Eula spends the morning praying. He says God in his prayers, God, God, God, but the name is not connected to anyone specific. He has never been to church. When he’s older, looking for ways to bare his soul to a lover, he pathologizes this behavior. I was lonely, he says. I would tell God about my day. It was just someone to talk to.
But now he’s young and knows what to say. He puts on his ill fitting clothes, black and cheap but durable, and he prays. He puts butter on toast and prays. Only sometimes does he stop and close his eyes and fold his hands. That happens when he wants to make a point. Otherwise, he just stares, spiritually, and lets it all wash out.
His body is short and wide, sturdy but unkempt, his soft stomach decorated with pale marks that purple in some places. They crackle outward like river maps or thin twigs on tree branches. He sleeps in a sports bra underneath an oversized T-shirt, and he wears these during the day as well. He is growing into a fine young woman.
When Eula was small, his mother left his father and moved herself and Eula across the state to be closer to her parents, in the town in which she grew up. Eula has a few memories of his grandparents, but they make little sense. He distinctly remembers a time his grandmother used a pair of chopsticks from Panda Express to pluck a wasp from where it was crawling on the wall. She ate it, and its crunch is what he remembers most. Eula was five when they died, within a month of each other. He has no memories of his father.
The apartment building where Eula and his mother live is bordered on one side by more identical apartment buildings. On the other three sides is a vast wasteland of small hills made of packed dirt and sharp brush. The four-lane freeway cuts through it into infinity the same way it cuts though the whole town, never stopping, watched over by strip malls and anti-abortion billboards.
Sometimes, knots of children prowl in the shadows of the buildings armed with tiny bicycles and naked dolls from Goodwill. It’s a quiet, empty Saturday, though, and Eula is alone. He has his mother’s old iPhone 4 and giant headphones that bleed more sound into the air than they put into his ears. He listens to Simon & Garfunkel.
Propped against a slight incline with the dirt pressing against him, tangling his hair and sticking to his skin, Eula prays for his mother, who works as a receptionist at a fancy hotel where she will never stay. He prays for his grandparents, whose ashes Eula had watched his mother scatter over the surface of a lake an hour outside of town. “I grew up going here,” his mother had said on the drive, the two urns tucked safely in a box on the floor of the passenger seat. Eula had to fold his feet back so he didn’t touch them.
“I’ve never been,” Eula said.
“No, you have,” said his mother, focusing on the road while Eula stared at her. “You were just too young to remember.”
Neither of them cried, not when they heard about the deaths or at the joint funeral or when the ashes caught the wind from the upturned mouths of the urns, those pieces of people being pulled away into dirty water laced with sunset. Eula kept waiting for his mother to break down. But she must have done it where he couldn’t see, as he himself had, watching himself sob in the bathroom mirror one afternoon while she was on a late shift.
Once Eula is done praying for his father and his freshman year English teacher and the woman who sits on the corner of Fourth and Main every weekday with a blanket on her lap and cardboard sign in her hands, he opens his eyes, and he finds that David is standing there watching him.
Eula takes off the headphones and they gasp tinnily in his lap. David is a year older than Eula, with a black ring through his bottom lip and holes in his jeans. He lives in a nearby apartment building. Eula has been hearing a woman calling him inside for years.Eula feels as though he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing.
“Hey,” David says. He is wearing a black messenger bag, bulging oddly with objects. He takes out a little black vape pen from his pocket, sucks on it, and swallows the smoke. “Do you know about the Yellowstone Supervolcano?”
Eula is staring like a deer in headlights. The sun is climbing steadily in the sky behind him, he knows, because David’s face is lit up and his dark eyes are narrowed against the brightness.
“It’s the biggest volcano ever. It’s underground. When it erupts, everyone will die.”
Eula is still lying down. “Yeah, I’ve heard about it before.”
“Really?” David doesn’t look surprised, or excited, or even disappointed. His face is blank. “When I saw you out here, I thought you were dead.”
“What would you have done if I was?”
“Shit, I don’t know.” David chews on his fingernail. “Probably would’ve left you. Let you get eaten by coyotes.” He pronounces coyotes like “cay-oats.”
They are looking at each other, and Eula can hear the cars on the freeway rushing breathlessly by. David takes a half-empty two liter bottle of root beer from the bag at his side. He unscrews the cap and drinks some, then offers the bottle to Eula.
Eula sits up to take it. His and David’s fingers do not touch. The soda is slightly warm and mostly flat. Eula only drinks a little.
