighbors, they were dismayed to find only Mrs. Strickland. And she wouldn’t explain where her husband was stationed overseas, where her children were, she wouldn’t even disclose why they had chosen to move to Van Buren.
Michael dressed and headed outside to begin raking the leaves. Most were a yellow-brown, the type of mushy leaves that layered onto one another, stuck with the rain from the night before. They fell from the trees surrounding the home, oak with strong trunks and branches extending out beyond the lone Mormon house. Thick branches became thin sticks, meaningless and dreary as they withered away. And hanging off the branches were the leaves, once full, veiny, and green, their spiraled edges now torn with the threat of winter. A singular willow, the only of its kind, remained intact in the Strickland backyard. Laden, drooping branches full of leaves still casted a shadow onto the wet ground. The mucky water made the leaves smell of mold and earth to Michael, bunches of leaves slowly becoming the same color and texture. A few stuck to his pant ankle, but he continued raking.
Michael had not taken the facial features of his father, rather, he inherited his mother’s eyes, nose, and chin. But his stature was tall and lean, his red hair a recessive gene, and his asthma acquired all on his own.
As a child, Michael read beneath the massive willow in their backyard nearly every day, intently staring into paperbacks stained with the smell of the outdoors and flipping through their contents. Books with peeling, glued-on covers and pages littered with grass stains, books with originally intact spines and without pencil markings made in the margins. Books hidden under floorboards, under his bed, and behind the gardening and tools shed.
One sunny afternoon in late October, several years prior, the freckled boy was reading To Kill a Mockingbird behind the gardening and tools shed. Reading so deeply, almost hypnotically, in the calming summer breeze had caused him to mistake his mother’s car pulling up in the driveway for his neighbor.
Mrs. Strickland discovered her son behind the shed and, in absolute outrage at the sight of the book, tore it from his clenched hands and vowed to throw it into the garbage. His cries and protests were ignored by his mother, and eventually he was sent to his father for a punishment.
Sun setting on the lawn, Michael’s youngest sister wandered outside their home until she found her sullen brother beside the willow tree. His book missing, tears reluctantly escaping their ducts, red hair matching the stinging cuts across his face.
She was only a toddler at the time, and so her efforts to console him were appreciated by Michael in a pandering sense. He knew she could never understand. And yet, Margaret approached her brother with a tap on the shoulder, her chubby toddler fingers pausing him in his tracks. He reached, as he always did, and sat the young girl in his lap while the tears streamed down his face. He cried slowly at first, then rampantly, his tears an ever-flowing bottle with a stolen plug. Confused, she faced him and tried to wipe each tear as they came, her sweaty palms combing over his eyelids and pressing firmly onto his cheeks. Her toddler’s hands smelled of baby food and sunshine, of overgrown grass and laughter. She didn’t stop his crying, but she held his hand until it did.
His rake was exactly his height, which forced him to bend lower and lower as he scraped against the earth. His shoulders slumped and his freckled face began to redden (a tendency of his pale skin), the beating sun competing against the chilly air and his rake.
Like all of the neighbors on Van Buren, he did not understand his family. The vast majority of the neighbors pitied the Strickland children. They accepted them to some extent, like any neighborly neighbor should, and offered them lemonade in the summertime and hand-me-down clothing from their older children. But his family were outsiders, and with their awkward demeanor and speech, they simply did not fit in with the others.
About the Author
This chapter is part of a longer work in progress, about a Mormon family "the Stricklands" living in a suburban neighborhood and their relationships with the other people in the neighborhood. The point of view is primarily from Michael Strickland, the second eldest child, told in third person indirect narration. All the Leaves Are Dead is a story about navigating familial relationships, growing up, isolation, and found family.
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