I flip the visor and stare at myself in the tiny, smudge stained mirror trying to think of words. Conversation. Something to say. For several moments there is nothing, just the scrape of her tongue, and the soft exhale of breath that comes between licks. Then I open my mouth:

"What radio station do you like? I don’t suppose you like NPR, I don’t suppose you know what NPR is. What’s your name? You’ve got some, uh, chocolate on your… right… there…"

I reach across the seat, vinyl creaking beneath me, and press my thumb into the corner of her mouth, into the tiny dimple her plump little cheeks make. She doesn’t flinch, or cringe or blink. She has these massive malted milk eyeballs that stare right through me.

"My name is Jack. I’m Jack. Do you like your ice cream? Moose Tracks are my favorite, what’s yours?"

I’m guessing she’s eight. Eight or nine. Her blue dress is faded, and the pattern is checkered, wrought with tiny yellow sunflowers in no particular mathematical sequence. She has on tiny pink glitter gel sandals, and they’re so filthy that the Barbie doll magic of them is defiled. They’re the kind of shoe you find on a playground in the middle of the nite, buried beneath the wood shavings in the monkey bar box. I know, because I’ve been there, I’ve found them.

I scan the radio. Some college station, something I can ignore. She rocks her left leg back and forth to a non existent beat. She’s jiving to a badly scripted Nature Club commercial. The hair on her head is as light and fine as the dusting on her arms, on her calves. Her skin is dark. She wraps her fingers around the remainder of sticky sugar cone, and her fists close like a monkey.

 

 

"What’s your name?"

"Mrarrr, "mumbled against the crunch of sugar cone.

"Swallow honey. It’s rude to talk with food in your mouth."

 

 

A lump appears in the hollow tan throat. She audibly smacks her lips together. They’re outlined in a rim of black and white candy coat.

 

 

"Marie."

 

 

"Hello Marie, I’m Jack… I said that. I told you that already. Marie." I repeat her name like a mantra. The sugar cone is gone and her grimy monkey paws make sick sucking sounds on the vinyl seat. I reach across from her, my arm brushing her shoulder, her scent obstructing my nostrils, and I pull tissues from the glove box.

 

 

"Here. Clean up. You’ll leave little sticky smears on the seat."

We spend a moment in silence, staring at one another while she resists the tissues.

 

 

"All right, Marie, you stay dirty. I don’t care. I bet your mama cared if you were dirty, but I don’t care. Fuck it. I’ll get dirty too." I flip the lid on the ashtray, shove my finger inside. My middle finger, and raise it to her lined in grey smear. She cracks a smile, and her tongue travels to the corner of her mouth and pulls away a spot of chocolate.

 

 

"O. So you know what this means?" I say, and wave the righteous finger back and forth.

A tiny giggle erupts from the place inside her chest.

"Who taught you that?"

 

 

She’s silent. Her breath is raspy, I imagine she has a cold. I imagine the coating of milk and sugar insider her throat can’t help. What a horrible start. I’m a horrible…. Whatever… I think I’m being. Fuck.

"Do you know why I took you? Do you know why Marie?" Nothing. Empty eyes. No response. No wonder or fear.

"Oh, judging from your silence, from the forlorn look on your face," I say as I adjust the rearview mirror and push the car out onto the road, "I’d say that you don’t know, and truthfully I don’t know either…"

She drags her lazy eyes across the busy street. Even her blinks are lethargic. I realize she’s humming something almost inaudible. It’s the National Anthem. She’s tapping her grimy pink gelly foot to the botch play of the National Anthem in the back of her head. I continue:

 

 

"…I am Baal..

I am Godot.

I am the bird down in Birdland.

 

 

"I am the American dream, and I must be."

 

 

"You're crazy," she giggles.

I smile. "That too."

 

 

I realize while sneaking glimpses of her at stop signs and red lights that she is a miniature version of a woman. The pockmarked and dingy white lace at the nape of her neck scoops down low, it reveals a tan expanse of skin where her cleavage would some day be. She has a definite shape to her legs, behind their mosquito bites.

"Marie, I know you hear stories about bad men who buy little kids ice cream and take them away, and do bad things to them. I'm not one of those men. I promise you."

She nods slowly but her mouth gapes, and her jaw looks a little too loose on her face. Is my Marie an invalid? Did I steal this creature of brown skin and lace clothes and candy scent only to find that she's mentally retarded?

 

 

No.

 

 

She shifts again, and pulls her feet onto the seat. A little person. A living doll, capable of monstorizing my fingers as they encircle her ankle, swell on the hot flesh and push her legs down.

 

 

"Don't put your feet on the seats. You'll get them dirty."

I watch her nose wrinkle from the corner of my eye.

