RE, page 2
Went to college to teach, but it seemed too difficult. Tried to become a fantasy writer instead, and published two books of a trilogy before they terminated my contract. Then, I just gave up on writing. Worked at the safety plant to pay the bills ‘til I was out of debt from school, which took… most of my goddamned life. Julia killed herself. And then, I became a county clerk in Town Hall office for years… and that was it. Tabitha held a blank stare, feeling hollow and disappointed. Not much of a fucking life.
She shook her head, turning to watch the profile of her father’s face as he drove. Dad, you look so young. I have to watch you die all over again. And Mom. I don’t know if I can do this.
“Almost home, Pumpkin,” he said, misreading her concern. He pulled past a familiar liquor store, and his pickup truck made a turn down the hill, passing the sign for the Lower Park. There had been an Upper Park at one point, mobile homes filled with retirees and the elderly, but it had been bulldozed and replaced with convenience stores, a gas station, and parking lots. The already low property value of the Lower Park neighborhood plummeted even further as a result, more or less hitting rock bottom in their area. The truck lurched over the speedbumps ever-present throughout the narrow lanes of the park—a measure to keep reckless and impatient drivers from speeding through the confined spaces—and the familiar sight of their trailer came into view.
Her childhood home; a sunbaked and graying double-wide tucked into the rows of mobile homes. It actually looked less dirty and decrepit than she recalled. There were no gaps in the paneled skirting around their trailer right now, and the ugly hedge hadn’t grown in yet either. The tree she’d remembered seeing last, back when she moved out in her late twenties, was still a scrawny little thing, not much more than a thin sapling. Uncle Danny’s car wasn’t there either—in her past life, it had been a permanent fixture of their yard for most of her time there, up on cinder blocks and wrapped in a faded brown tarp. Wonder when he’ll be dropping THAT little beauty off, so that he can go be in prison for the rest of his life.
“Are you okay?” her father asked once again as the truck finally rumbled to a stop in front of their trailer. He gave her another look, and she guiltily stopped peering around at everything as though seeing it for the first time.
“I—” She froze when she met his eyes. —Never appreciated how much I actually missed you. I don’t want to lie to you, Daddy, and I don’t think I can pretend to be a child. Wouldn’t even know where to start. “I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” he murmured doubtfully, reaching over to tousle her hair. He hadn’t done that in—well, it certainly felt like forty years. Tabitha fought to keep her eyes from watering again.
* * *
Her homecoming was appalling, as she’d expected. Her mother, Mrs. Shannon Moore, was still fat in a fresh, plump way, only just beginning to bulge at the seams. Nothing like the bloated and gigantic obese mass she would become in a few years. Tabitha pondered what the most tactful way to ask if she’d been diagnosed with diabetes yet was. Still, her mother’s knee problems didn’t appear to have surfaced yet, and she was getting around under her own power right now, at least. Even if she didn’t get out of her seat to welcome her daughter home from the hospital.
The trailer’s interior was cut off from outside sunlight by both curtains and blankets over the windows, dimly lit instead by the yellow light of incandescent bulbs. It was cluttered with mismatched, tacky, and worn-out furniture, and it smelled. Body odor and greasy cooking. The carpet hadn’t met a vacuum cleaner in well over a year, black mold was accumulating in the corners of the ceiling, and dirty dishes were everywhere.
Tabitha begged off dinner on the fabricated excuse of a nausea that was becoming very real, but rigid family tradition dictated she sit with them at the table while they ate all the same. Baked beans and toasted bread—why toasted bread?—was the fine meal that she passed up.
Nothing about the intermittent silence and small talk seemed real to her. Her stomach turned itself into knots as she warily eyed her surroundings in the trailer, because everything was half-familiar and half-horrifying. She could never determine which was specifically which either.
“Hope you’ve learned yer lesson ‘bout those trampoline jumpers.” Mrs. Moore finally shook her head. “Yer lucky you didn’t break yer neck.”
“Yes, Mother.” Tabitha nodded politely.
