stealth
adjective

1. (chiefly of aircraft) designed in accordance with technology that makes detection by radar or sonar difficult.

“You came out of nowhere,” is the first thing I said to her.
She laughed, “Sorry, I tend to do that.”
I stood frozen. I hated getting caught talking to myself.  I dropped the clump of grass and leaf at the same time. Without anything in my hand, I felt exposed. Her eyes followed the ground where I dropped everything.
“What are you doing?” she said
“I’m just playing,” she made me nervous.
She had long dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt like me and white sneakers, kind of dirty like me, and she kind of flittered, even while standing there.
“Can I play too?”
“Well, I was playing kind of like an alone game.”

“Oh,” she looked at the clump of grass I dropped and back up at me.
“Well…I know a not alone game we can play,” she started.
You’re probably thinking, as an adult, that playing with a stranger is off limits, but she was a girl, my age. There was no threat detected. I was embarrassed for sure but up for adventure at any given moment.
“And you love games.”
“Oh,” I emphasized. “When I was young, I RULED games.” I used my thumb to count, “I either had to win, had to make it up so the game was in my favor to start, or had to change the rules in the middle so even if the game was falling out of my favor, I could circle back to winner.”
“Sounds like you had to win.”

“I had to prove might.”
He nodded. The fire was warm. I had heard no more alarms or sirens. It wasn’t that I was comfortable with him, it’s that I knew he was engaged. It was 7:30 pm, black as night, cold as death, bleak as life and I felt the energy in the room shift from one of us could cut a knife to you have a better truth coming.

I spent a lot of time in the ditch with Leana, and later in my adolescence, with others from the neighborhood. Leana and I were best friends, inseparable, sisters. We fought also but we were real friends. I called her almost every day or she called me; to either talk or hang out. But even as a child, aloneness recharged me. The dichotomy of introvert and extrovert has always fascinated me as I no longer believe in those terms. Movement, moods, waves come over people and they must go with them so they aren’t dragged under. When I need people, I need people. When I need rest and quiet, I need that. Even as a child, entertaining grew exhausting. I was the “funny” one and the adventurer. My legacy was that I’d perform any dare, including truth. In games, sometimes truth is the hardest. I was always game. They used to dare me to dress up, go ask for non existent car parts at the nearby Advanced Auto parts.
“I’m deadpan,” I lower my face.
I was always chosen to prank stores because I never laughed, could make up things on the spot and had the properness of a real charm school girl.
“Thank you for your time,” I would say leaving the store, Leana in tears, the clerks baffled by, not the Halloween costumes in April, but the boldness of the child’s flirtation with the staff.
I would be the one to knock on the new boy’s door to introduce him to the block, the one to steal the Christmas decorations off of the old woman’s door step, the one to confess my undying love for the new boy first, the one to race him, the one to hit him, the one to run across the highway before the cars. I was the one who told the jokes and picked up bugs. I was voted “funniest girl” in my sixth grade class. Gregarious, I talked to everyone. Clamorous, I was the one to get the entire class in trouble often.
“We are waiting for you, Ava,” Mrs. Heinz said to the entire fifth grade class as I made faces at my friend Parres, unaware that The Oregon Trail game had started again.
It was always like that. I was mildly disruptive but entertaining enough to go undetected.
“I wouldn’t really call you stealth. You just yelled across the entire school bus that you were in love with Jon and were going to marry him”
I flipped my hair.
“I was being rooooommaaaaantic, Leana. Of course, I’m not going to marry him. I am gonna marry Dennis Rogers. Where’d you learn the word stealth?”
I looked up the word stealth that day:
stealth

noun

1. cautious and surreptitious action or movement.

I looked up surreptitious:
sur·rep·ti·tious

/ˌsərəpˈtiSHəs/

adjective

1. kept secret, especially because it would not be approved of.

“Sir ep tish is.”
I closed the dictionary.
“Umm, I am like so sir ep tisshh isss.”
“What’s that?”
Suddenly, I turned to see a young girl in the ditch with me. It was Friday, 

I had just announced my love for Jon on the school bus and looked up the definition of stealth to later impress Leana with a bigger word: surreptitious and was practicing privately in the ditch near her house. I wasn’t sure what she was asking about; the leaf in my hand that I was twirling to remain calm, the grass in the other that I had plucked for no reason or my exxaggerated use of the word surreptitious that I was practicing to impress everyone on Monday.