 

 

"All right. Fine, Marie. Put your feet on the seat. Go ahead. Be crazy. Be wild. Take off your seatbelt while you’re at it. That’s right. Let’s break the law. Let’s tempt the fates. Let’s push all the buttons. I mean, we’ve gone this far already, we might as well let all hell break loose, because there’s no going on back."

She is staring at me, wide-eyed. I’ve fallen forward into her face, and so I sit back, pinkened. Embarrassed. . I haven't been this harsh in a very long time.. And she's only a child. A child. She can't understand. Not yet. Composing myself, clearing my throat, I sigh.

 

 

We sit in silence for a while, my breathing slowing, pulse slowing, and then she squirms,

"I gotta pee."

O good god.

 

 

"Now? O, yeah sure. I mean its perfectly acceptable, you are a human being and these things do happen." My fingers drum the steering wheel, thinking, plotting, scheming. The sun is slowly dragging itself into the west, and the horizon begins to vomit those militant grey clouds along the tree tops, along the backdrops of fast food restaurants and insurance agencies. There is a giant neon hotdog lifted into the air, its insides punctured by the flickering silver of a fork. "Bi Dogs" in bubbly red, the G is burnt out. I’ve never been here. They’ve never seen me. My daughter and I would like to use your restroom, Ooh and maybe try someone of those jalapeno popper things….

"So, do you do this on your own? Are you old enough? I mean, you don’t need help or anything, do you?"

She scrapes her finger nails over the broken pink skin of a mosquito bite on her inner thigh. "We go to the boys," she says, "You’re a boy."

 

 

"Honey, I’m a man. Please," and I circle the car to let her out on the other side.

 

 

She holds out her hand, and I take it in mine. For a moment I’m lead like a blind man through the door. I don’t accept the shrill clink of the bell above my head, or the "Hey guys" from the shaggy haired kid behind the counter. My little brown bird pads her dirty feet across the dirty floor and pulls us into the restrooms. Through the door with the tiny stick figure in a suit. She enters a stall and climbs up on the white toilet before my legs twist me around, and I’m facing the wall.

 

 

"Can you please close the door? Were you born in a goddamn barn?"

A little motorboat begins.

 

 

"I can’t reach…" she mumbles but her voice is drowned out in the echo of liquid off the walls. It gets louder and louder, and I begin to imagine it like a sled of bells, coming ever closer, ready to pummel me into the ground. I can hear her little feet kicking back and forth on the porcelain base of the toilet. She’s pumping her feet in an excited rythmn with the tiny mechanical motor within her, and slowly, ever so slowly it dies down.

I catch myself in the mirror. Brown hair, soft lips, a bit of sagging skin beneath the eyes. The eyes, becoming something/someone they’ve never been before. I press my hands into the wet, sticky edge of the sink and loom in on myself in the mirror. This was not me, this is not me. How had I found myself locked in some preternatural courtship with a child? I was done for. They would surely find me and use me as the basis for their definition of evil. Would my Marie’s father seek me out, would he break my skin and pull my heart out to show the world what it really was? Dark, and dank, and without remorse.

 

 

Her hands closed around my pant leg, and pulled. Much, much too close.

"Excuse me," she said, "I need to wash my hands."

 

 

It was true. I saw when she held them out to me like a gypsy child. My form was so gargantuan, so monstrous as it towered over her. I bent down and slipped my hands around the tiny waist, and pressed my body into her from behind, as I lifted her sink level. She squirmed beneath me, pumping soap, scrubbing suds in the friction of her palms, rinsing and rinsing and rinsing. This heated little sac of skin and meat functioned like a human, like a woman.

 

 

"Okay Jack…" she said, "Okay. All done."

"Yes," I told her, "yes, all done…"

 

 

I held her there, pinned beneath the sinks edge and my torso. Our eyes locked in the mirror. For the first time, for the first moment since I scooped her up and away from that terrible woman who’d left her for a screaming match on her cell phone, for the first time I caught a glimpse of fear.

 

 

My fingers tightened about the tiny waist. Ivory spires cinching faded blue gingham.

"Ow. You’re hurting me," she began to wiggle in my grip.

 

 

"Marie," I said, "Marie…." With my face in her hair, and the scent of dirty and flowers and her squirming warmth before me, "Marie you go get a booth in the back of the store. You go sit down, and I’ll be out soon, and we’ll have all the ice cream and hotdogs and candy you can eat until you projectile vomit. I promise honey, I promise."

 

 

And I put her down. I put her down, and I watched her eyebrows knit in confusion.

"Go get a seat."

And she did.

 

 

Seconds later I found myself behind the wheel of the car, keys in hand, sanity somewhat intact. The sun was skirting the treetops as I slid out of the parking lot, and watched "Bi Dogs" neon sign shrink smaller and smaller in my rear view mirror.

The back of her head bobbed in the window of the restaurant. I bet she was humming. I bet she was pumping her plump little legs. I bet she wanted Moose Tracks.

 

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