Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

can’t tell why I did.
    I pull the stopper in the sink. The water circles the drain in a soapy funnel I wish I could stand inside, everything pulled round me, pulling tighter and tighter. That’s how it feels when someone stares. People stare at you like you’re food on a plate, and you can feel the power of how bad they want something. They stare at me one way, keep staring, but they stare at Termite and look away. Termite never stares. That’s because he can’t, Nonie would say, no mystery there. It’s true his eyes move because his muscles are quiet and don’t work, but I think he knows he can’t want things, not hard, so hard, the way people do. He does things another way. He doesn’t do anything, Nonie would say. I don’t believe her.
    He hurts her more than he hurts me. That’s why she says what she does.
    I wash out the sink and rinse my hands. It’s time to get Termite. That alley cat is sitting in front of his chair again, watching the plastic move. That cat scares me. Really it just sits there, looking at him with its yellow eyes, and sometimes it gets down in a crouch. I see that cat at the rail yard when I take Termite to see the trains. I’ve seen it for years. The stray cats slink around by themselves and they’re always alone. Low to the ground, afraid of the dog packs probably. I tell Termite the cats eat the rats and the dogs eat the cats, just like “Three Blind Mice.” Then he’ll do the first lines of the rhyme in sounds and I’ll have trouble getting him to stop. He remembers cadences of songs and rhymes, like he recognizes sounds, not words. He doesn’t need words. He needs his strip of blue, and the space under the rail bridge by the river. He needs to see the river while the train roars over top. He needs the rail yard.
    He loves going there in the wagon when the sun glints on the rails. The tracks go off in every direction and the trains screech and hoot and begin to move, so slow we can keep pace just beside them. That close, the noise takes over, shakes in the ground. Termite sits up straighter and gets real still. He likes vibrations so big they get inside him. He’s so pure he’s filled up more than I could ever be, more than I am, running and pulling the wagon. Afterward, when I’m out of breath, on my knees and leaning back against the gritty wheels, I feel drenched, soaked, washed away, and the train is still blaring in a fade that streaks away from us, a fierce line hanging on. The yard is two blocks west so we hear the freight trains every morning, sounding at the crossing, and Termite makes sure I know how wrong it is he can’t get what he wants. He doesn’t say anything, only uses his elbows to sit up a little straighter and turn toward the sound, tilts his head, his ear like an open cup. There: the 6:52. I crank the window open a little wider to hear the fast bellow, the hush and hollow of it. Even from far away, it makes a quiet in the air it rips. It pours through. I’ll give him a moment. I’ll give him one more moment.
    N onie hates the idea of blue cake, she says it looks like something old and spoiled, too old to eat, though it’s light and delicate and flavored with anise. But Termite likes it, and he likes pink cake that tastes of almond, and mostly he likes me putting the batter in different bowls, holding them in the crook of his arm while I bend over him, stirring. I tell him how fast a few drops of color land dense as tinted black and turn the mix pastel. I make three thin layers, pale blue and pink and yellow, and I put three pans in to bake, shut the door of the oven fast to pretend I’m not making everything still hotter.
    “Hot as Hades today,” I tell Termite, and I move his chair so he gets the hint of breath from the window. The radio cord still reaches and he turns the knob with his wrist, slow or fast, like a safecracker, like there’s some sense to the sounds, the static and the interrupted news.
    “Don’t try talking to me in radio,”