Madeline Cash is the editor of Forever Mag. Her short story collection, Earth Angel, is forthcoming from CLASH Books in April.
The workers ate their lunches as the Catholic high school let out across the street. They whistled at the girls in pleated skirts and polos who walked by. The girls grouped tighter together, their plaid disguising them like zebra stripes. One dawdled behind the rest, and he could feel her watching him. As she walked over, the other workers clucked and hollered.
“What’s in your sandwich?” she asked him.
The waist of her skirt had been rolled so the hem brushed the tops of her knees.
“Sardines.”
He removed the top layer of bread to show her the four perpendicular fish.
“You eat the bones and everything?”
“Yes.”
“Can I try?”
He handed her the sandwich. She took a bite and squinted.
She said, “Do you know what you’re building here?”
“Parking lot.”
“For the school,” she said. “It’s like you’re building it for me.”
Then she skipped off to catch the bus with her friends. Her keys jingled from where they hung on her backpack.
“Get it, bro,” the workers called.
. . .
He walked to work in the dark. Past saints in glass cases with fruit offerings at their feet. Past a barefoot man sleeping against a cellphone store. Girls in burkas pushing burlap bags of jasmine rice. Mexican men selling fruit out of carts. Past women listening to Haitian radio and hanging laundry on lines. He clocked in at dawn and unloaded piping from the truck. The men he worked with were older than him. They spoke Spanish and Polish and played cards after work. He walked home in the dark. His room was divided by an accordion wall behind which a Pakistani man mumbled in his sleep.
When he got home that night, he listened to kids lighting fireworks outside and counted his money. The next day a worker cut his thumb off with the table saw and the site closed early. He was frustrated to lose the day’s work.
. . .
The schoolgirl came up to him again the following afternoon and sat down. This time she said nothing and rifled through her knapsack. She pulled out a sardine sandwich and took a bite. He laughed at her.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Luka.”
“Where are you from?”
“Croatia.”
She nodded. The other girls called for her and she stood up. He sat at eye-level with her knees, fine blonde hair on each.
“What time do you get off?”
. . .
She was waiting for him when he clocked out, no longer in her uniform but instead, slim-fitting jeans and a sweater with her hair pulled back into twin braids.
“I’m Abigail by the way,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, pointing to her necklace which read “Abigail” in silver script.
They walked for a block, past a man selling bouquets of roses, a bucket drummer, a window of chickens strung up by their feet.
“I don’t know this neighborhood well,” she said.
They walked by a sign reading LIVE NUDE GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS above a dark bar. A pawn shop. An apothecary with bins of dried crickets out front. An emaciated cat eyeing them. They passed through a park with wood chips instead of grass. Several children’s birthday parties were wrapping up. Brazilian men offered face painting. They displayed pictures of wolves and dragons and Hello Kitty. She seemed intrigued by this.
“No,” Luka insisted.
He searched his mind for the words.
“Face AIDS.”
“Face AIDS?”
She offered him her phone and he typed into the translator.
“Oh! Scabies.”
“Very dirty.”
Luka stopped at a falafel stand where he parted with seven dollars to buy her a kabob. They sat on the curb.
“Beautiful,” he said, pointing to her ring.
“It’s a mood ring. It changes color depending on what mood I’m in.”
“How?”
“Magic.”
“No magic.”
“Yes magic!”
“You crazy.”
Abigail licked the grease from her fingers and unzipped her bag. She pulled out a glass bottle, took a swig, then handed it to Luka. The bottle was shaped like a woman’s torso.
“Loša djevojčica.”
“What’s that mean?”
She hit a vape pen and exhaled a blue cloud.
“Bad little girl.”
. . .
It started to rain so Luka took her to his apartment. He set her Uggs on the radiator like rotisserie chickens. The room smelled like mildew and curry. The Pakistani man was gone and his bed vacant. Abigail took a faded pencil case out of her knapsack and pulled out an X-acto knife, then her yearbook. She traced the outline of her school photo with the knife, removed it from the book, and handed it to Luka. He put it in the photo sleeve of his wallet, replacing a Dunkin’ Donuts punch card.
. . .
Luka laid concrete for eleven hours. He coughed little clouds of gray debris like an old furnace. One of the guys dropped a joint into the pour and it became part of the foundation. Part of her parking lot. At home he found that the accordion wall was parted and the other half of the room was now occupied by a one-armed man in combat pants. He was smoking a cigarette and offered one to Luka who accepted. What remained of the man’s arm was tattooed with busty mermaids, caressing his stump. He’d hung a picture of Selena Gomez on the wall.
. . .
“Let’s go to my house,” she said, so he followed her.
They took a bus to the north end of the South Bay, a neighborhood where Luka had never been. Her room could swallow his in triplicate. She had shelves of soccer trophies and magazines and purple bedding with tomorrow’s uniform pressed and laid out. She flopped down on the bed and beckoned for him to join her.
