i. 

We patterned the sky with our spit, bellies down on the linoleum floor, to the rhythm of the metal-bladed 1970s ceiling fan. Z and I learned how to pray under an olive tree on De Soto Ave. Z talked as if she was teething her lips into shreds like orange peels –opening her mouth was playing a game of tag with the alphabet. Her whole body was covered in tiny black hairs like feathers, which is how I knew that one day she would fly off the roof of a school or the monkey bars or a bell tower. How I knew that she would turn herself into a martyr for the sky. Z learned my language with her bird-bone fingers scraping hearts in my trace-paper skin. She told me we were young and greedy for touch by licking salt and wild honey from my hair, that we were shotgun gods purged on the philosophy of being full. I lied saying I was never full, always saving room for a dessert. 

ii.

We took the bus with fingerprint hand-sweat windows that smelled like sun-rotted fruit and baby powder. She giggled at the man leafing through a newspaper on the seat in front of ours, then her whisper stole the breath from my lungs “his cough sounded like two droplets of water hitting a hot pan,” and the bus driver jerked our stomachs out from our bodies. It was a 115-degree summer in the valley, our shirts plastered to our shoulder blades and we were afraid our feet would burrow roots in the soil, searching the geography of our city for any trace of water. I confided that I’d never be holy because I’d let a boy kiss me under the playground slide at recess and his spit spattered my cheeks and tasted metallic like pennies. But Z said when she reincarnated as an angel she’d sew her body to mine and we’d deceive any guard at the gates of heaven. Or my aunt (a predator by season) would confuse us for mallards and rifle down our bird-bodies, catching us in the crossfire of a survival mission. 

iii.

We made drum beats with our boots at the laundromat, played slip n slide on spilled detergent and bleach, letting it burn up our heads. Z told me if I climbed into the dryer I would time travel, like the Delorean from Back To the Future, a movie she watched as a bonding experiment with her father. I bent my body backwards till my spine curled like a chain of pearls and I renamed the machinery into a chrysalis. But Z forgot to watch, distracted by the neighborhood boys doing bike tricks on the pavement. So I spoke in blood bubbles, told my body to reform from bone shrapnel, joined a confessional with a nameless god. When she finally looked at me, her eyes grazed my form like it was a puzzle and she was impatient. She told me offhandedly that my limbs were made of rubber, that she could bend them like putty and turn me into any shape she wanted. My first word for body translated to plum-bruised forearms and chlorinated hair –it was a way to centralize my hurt. Z’s mother was a failed acupuncturist/homeopathic doctor who needled my body back into form the time I had an allergic reaction to sleeping in a bed that wasn’t mine. Then again when I revolted against my skin and grew mountain size welts, painting my naked back into a topographic landscape. Held my face together when I chipped a tooth trying to eat the crystal angel on the mantelpiece, thinking I’d wake up with wings and Z would teach me how to splay my feathers on the clouds and then I could finally fly.