“Yes, Mother?” the woman asked incredulously. She glared daggers at Tabitha, as if warning her daughter not to sass her.
“Yes,” Tabitha repeated dispassionately. What, did I normally say… ‘Yes, Momma?’ I may have never amounted to much, but I WAS an English major. I’m not going to be able to keep up some ignorant kid charade anyways. I have too many other things to deal with right now.
“I’ve learned my lesson. I wasn’t being sufficiently responsible at that time, and the consequences of my actions were unexpectedly severe. In the future, I will mindfully endeavor toward more appropriate courses of action.”
“No need for attitude, Tabitha Ann Moore,” Mrs. Moore warned with a laugh, forking more baked beans into her mouth.
Tabitha found that her mother smelled. Mrs. Moore was gross, disgustingly fat, and petty, and Tabitha was beginning to hate her all over again. Mom, when you died, I came to terms with everything I could, and buried the rest. So that I could just focus on the GOOD memories, and leave it at that. Why am I being made to go through this again?
“Kids’re getting smarter every day,” Mr. Moore joked, not looking up from his own plate. “Sweetie’s so smart, she broke their brain-scannin’ machine. Guess she was clean off the charts.” No one had actually suspected anything of that sort. From what Tabitha had overheard, everyone was blaming the MRI’s apparent failure on an electrical fault that came about from a surge during the power outage.
“Shame they never get any more respectful.” Mrs. Moore frowned, pursing her lips.
With the wisdom and grace sixty years had given her, Tabitha kept silent, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. She stared instead at the yellowing floral wallpaper, and patiently endured the sounds of her parents eating.
Afterwards, she found her cramped bedroom was stuffy and strange-smelling, and she could only resign herself to accepting that some of the body odor this trailer was rank with belonged to her previous self. There was a brief but potent mixture of nostalgia at seeing all of her long-lost childhood toys, and repulsion, in really realizing her past living conditions. Taking a deep breath and steeling her nerves, she finally turned to face the mirror sitting atop her dresser.
She’d studiously avoided her reflection on the doors out of St. Juarez, and the windows and mirrors of her father’s truck. She feared the impact this sight was going to have on her psyche, and most of all… she simply didn’t want to believe. Because she already knew what she would find. She’d spent most of her life detesting and struggling with this.
A hefty thirteen-year-old girl scowled back at her in the mirror. Pudgy enough, at that age, to already have a protruding stomach paunch. Despite having just started puberty and growing taller, her breasts looked like fat, not like boob. They were the unappealing fleshy contours a fat man would have, moobs, not feminine assets she could push together to form cleavage. Her neck was fat, her chin—fat, fat cheeks, her entire face was wreathed in it, swaddled in layers of fat. She clutched the edges of the counter and dry-heaved. She pressed her eyes shut and took a deep breath.
Okay. Okay. It’s not that bad. I knew I had a complex about my weight and my appearance, I just… well, nothing was ever going to make me ready for this all over again. Never thought I’d miss the OLD LADY physique.
It wasn’t until her late fifties that she would drop all of the weight, mostly because of stomach ulcers that turned into a cancer scare. Not being able to eat certain foods without a trip to the hospital had finally transformed her into a rather normal-looking, even scrawny, gray-haired old woman. Her diet drastically changed, and on the orders of the nutritionist on her insurance, she enrolled in the local Taekwondo program for basic daily exercise. And that was when I became a martial arts grandmaster…
…Hah, yeah right, as if. Another prime example of her mediocrity. As the only elderly woman in that Taekwondo school, she’d been exempted from actual sparring, and never laid a finger on anyone. More often than not, she spent the classes corralling the younger ones, or resigning herself to practicing warm-ups, stretches, stances, and exercises with some of the girls who hated fighting. In the end, Tabitha felt about as qualified in Taekwondo as an amateur yoga instructor.
