No Saviors by Sarah Bradley

You’re sixteen today, but no one told your stomach. For breakfast you had black coffee. For lunch you had a bag of cheddar and sour cream Ruffles and a Hawaiian Punch from the vending machines at school. Also the red part of Caleb’s Bomb Pop. It stained your lips, and then you transferred the stain to his lips behind the portables while Beth Mendoza sat a foot away from you fashioning an apple into a bong. Caleb isn’t your boyfriend. You don’t have a boyfriend. Caleb is just a way of passing the time.

You shift uncomfortably in the passenger seat of your mom’s Ford Festiva. You can feel the familiar sensation of your stomach so empty it draws into itself, as if it could climb up your spinal column and disappear. It’s not that you want to starve yourself, you’re not one of those girls. Though you’re skinny, parts of your body are still soft and yielding. You’ve never felt the desire to whittle yourself down to an object made of sharp angles and parallel lines. You’ve never had the luxury of turning down food. You wonder how your mom thinks you feed yourself while you’re at school, or when you get home and she’s still at work, but you know it’s a trick question: she doesn’t think about it. Between working two jobs and dodging the bill collectors, she has other things on her mind. At least tonight, you’ll have a decent dinner.

Your father lives on the other side of town, in a narrow cinderblock building divided into four small apartments. His is full of old magazines and secondhand furniture. You don’t like going there. It’s a place of obligation, of biding your time and making awkward conversation and wondering how long before you can leave. Not how you would have chosen to spend your birthday, but nobody asked you. As your mom pulls onto the thin strip of gravel in front of his apartment, you try to put on a happy face. You know it will make things easier. Also, he might give you money for your birthday. You don’t want to get your hopes up, but in the back of your mind, it’s there.

You stand behind your mother as she tries the screen door. It’s locked, so she knocks on the glass. From inside, sounds of movement followed by a loud thump. She knocks again, and a moment later your father appears. You watch him fiddle with the lock. His hair has been cut very short since you last saw him. It makes him look older than you remember. When you come inside, he locks the door behind you and pulls you into a clumsy embrace. Your stomach drops as you register the smell of beer and sour sweat.

“Happy birthday, kiddo,” he slurs.

You pull away from him, avoiding his eyes as you look around his living room. On his shelves, the same old pictures of you as a kid. If you go back far enough, there must have been good times. Then again, you aren’t smiling in any of them.

“You want a beer? Shot of tequila?” he asks.

“She’s sixteen, not twenty-one,” your mother says.

“She looks pretty grown up to me.”

“I’m good,” you say. “I’m pretty hungry, actually. Maybe we should go ahead and leave?”

“Maybe we should go ahead and leave?” His voice goes high and shrill as he mimics you. He laughs but no one else does, and his face twists into a scowl. “Alright, hold your horses,” he mutters. “Give me a goddamn minute here.”

Your mother is already sitting on his lumpy blue couch, so you sit down beside her. You watch as your father lowers himself unsteadily into his recliner. Next to the chair his cowboy boots stand askew, shiny leather the color of whiskey. You watch him pick one up and stick his foot out in front of him. A cold sense of dread is overtaking you, telling you to avert your eyes, but you can’t look away. He aims for the boot and misses, his foot falling through the air and landing with a dull thud. He swears under his breath and lifts his foot, tries and misses once more.

You try to catch your mother’s eye, but she won’t look at you. Her eyes are glued to the carpet, and that’s when you know. With perfect certainty you can see how the night will play out. People staring as your father keeps drinking, getting louder and sloppier and meaner the whole time. You want someone to save you, but you know better than anyone that there are no saviors here. You want your mother to stand up and say you’re leaving. You want your father to be a different person. You want a lot of things, and none of them are happening tonight.

You feel like you’re moving underwater as you make your way to the door. The silence rings in your ears while you struggle with the locks, until you’re released at last into the still heat of the early evening. You lean against the car staring at the pink and orange sky. You tell yourself that someday you will be somewhere else, and none of this will matter. You will be a different person with a different life. Like a river, time will sweep you up and carry you away.

Your mother comes out of the apartment, and you both get in the car. She sits there with her hands on the wheel.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she says finally. “What do you say we go home and order some pizza?”

You shrug. Your stomach feels cold, but you’re not hungry anymore.

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SARAH BRADLEY — Sarah is a Best of the Net nominee and an alumna of the American Short Fiction workshop; her stories have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Phoebe, 34 Orchard, HAD, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. She lives in Austin, where she’s working on a novel. Find her at www.sarahvbradley.com or @sarahbooradley.

Art by SANDY LITTLE — Sandy is a South African-born, UK-based visual artist and illustrator whose practice is rooted in drawing and digital art. She completed her Honours degree in Fine Art at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein in 2012, where she specialised in both traditional and digital mediums. Sandy has worked as an arts and design lecturer for the last 13 years thereafter she committed to becoming a full time artist and freelancer. Little can be found on Instagram under the handle AngryLittleCrayon where she shares her art and music from her band Big Fright.