Based on the song "Life on Mars" by David Bowie...
Someone is killing girls in the little town of Nowhere, South Dakota and they all look like Fiona Mars.
Fiona has a secret she can't quite remember. A secret her father, the Sheriff, is trying hard...
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"Dad," I said.
"Fiona." He said it Fee-o-nAH. He liked to put my name through a juice squeeze when a point was moot and the conversation was over. Mine usually were. And it always was in four minutes flat.
I wrapped the coated phone cord around my finger until the tip paled yellower than the aged linoleum under my bare feet.
Month two of Life After Mom, I stopped calling his desk to ask when he'd come home. Then, the daughters of Nowhere South Dakota started turning up in dumpsters and behind trees with their necks strangled and he really never came home. If he did, I never saw him.
I'd called now because "hey, did you know there are veins under my skin the size of train tunnels?" and I wanted to dig them out to hear them echo. I wanted him to tell me no.
"Fiona."
(Fee-o-nAH.)
I was wasting his time.
Gee, sorry Dad, but I noticed those trains are running late, I need to find them, help. "See you when I see you," I said.
And hung up.
When you get the yen to hurt yourself: Tear up a phone book instead. That's the advice the grief counselor gave our school when we lost Busy. But where we lived, where I lived, there weren't that many pages.
So when I got that yen, I just didn't do the goddamn dishes.
Here's why:
I couldn't never make my dad stay on the phone, see, so I left the dirty dishes out. In the sink. On the counter. Spread across the waxy table top as if the soup bowls might catch a better signal than the antenna on the roof. It was my way of finding evidence of a life other than mine. A life that crawled the kitchen at two in the morning, frying eggs and leaving the blood to harden on the spatula. A life that went weeks without seeing his daughter, not once. Overnight dishes multiplied. Crumbs doubled and tripled until we weren't just feeding ourselves, and when I slunk down the stairs on a Sunday, like that day, I'd see the week-long castle we'd built and felt less alone.
Funny word, yen.
On that morning, the morning the fourth dead girl was found—the morning I read the headlines and called him for help with my itchy veins—it was mid-summer. I was in the kitchen with the undone dishes, sweating in my cotton shorts and braless in my handmade tank top. Mice performed on the counter: tiptoeing on the high-wire edge to nibble the toast from Wednesday. A swollen black fly hummed along, building suspense as it darted from one jaundice blood smear to another. A breeze tattooed the lintel with the loose porch door.
I was supposed to clean. That's what I did. Disassemble the scene, let it bloom again next week. Mom wasn't around to clean up the mess, anymore. Not since we asked her to clean up mine and she screamed "No!" in our faces. But that Sunday I didn't want to.
Cos you see, they'd found her on the highway, rolled out in a ditch.
I walked away from the phone. Pulled on my scabbed combat boots, and snatched an oversized flannel from the coat closet.
I've since wondered (in the movie theater, in the backseat of an NPD cruiser) how things might have been if I'd decided to stay home that Sunday and cleaned like I should have, instead of driving myself and my Christ foul mood to Rick's Roadhouse on the interstate.