Although, I wonder if… Out of a nascent whispering of curiosity, Tabitha carefully—carefully set her feet into a forward stance. Then, she shifted into a back stance. Dropping into a horse-riding stance, rising up into a tiger stance. Crossing her legs in a forward cross stance. Twisting into a backward cross stance. So, I CAN use future knowledge in my past body. At least that means those forty-seven years weren’t some… absurd hallucination. Actually, these moves seem kind of… easy?
She let herself fall forwards in the scant space of her room, keeping her back rigid and catching herself with only her palms. It was a loud crash and an ugly struggle, but she just barely kept her nose from violently meeting the floor—and even managed to do a single proper pushup, before her protesting arms seemed turned to jelly and gave out on her.
Okay… doing that was dumb. But also completely impossible, back when I was sixty. Guess it can be nice to be young. I could… actually get in shape. Not in my room, maybe. I could practice katas out in the yard?
I don’t… HAVE to be fat, this time. I’m already disgusted at the thought of eating fattening garbage like my parents always did, here. I… know how to cook now. I can actually JOG now that I’m young again, basically whenever I want to! High school starts in, what, August? September? I can be in AMAZING shape by then! Everything can be different! All at once, the idea of changing her life began to brighten her perspective, illuminating all of the opportunities she’d been too distraught to see earlier. Her skillsets from the future may have seemed unimpressive then, but couldn’t she still apply them to the problems from her past? She’d had a lifetime to regret and dwell on all of them already, after all.
I can write my story all over again. GOBLINA, and GOBLIN PRINCESS. But with all the feedback and techniques I’ve learned since about the story structure and pacing. AND, I can get it out there and published before the market’s oversaturated this time. Tabitha thought, her mind racing. Julie… I can save Julie. I can fix things for her. Make everything right so that she never even THINKS about taking her own life. I can save Mom and Dad from themselves, somehow! I can… I can do ANYTHING.
As night descended on the aging and worn mobile home lots of the Lower Park, the bright, beautiful laughter of a young girl resounded from one of the compact little rooms within.
“I’m never going to be trailer trash again.”
2
CLEANING UP AND CLEARING OUT
Tabitha woke up early and full of energy, despite having skipped eating dinner last night. Her father was gone already, having left for work at five thirty, and her mother was unlikely to rouse for at least another hour, giving Tabitha free range to re-explore the place.
Last night, she’d slept in her underwear, having tossed yesterday’s clothes in the bathroom’s communal laundry hamper. She began her day by opening her dresser drawers and sorting everything she found into neat stacks. Several dozen articles of clothing were immediately discarded into a trash pile: socks with holes, shirts too discolored to wear, pants that were ripped along the inseam—who had bothered to wash and fold those?—trashy T-shirts that had their sleeves haphazardly removed, and similar pajama pants that had been cut into shorts.
Diligently trying on all of her remaining clothes, Tabitha was dismayed to find that less than a third of them fit—she didn’t even have a full week’s worth of clothing to wear. Luckily, her bras and underwear were the newest of the lot, and all correctly-sized, likely purchased to keep up with puberty. She dressed herself in a pair of sweatpants and an oversized shirt, then carefully folded and returned the clothing she would keep into their drawers.
The Moore family weren’t packrats like some of their neighbors, but they did seem to hoard things like bags. After a quick trip to the kitchen pantry, frowning at nearly everything she saw, she returned with two grocery bags to pack the clothes too small for her into.
They’ll tell me to hang on to them JUST IN CASE, because of all the little cousins who could grow into them, Tabitha grumbled to herself. As if any of them ever needed any more hand-me-downs. Need to convince them to take me to a thrift store so I can fix my wardrobe. Yesterday’s pair of jeans, several pairs of sweatpants, and what appears to be a single value pack of cotton shorts is NOT enough attire for a teenage girl. Now I remember why I used to wear the same clothes so many days in a row.
In the meantime, the scrunched-up wads of grocery bags were already spilling out the pantry door, so she collected them and made her way around the trailer, emptying out three small waste-cans into the grocery bags and then fitting one inside each as a liner. Why were we collecting these bags at all, if we weren’t going to use them…?