She told him about a girl at school who loved rabbits, so her father bought her the world’s largest rabbit. It was monstrous, the size of a great dane. It cost him a million dollars. She was terrified of the thing. They kept it in a stable down the street. Luka said they should have eaten it and Abigail laughed.
She told him that she had these night terrors so her parents sent her to a shrink and the shrink gave her these pills and she poured some out into her hand to show him. They were purple like her mood ring. Like her bedspread. Luka said he’d never been to therapy. His family worked hard and put little emphasis on mental health. But he’d once taken a restorative mineral bath.
She read his tarot, delicately placing ornate cards over one another. When she pulled The Devil, he swept the deck off the bed and called her a gypsy. She draped herself over him. He lifted her up and down like a dumbbell.
“Too skinny,” he said. “Like starving orphan.”
“How long have you been here?” she asked him.
“Two months.”
“And you like working construction?”
“S’okay.”
“I want to be an actress.”
“You talking to me.”
“Exactly.”
She stroked his head. Traced the bridge of his nose with her finger.
“Do you have Instagram?”
“No phone.”
. . .
Then Abigail’s dad opened the door holding a golf club. He chased Luka into the street. He said he’d seen Luka on the doorbell camera. That if he came around again he’d splatter his skull across the pavement. Abigail didn’t pass the site again for a few days.
. . .
The one-armed vet was listening to dubstep and doing sit-ups when Luka got home. He counted his money in the bathroom down the hall. When he returned, the vet was making instant noodles on a hot plate.
“Where ya been, man?”
Luka shrugged. He looked over the vet’s things. Some girlie magazines and prescription bottles. His pills were purple like Abigail’s.
“You got a girl?”
He smiled. Luka handed him Abigail’s school photo.
“She’s something.” The vet opened his own velcro wallet. “I got a girl back home, too.”
He handed Luka a picture of a border collie.
. . .
At lunch he waited for her on the Catholic school steps but the nuns shooed him away. After work Abigail waited for him at the site. A woman in a halter top and heels with a large animal tattoo stood outside smoking and Abigail stood with her, hitting her vape pen, until Luka came out. He put his hardhat on her head.
“I have something for you.”
She handed Luka an iPhone 7.
“You crazy!”
They walked to the shoreline where black water lapped at the heels of graffitied shipping containers. Signs warned against swimming. The area was contaminated by runoff from the oil refinery, Abigail explained. She took a photo of Luka against the sunset.
“I’m making you an Instagram. What’s your full name?”
“Luka Ćiro Blažević.”
“How do you spell that?”
The temperature dipped with the sun and Luka wrapped Abigail in his jacket. She felt like nothing. He wanted to feed her a million-dollar rabbit.
. . .
She walked to the bus stop. Past telephone poles with flyers for babysitters, cello lessons, and Christian-science church groups. Past women in athleisure pushing double-decker strollers. A park with kids doing live-action roleplay, mauling each other with dull weapons. At school she went to the front office and said she needed to change her elective from acting to Croatian. The woman at the front desk told her it was too late in the term to change her elective, and were it not, the school did not offer Croatian. She could take Spanish next semester.
Her third-period teacher announced a canned food drive for the needy. One girl remarked that they should just donate everything to Abigail’s boyfriend. Abigail hit the girl in the face with the back of her hand and was suspended for three days. She texted Luka that she would not be able to see him that night.
“What happen?”
“I got in a fight.”
“Loša djevojčica.”
. . .
But she couldn’t sleep. Climbing out of the kitchen window subverted the doorbell camera. She ran across the damp lawn, setting off the neighbor’s motion-sensored lights, dodging sprinklers and bougainvillea. They met at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s. Luka asked her what her night terrors were about. She said she couldn’t remember. She sipped a strawberry shake and traced patterns in the condensation on the cup’s side.
He told her that his family used to fish outside Dubrovnik and his grandparents would make Pijani šaran and gradele and mostaccioli with salmon. The water was clear and blue, not like here. She asked him if he missed it and he said very much. She said hang on and went up to the counter. It was so abrupt, he worried he’d offended her.
“Maybe you can find things here that you like, too.”
She brought him a Filet-O-Fish.
. . .
The night was cold against Abigail’s stockings. He chided her for not dressing warmer. They walked into an old church with topiary angels out front. An AA meeting gathered in the basement and Abigail took two cookies from their table. Mary was depicted in various stages of grief around the altar. They curled up together in a confessional and ate the alcoholics’ cookies. She asked if Luka went to church back home. He said they had the most beautiful churches she’d ever seen.
“What happens when the parking lot is done?” she asked.
Luka thought. Mary grieved. The alcoholics said one day at a time, one day at a time. They heard sirens passing outside. Luka imagined the police of this neighborhood charging him, all armed with golf clubs. Abigail pressed against his chest where she eventually fell asleep.
They woke up in the light of the booth’s latticed screen.
“What happens,” she picked up where she’d left off, “when you finish building the parking lot?”
Luke smiled at her. “Build another.”
