Free Small Beneath the Sky by Lorna Crozier Page B

1658: Lovelace, Lucasta, Toad and Spider. The speckl’d Toad... Defies his foe with a fell Spit.
    My friend’s brother, who was in grade 12 when I was in grade 10, took me aside at the Teen Town dance one Friday night. He was still as skinny as a little kid, and he wore a dumb-looking wool hat even though it was summer. There was something he had to tell me, but I had to promise not to get mad. It was a trick, he said, he and his friend Jimmy used to play on us. In winter they’d slobber on the branch of a tree. If it was cold enough, and they got the angle right, their saliva froze before it could hit the ground, forming a row of thin icicles. They’d wait for me and my friend to come up the alley on our way to school. “You were always giggling and chattering,” he said, “we could hear you half a block away.” He and Jimmy would act nice. They’d break the glass sticks from the branch and offer us the best ones, long and glittering in their hands. We’d lick the pointed ends and then put them in our mouths. Now I understood why the boys danced around us as we sucked the ice, why they laughed and punched each other in the arm, laughed so hard they doubled over and hugged themselves, hugged themselves to keep their secret from spilling out.
    spit , sb., saliva, spittle; a clot of this. See also cuckoo-spit, frog spit.
    The practical uses of human spit: To hold a kiss curl in place, to shine a shoe, to express disgust, to remove a smear of mascara, to lubricate, to seal an envelope, to slicken the lips for a photograph, to defog a scuba-diving mask, to test the hotness of an iron, to clear the throat, to turn a dull stone to jade, to determine the direction of the wind, to moisten a wad of gum or a plug of tobacco, to turn a page, to clean a face. “Wait,” she would say when I was halfway out the door. “Let me look at you.” Always she’d find something, lick her finger and rub at a spot on my cheek or chin. I’d wiggle free of her hands and walk from the house, marked with the snail-slide of my mother’s fingers, slick tattoos telling my tribe and lineage, my face shining with the signs she drew to place me in the world.

light years
    T HE SUMMER we were eleven, almost every evening after supper, Lynda and I would jive in her basement to Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel.” The glossy 45 spun on her portable record player, which you opened and closed with two brass snaps like the ones on a suitcase meant to travel far. When it was time to leave, I ran the four houses from Lynda’s place to mine, then paused, shaking, scared to go down the six steep steps that cut through the lilac bushes leaning in on either side, the brittle hands of branches reaching out. There were no streetlights, no porch light over the door, and the curtains were closed. If I shouted no one would hear.
    Sometimes Lynda snuck out her back door, sprinted ahead of me, then leapt from behind the hollyhocks and caraganas just past her house to call out, “Scaredy-cat!” My mother thought my terror came from Lynda’s teasing or from the homeless men who lived in the Salvation Army house one block down, but none of them were out after the evening meal, and in the day they looked as harmless as old forgotten uncles who’d wandered off the farm and spent their hours looking for the road back to Cabri or Success or Antelope.
    I didn’t tell anyone the fear had arrived the first time I saw the stars, really saw them, looking down hard-edged and blank. When I was little, I loved to hold their gaze. Every Sunday, on our drive home from my grandparents’ farm, I’d lie in the front seat with my head on Mom’s lap, my feet on Dad’s legs below the steering wheel. If it was winter it would be dark outside, the stars drilling their distance through the windshield and into the small place warmed by my parents and the heat blowing from the vents below the