She managed to fill another entire bag with garbage she found simply strewn about the trailer, before it dawned on Tabitha that she was cleaning house. She paused, grimacing. Keeping a living area free of trash and clutter was second-nature, something she now did without thinking. Because it needs to be done. And, being surrounded with filth stresses me out. Might be a bit out of character to attempt doing ALL of the long-neglected household chores at once…
But what else can I do? She scowled, collecting dirty dishes and piling them in the sink. I can’t live like this.
Even after making a few trips to the bathroom hamper for the errant bits of clothing she found strewn in the corners of the living room, the place still looked… well, dirty. She pulled down all the blankets covering the windows, releasing clouds of dust to hang in the air just as dawn light was beginning to stream through the windows. All of those blankets smelled and they needed washing, so she folded them and arranged them in a giant pile next to the hamper.
Okay. Carpet. Now that the room was properly lit up, it looked terrible, and after a cursory search, she discovered why the floor hadn’t been cleaned in ages. Their vacuum cleaner was outside, in the shed, caked in moldy dust and cobwebs—and it was old. A rather bulky independent canister-style motor and collecting bag, connected to the upright cleaner by an umbilical of electrical cord and ridged flexible hose.
Making three trips to carry the contraption and its attachments in and onto the kitchen tile, she then grabbed a bucket of water and one of the ripped socks she’d just thrown out and sat down to wipe the cleaner clean. The amount of time and effort she had to put into simple tasks like tidying up a room was beginning to seem absurd to her, but Tabitha gritted her teeth and fantasized about soon having a carpet clean enough to sprawl out upon.
The entire vacuum cleaner was a filthy mess, and the bag had never been changed whenever the thing was stored, so the contents inside had begun to rot. After a thorough scrubbing that turned the water in her bucket an unsettling shade of brown, she reassembled the thing and was ready to begin cleaning. Unfortunately, it was as loud as a leaf-blower, and Tabitha had only pushed and pulled the thing over three square feet of carpet when her mother stormed out of their bedroom, furious.
* * *
“Don’t know what you thought y’were tryin’ to butter us up for, doin’ all of this, but whatever it is—you ain’t gettin’ it.” Mrs. Shannon Moore frowned, blinking at the dishes all over the countertop. The drying rack had long since been filled, and the rest were being set to dry on a towel Tabitha had spread out. “How am I s’posed to eat breakfast?”
“With clean dishes,” Tabitha answered with a deadpan expression, and she drained the sink water. She’d been doing dishes for forty-five minutes. As absurd a concept as it was, all of the dishes had been dirty. It was apparently custom for dishes to only be cleaned directly before use, oftentimes only rinsed, and then set down wherever afterwards, dirty and forgotten until they were needed again.
There wasn’t even a place for the bowls, plates, and cups in the kitchen cabinet, a fact that managed to stun Tabitha. The cabinets were jam-packed with everything else under the sun, it seemed—flashlights without batteries, forgotten tools, empty tins, metal brackets, cheap Christmas decorations, and a dozen old plastic margarine containers, each filled with a mysterious assortment of rusting nails and screws.
“I’m going for a walk.” Tabitha sighed, wiping her hands dry on her shirt. Last night’s charged enthusiasm for tackling all of her problems in this new life head-on… was rapidly draining away as she realized that she’d be forced to fight for every inch to complete even what should have been basic tasks.
“A walk?” Her mother inspected one of the bowls. “Outside? And where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m just going in circles,” Tabitha said, wishing there was a way to explain the truth of her circumstances. “…Around the neighborhood. I just need to walk for a while, get some fresh air. After what happened yesterday, I really can’t handle being cooped up right now.”
She failed to put emotion into her voice like she’d intended, but her excuse seemed to hold up, and she was given permission to go outside. Which honestly surprised Tabitha, because it was still technically a school day—her mother would have had a fair argument to keep her from wandering about. If she even knows what day it is.
