Configuration

“Holy God,” we say. Lory has crinkled all of the wire hangers into a meaningless Venn diagram on the wall. Lory tries to wink and tit in some sort of meaningful way, but she is covered in flowers and downy hair, and it all feels like too much to be honest. Lory, standing on top of the covers, like some conquest, Lory hears out of one ear and pouts against her shallow chin. “Lory,” we say. “Go ahead, explain it.” But Lory knows the rules. Lory presses the meaning deep inside her and reaches with a blunt thumb between her teeth to dig something out. “Come in,” she says. “Take a look.” And that’s all we do. We whisper, and Lory beams proudly and stirs within herself. We coo a bit and think that we’ll forget this by tomorrow, but a handful of tomorrows come and this image still pops up like floaters in our vision.

The next time we see Lory, Tuck is disappearing behind her, doing that thing where you stand behind someone and stick you arms under their armpits so it looks like the person in front has four arms. We wait for them to get still before we laugh, and their elbows are waving and tangling again, and then we have to fly our hands to our faces, because the image of those wire hangers returns. Lory, with her piggish eyes, looks down, and sees all four of her arms, and tells us twice about her confusion headaches. Tuck sends out a stray hum behind her, to remind her he’s there, and her arms get heavy and trap his hands right where they are. The two of them stand for hours there, free and yet tied. We leave and go to the mall, where there are salesgirls and gold and the slow pace of age. There are hollow prayers in the air that look just like window shopping. We hop around in our slender skins and ogle the sagging, elderly patrons on the benches. We stick out like sore thumbs, or the old people do. Whichever it is, someone doesn’t fit in.