A Field of Yellow Flowers

She moves back to her parents' house in mid-April and walks around in the late afternoons in nothing but a flimsy worn nightgown passed down from her grandmother to her mother to her. She sleeps until noon with her old teddy bears and a baby's blanket tucked around her on her old bed she has outgrown. She listens to jazz before drifting off to sleep and tucks her fingers between her knees to keep them warm. She locks her door and pretends not to be home when Father comes home for lunch and calls out to see if she's there.

A few weeks later the Thing arrives in a big brown cardboard box sealed with a thin layer of packing tape and a thicker layer of duct tape. Someone filled the box with the packing peanuts she loved to swim in as a child. Before rooting through the box for the Thing she picks up three pink peanuts and sticks them one by one onto her tongue, tastes the juices they emit as they melt into small gelatinous gobs. The Thing shifts beneath the peanuts and draws her attention. She didn't order the Thing; whoever sent it misspells her name and got her zip code wrong. It isn't until a month later that she realizes the label bears her school address and must have been forwarded. By then the Thing provides pleasant company, but at first it proves a nuisance.

Her parents refuse to inquire about the Thing, its origins and its purpose, and decide for the sake of their already frayed relationship with their daughter to accept it as a strange but welcome appendage of the family. She notices that they treat it like a member of the family and becomes jealous, and soon refuses to let them touch it. The Thing, she reminds them, belongs to her, and she is their daughter, and maybe if they acted like it such a Thing never would have happened to begin with.

She takes to sleeping with the Thing at night. She shows it how to lie down on the bed and laughs when they realize its feet extend further than hers off the bed's end. The Thing learns to laugh before it learns to sleep. That night it learns to wet the bed.

Mother nicknames the Thing "Ernie" because in her opinion, "Every Thing deserves a name." The daughter refuses to call it by this name. She smacks its hand and wags a finger in its face when it learns to say "Ernie." She treats the Thing to ice cream in the shopping center Downtown and blushes when patrons scream as the Thing emerges on the city streets. They call it "that Thing", and she does not correct it when it begins calling itself "Thathing." It suits it, she thinks, and ignores Father when he says it's cruel to confuse it. That night it learns to cry alone in the shower with the water running so no one hears.

The Thing learns to find flowers. He picks daisies and wild flowers. He plows the neighbor's garden of azaleas. He delivers a rose bush to her feet. He plucks handfuls of bright yellow flowers that make her sneeze; she calls them weeds and throws them in his face. He teaches himself to sneeze, and to stop finding her flowers. The Mother teaches him to arrange bouquets, but he teaches himself to devour the heads, the stems, the vases, and then there are no more flowers.

One night the Thing hides in her closet and locks itself in and refuses to answer when she calls for it. And that night it creeps out of hiding and jumps on her just before she falls asleep. That night it learns about pain. She beats the Thing with a shoe and screams when it grabs the shoe and her hand in its mouth and swallows the shoe whole before spitting her hand from its mouth covered in slobber and tiny threads of shoelace.

She finds a job at a local department store and sleeps with the night manager. She leaves her parents' home on Halloween and cringes as she moves her boxes into his home while children dressed as the Thing trick-or-treat under the light of jack-o-lanterns. They have a baby and name it Ernest. They are never married but pretend. Ernest cries in the middle of the night and clings to his mother's breast as she feeds him. The night manager sleeps with the employee of the month. She packs her things and Ernest and moves in with the Thing, who has found its own apartment in Center City. It proves a much better parent that the night manager; Ernest loves to cling and crawl in its hair. The Thing learns the word "Daddy."

Ernest grows like a tree without roots, and she teaches him what she knows. She teaches the Thing some things, too. She teaches it to say "No" to Ernest, to say "Ask your mother." She teaches the Thing to hug Ernest without breaking his ribs. The Thing teaches itself to kiss. She cringes when it insists on kissing Ernest on the cheek, the forehead. She learns things herself. She learns to remain silent when the Thing insists on kissing her in quite a different way.

One day the Thing leaves while Ernest plays with his mother in a field. She calls and calls for the Thing. She calls for "Thatthing." She calls for "Ernie." Ernest calls for "Daddy." But the Thing is nowhere to be found. It has learned to hide better than she has learned to seek. She gathers up her things and Ernest and gets in her car, drives home, checking the rearview mirror every so often. She learns to panic, only a little, when she checks the trunk and the Thing is not there. She learns she cannot sleep with the Thing's furry warmth beside her. She learns to cry in the shower with the water running so Ernest cannot hear. She learns she cannot pass a field of bright yellow flowers without weeping. And the Thing misses its first chance to learn of love.