On the train tracks Love and I sat together watching the endless horizon. The planks were warm from the beating sun. On one side of the tracks was a brick factory and on the other was the dump. At night my mother and I took our garbage in a wheelbarrow and dragged it a few blocks there, past house after house. There was an occasional dog bark. If it was a full moon we never went. Mother was afraid we would be seen and get caught.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“There it is. Eternity. Out there,” she’d say and look with amazement. We’d pick up a few rocks, throw them back and forth, and strike them against the steel tracks. It was on one of the planks that she took a knife from the garbage and carved “Love loves Miso” on it. I was only eight and she was nineteen.
She told me all about Miso as we walked from the tracks to the cemetery. She liked looking at the tombstones, especially of the ones who died younger than her. “Look here, Tamara Zimkovic, 1951-1974. I wonder how she did it?”
The last night I saw Love was in our churchyard on a bench. She wanted to go inside but said that this was a place she was afraid of. I told her that I had been baptized there and it wasn’t as scary as it looked from the outside. That’s when she told me that the church would one day consider her evil. Evil like the brick factory that took all the happy faces away from the people. She told me her Miso was getting married. And that she had met his new wife and she couldn’t stand her even though she had pretty hair and smiled at her. She would be taking him away from her and she missed him so much she just wanted to die.
My mother and all the townspeople spoke of the funeral and suicide for months. Love’s mother sat vigil by her grave every day. One day my mother and I took a walk in daylight to visit Love’s grave. At her grave I started to play, jumping back and forth across the fresh mound. Sometimes I missed and fell down with my bum in the dirt. And I got up again and stole fresh flowers from the other graves and put them on hers.