“Wanna see something?”
Eula can’t fathom why David is still here. He stands up and brushes himself off, combs his fingers through his long, thick hair until he hits an unconscionable tangle. His hair comes down to his waist. It’s gray-brown and falls over his face like he has something to hide, even though he doesn’t. He motions David forward.
Eula’s friends were always girls. Usually, they were the daughters of his mother’s friends, women who each looked as different as night and day but all had the same sort of shadow around their bodies, thickening deep in the bags under their eyes. The girls would often tell him his future because the minds of girls are rife with prophesy.
They would do this by barely speaking to him, by giving him roles that he would do a mediocre job of portraying, if not flat out ruin. Eula was not a team player.
Sometimes, a girl would pull her shirt over her head in order to exchange it for a silky dress or another item of dress-up. She would say, “It’s okay, we’re all girls here.” Eula would catch the flash of her flat stomach out of the corner of his eye, but he would not look close.
He is reluctant to give up that instant camaraderie. As he grew older, Eula stopped being a girl, and he mourns it, even when he prays for a flat chest and a deep voice. Eula has never been in a room of boys, but he imagines they don’t need an excuse to undress. They don’t have to say it. He keeps his eyes on David’s back, and sees that the sun shines on it differently than it does on his own.
David continues to talk as he leads Eula through the brush. He sometimes turns ninety degrees to angle his voice a little more toward his follower.
“The thing about the Yellowstone supervolcano is that it could erupt at any moment. We can’t do anything. It’s just this constant threat of disaster. My grandma says young people can’t understand how real death is, but I understand it, I bet you do, too. She has all these crucifixes in our house, seriously, every wall, there’s this emaciated little guy hanging there with his arms out wide. But she knows he won’t save her.”
He stops abruptly, his words and his feet. Eula almost runs into him. Thank God he doesn’t. He looks over David’s shoulder and down to a patch of bare dirt where a raven is sprawled, huge, black, impossibly inelegant. It’s on its back, its feathers tarnished and bent in all directions, its wings spread out like brand new road. It lies in a pool of blood, dark and still wet. It’s a mass of chaos. Eula can’t tell what it had died from. There is no question, though, that it’s dead, and the fact of it makes Eula’s scalp itch. You can’t trick yourself into thinking it’s sleeping, because no animal like this would leave itself in such a state.
Eula can still remember how his grandfather looked, all made up and silent in his coffin at the viewing. Even at five, Eula knew he was dead. There were no illusions. There was something gone. That’s how it is with this raven, Eula thinks. He suddenly wants to cry. He crouches down to be closer to it. He even reaches out a hand, but the toe of David’s dirty Converse strikes his wrist. “Don’t fucking touch it! Nasty.”
Eula can see ants crawling all across the corpse, almost camouflaged in the blackness. It looks almost like the skin is moving, like the molecules are packing up to live somewhere new.
“I have this dream,” Eula hears himself saying. “I dream that I’m a meat tenderizer. And somebody’s using me to beat up a slab of meat. Hitting me on it over and over again.”
“That means you wanna fuck your mom,” David says. “That’s what all dreams mean. I don’t have a mom, so I don’t have any dreams.”
Eula squints up at David. He wishes he were with a holier person so he could pray for this creature.
It gets worse. Two blonde boys appear out of nowhere, wearing shirts with aggressive Nike slogans on the fronts. They’re middleschool aged and thin as reeds. “What’re you doing?” asks the taller, blonder one.
“What’s it look like we’re doing, dipshits?”
The boys do not seem cowed. “Who’s that?” asks the same boy, gesturing at Eula, and not, as Eula was expecting, at the raven.
“She lives in the apartments. You must’ve seen her before.” David seems uncomfortable with the boys’ presence. Eula can see him wishing he could scare them off.
“That’s gross,” says the shorter boy. He gestures at the bird.
“I think it’s cool,” David says. “So does she. That’s why I showed her, and not you.”
The boys narrow their eyes at him suspiciously. The shorter one meanders off farther into the field, and the taller one follows, looking one last time at the raven, then at Eula.
David sits on a mound of dirt, pushes the strap of his bag off his shoulder. Eula sits, too, and looks at David’s body, his long, skinny legs and his bony shoulders. He looks at his own body, round and listless. He looks at the dead raven, its body now barely a body at all. Eula wants to be made of all three of them. He wants to be a collection of thoughtless matter floating through space. He doesn’t pray for that, though.