By Isadora Dean
Kenny was born in a broken bathtub in a spectacular failure of a waterbirth where no water was to be found. The water company had shut it off. Woosh! Out of the warm womb and into the loving embrace of dirty porcelain.
A detestable creature from the moment he was born – came out seven weeks late. Agony for his mother, I’ll tell you that – and didn’t she blame it on him for the little time she had left. Oh yes, she did. He took to the world like a stone to a lake.
Did you know that his second-grade teacher quit? Ran out of the classroom three minutes after snack break. A lonely chalk ‘s’ left on the black board for a lesson that wouldn’t get taught and a middle-aged woman speedwalking to her Toyota Camry. Twenty years teaching, then Kenny comes along. Up and moved. Became a florist in Newcastle. Now wears ankle length paisley skirts and band shirts to work now that smell like incense and career defeat at the hands of a seven-year-old.
Each year her class was nicknamed after a different flower – 01’ were the sunflowers, 02’ the dandelions, 03’ was the year of the carnation. She handmade tiny white flower pins for the class to wear on their neatly ironed lapels.
Kenny never was a flower sort of child. Found the pin a year and a half later pressed right through the snout of a bloated rat under the house.
By ninth grade his educational record was a patchwork of fourteen schools, thirteen expulsions, and seven teachers who decided on late career changes to jobs like cab driver, army recruit, or Adderall dealer.
When high school came along, don’t you know it, Kenny got himself a girl. Brought her round to family dinner at McDonalds with sharp pleats in her school skirt and a collar ironed flat as sheet metal. He was mad on her. Wasn’t he a wreck when she went and kissed Will Doyle under the lights on the footy field – those yellow ones that light up as the game starts. A mad wreck.
Some people say you can’t predict the shape of a man from the shape of the child. Dead wrong for Kenny.
He didn’t graduate. Fourteen expulsions. His mother wouldn’t have been happy. He used to wear her silver wedding band on a chain round his neck every day. Gave it to that girl. I did say he was mad on her. Never got it back, I don’t think.
After the whole high school affair, the girls plastered to his arm always did have that stiff pleated style. Never lasted long though. New one every few weeks.
He told them about the schools and the teachers, and his poor mum and they fancied him all the more. Tragedy is quite the aphrodisiac. Sometimes you could catch them squinting, blurring their eyes until he almost looked like James Dean. How tragic – they thought. Kenny – the poor boy from a poor family with his poor dead mum. Bad boy – Kenny. How romantic, they thought. What good ‘good girls’ making bad boy Kenny so much better.
What good, neat girls they all were – and good, neat girls have parents that look round for them. Good, neat girls are noticed when they start disappearing. Vanishing into thin air with Kenny left where they should have been, holding their purse and shrugging.
To Kenny’s credit, he kept it up for a while. Became the unlucky man whose girlfriends kept on disappearing. Until one of his girls had her pleated skirts ironed by a maid and a father who owned some Apple shares. I have never once seen devotion to a cause rival that of policemen to attractive upper-middle-class girls who go missing.
Apparently, his girls had been going to the basement. He put eight of them down there – if you can believe. Piled on top of each other. He made mannequins of them. Police found them all gnarled and barely human . In the end it was life for Kenny.
Stone – meet lake.
