We call it Quicksand Street, despite what the road signs say. Where the sidewalks should be, two long columns of dirt reside, that kick up dust in the summertime. In the spring, when the rain really comes, water mixes with earth, giving us thick clay. On those days, the parallel parked cars along the block sink deep into Quicksand Street. Early morning, from inside our homes, we can hear the frantic spin of muddied sunken tires trying to push forward toward the morning shift. We can see all the wriggling and contorting it takes to leave Quicksand Street. We can feel all the writhing.

 

Desiree moved away from Quicksand a few years back. She only moved a couple neighborhoods over, but in a city only ten miles wide, a couple blocks difference makes a world anew. The blue house she left behind stands squeezed between the mildewed dumpster lot and Mr. Porter's hydrangea bushes. The nosiest of neighbors, quite like myself, remember Desiree moving back and forth for hours, loading her car with belongings. No rain fell that day, only a dry lightning flickered in the clouds, telling stories of its own. Every half hour or so, a quarrel between her mother and her would boil over onto the front lawn, always about money and work ethic, then simmer back down like a frothing pot turned on low.

 

They took turns being in the wrong. The wrong often believed themself in the right. The daughter stole; the mother withheld. Desiree's hands caught one too many times in a midnight theft of plastic cards from her mother's pocketbook. And her mother's alleged offense was a rigid, barren generosity, a refusal to give her child anything that was not worked for—hardly a square of cloth to mend a denim pocket, how Desiree tells it. A mountain of useless things piled up in the corner of Desiree's room. For her mother, they were symbols of her daughter's defiance, her greed and entitlement. But Desiree saw a righteous monument to wanting, her right to desire, to have and hold a thing born of joy, not sweat or tears.

 

Now Desiree still comes back to Quicksand Street to see her little brother. She parks a couple houses down and waits in the backyard, never at the front door, avoiding her mom. Sometimes Leon is already outside under the wooden back deck waiting for her. Sometimes he peels the blinds open with his fingers to check if she's there and pops outside. They lay together in the yellowing grass, letting ants crawl over their ankles.

"Why are you holding your stomach?" Leon asks.

"Just hungry." Desiree responds, gazing at the sky through the cracks in the deck.

Leon updates her about school and band practice. Slips back in the house, grabs a fruit gummy packet and hands it to Desiree. Slips into conversation how there's a concert coming to town. His favorite singer. Mom decided he can't go because he doesn't have a job to buy the tickets, being only 11. He asked if he could work around the house to earn the money. Ain't no chore worth $80 was the answer.

 

Desiree imagines a pit opening in her little brother's belly as he retells the interaction, thinks of shoveling the earth beneath them to fill it back up. She recalls a sinking feeling of unworthiness, thinking of how even now, moved out and working and on her own, she falls to her knees sometimes with guilt after buying herself a nice thing. And because she can't stand to live in a world that denies boys like Leon a single thing more, she tells him without thinking,

"Wait for me after school the day of the concert. I'll pick you up." 

 

The morning of the show, Desiree wakes up with a bout of nausea even worse than the day before. She ties her braids into a bun, leaving out a few to frame her face, and rushes out for her seven-hour shift. After school, Leon's squinting eyes survey the parking lot for his sister's citrus colored car. The backseat is filled to the brim with cases of water bottles, so Leon slips into the passenger seat.

He's never held this job before, but no employee manual is needed. They park at the fast-food spot on Florida Ave. Leon grabs the cooler out the trunk, Desiree fills it with gas station ice. He waves the water bottles at passing cars, logo side out, showing off the merchandise. In sync, they weave between cars like easy choreography, waiting on the median when the red light greens.

 

Only when the sun starts beaming in his eyes does Leon start to audibly complain. Desiree notices the bead of sweat above his lip, his sky-blue shirt turning cerulean under his armpits, and goes back to the car to count the money. But they still haven't made enough, so they stay out working ‘til the sun saps.

Though he spewed out at least a dozen protests during, when they finally get to the concert venue, he says,

"It wasn't that bad forreal." He pauses and tilts his head.

"Can we do it again sometime?" he asks.

"You got another concert to go to?"

"No. I just wanna be useful."

Before his sister can prune that vine of thinking she now believes she's planted in his head, he's already running to the box office with ones and five-dollar bills held firm in his right hand, coins dancing in his pocket.

 

There isn't enough money for them both to go in. Desiree waits outside the arena, feeling the bass of the speakers percuss against her xylophone ribcage even from there. And though she can't see Leon, she pictures his head bobbing, short locs swaying in tandem with the BPM, and it looks like some kind of freedom.

 

Their mother is already waiting at the door when Desiree's car pulls onto Quicksand Street. Leon runs to his room to postpone punishment, but not before hugging his sister tightly. At the corridor, Desiree and her mother soak up the quiet between them, taking in two different meanings of the silence altogether. Glare, soften, glare, soften. There's a lot of love here, resisting itself.

"Can I use your bathroom?" Desiree asks, breaking the silence. Her mother surprises herself, being hurt by the question.

"It never stopped being yours too."

 

Desiree places her purse on the bathroom counter. Pulls out the pregnancy test that's been hurting her back to lug around all day. She thinks to turn the faucet on, a mock waterfall to soothe her mind, but doesn't want to hear any snide comments about the water bill just yet, with her and her mom finally speaking. Leon's small footfalls can be heard from upstairs, still jumping to the prior hour's rhythms.

 

She tugs on her eyebags in the mirror. For the first time, Desiree looks around, questioning the familiar bathroom's floral wallpaper, its lying roses with no thorns. She thinks the responsible, honest thing to do would be to take a pen out her purse and draw them on. But then she'd have to take it further, add the mulch, add the fungi, add the worms, add the rain, add the salt, add the roots. Nevermind it. Embrace the omission. When the time comes, Desiree will tell her baby, your grandmother loves deeply. That she combed her children's hair for hours, that she kissed their foreheads at each day's end. She'll tell all true things. The full extent of each beautiful truth.

 

One of the yellowed bathroom lightbulbs glints on and off. Music leaks in from the living room TV. Sleepy jazz. Desiree's eyes teeter back and forth. Down at the pee stick, back to the wall. Down at the test, back to the wallpaper. Up, at the flower petals burgeoning. Down, at the patterns repeating.