“A centipede?”
“Yep! But it was like, one of those smaller ones, not a real centipede.”
He made kind of a pursed lip motion as if he was trying to understand but also waiting for me to move on.
“Well it tasted like dirt and I was disappointed. It was the last time I ate bugs, definitely. It was not the last time I hurt them”
Sometimes I fed worms to Mike but what I preferred was to cut them up in pieces on the picnic table outside. In my house, it was easy to get away with things. You see, I made good grades, straight As and because of that I usually ran amok quietly and privately the rest of the time. A well studied, polite young girl can go on undetected in her duplicity. I was raised in the south, not sure if I said that,
“You do have a bit of a drawl.’
He cut in.
“Ah yes, some can detect, others cannot.
Well, yes I was raised in the south and I always said “thank you” and “please,” and as I grew, “excuse me” and “so sorry to intrude.” Politeness is a way to glide through the world. Something I still cherish. But I was curious about the micro world spending hours watching nature and animal documentaries by myself or with my mother. I read lot of nature books, specifically fascinated with dinosaurs. i enjoyed watching the seasons and learning how to predict weather trends, catching on early when monsoon season was, when hurricane season started and the difference in two. My favorite subject was Math and Science. I was a boyish girl. I was nine years old.
I cut the worms up with scissors or whatever I found, I am sure. Generally unsupervised, no fear of reproach in my actions. My brother mostly minded his business and also taught me how to spray paint my name into the garage so not the best influence either. I don’t think we even got in trouble for it. My dad was more concerned with wasting paint but I shook the can above them anyway.
“I’m gonna paint you silver and your friend gold,” I told the two helpless worms on the table.
I wanted to see how long it would take them to die or if they could exist like a metallic zebra underground. Memory is fuzzy but I recall an increase in movement and then a flatness taking over them. I felt guilty.
“I didn’t think you would actually die or I would have never played Sparkle Shine with you,” I buried them with a forlorn, detached reverence.
I know it was detached because I continued to cut them up for a while, longer that day, maybe another year.
“If you cut at it’s heart, it will survive.’
“I think that’s wrong, Ava, you have to cut it clean in half.”
“Ummm,” and I pointed to myself, “I do this all the time. You cut them and they wriggle and then you wish them luck and throw them in the ground.”
“It sounds you like killed them.”
I gasped.
“Are you joking? I make them stronger. Now they are many.”
I was at school in the lunch line with my best school friend, Leah, not Leana, Leah. They have similar names. The truth was, a lot of them died for my enjoyment but I didn’t want them to. I was pretty typical: salted a few slugs, stepped on a few beetles, chopped up a few worms and fed crickets to my turtle, but I was no sadist. Curious. I loved bugs. You could not convince me I was not in tune with them. They always found me.
Because of my creepy tendencies and proclivity for dirt, my girl friends weren’t always around for my escapades. Nine years old is the time in life when you’re understanding that you’re going to be an adult one day but it’s so far away that it bares no consequence to you. What you did at nine was inconsequential to who you were going to become. We were all a bit supercilious, me being the worst, and unafraid of walking the block, going into the ditch that separated our neighborhood from the “bad neighborhood.”
“There were projects, a church, it was a black neighborhood.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I don’t think this now. I am speaking from my nine year old to paint the picture of how I got here.”
“I am listening to you, Ava.”
And I felt that.

When I was young, I loved bugs. I loved dirt simply because bugs living in them. I used to pick up the bricks that lined the garage to find worms half in the dirt and pull them out with my fingers. If I couldn’t get them out, I’d move on to the rolly polies; watch them curl up in my palm and then sometimes I’d leave them somewhere else. Sometimes I put them right back where I found them but sometimes I’d put them somewhere else and see if they can find their way back.  I watched them like that, a teasing giant, careful not to step on them, careful not to squash them, just watch them.
The worms were a different story. After it rained, I went out and collected them in clumps. They were easier to find in mud and rain.
“I am saving them from being dried up when the sun comes back out.”
“No, you’re a weirdo who plays with bugs,” my brother said.
He sort of kept an eye on me as we rounded the block and also let me pick through the fallen pine needles for trinkets to pocket; stones, straws, rubber bands.  I was very into picking things up and feeling them, twisting them, moving them and seeing what sensation came over my body as a result. But with worms it was different.
“You cannot control worms.”
“Eww Ava no one wants to.”
My friend Leana, nor any of my other friends, enjoyed this game or supported this habit. On muddy days, I played alone, my brother nearby often to watch me. I was little in stature and rarely aware of my surroundings. He also liked going out after the rain. On his bike, he would whizz by, circle the block a few times, try to scare me on my hunt for the “best” thing which could be anything really. But worms I loved. I knew they’d be underneath the bricks, but I also knew they were now scattered all over the neighborhood. I picked them up just to feel the way they slid and wriggled over my hand. I moved them from concrete to grass to watch them dive into the ground, unphased by the dirt. The dirt was slick now. Easy squirming in after the rain.
I loved watching them do that; come out of the ground go back into the grain.
“Amazing,” I said to no one.
No one shared this passion. The only time Alex, that’s my brother, enjoyed it is when I fed them to our alligator snapping turtle, Michaelangelo, my brother named him after the Ninja Turtles. I loved catching crickets in my palm and throwing them in the tank or bringing worms in, maybe a tiny centipede. Catching crickets was a feat and I was proud of my abilities.
“You gotta make them jump right towards you, Alex.”
“No, that’s gross, you do it. I’ll watch.”
“Ok.”
I preferred being the best at everything anyway. I enjoyed being Queen of the Bugs. I enjoyed watch Mike eat them.
“I ate one once,” I looked up at him to make sure he was still listening.
“A cricket?”
I looked back down at the floor and smiled. How preposterous.
“No….guess.”
“Oh you sure love games.”
“A worm?”
“Yuck,” I stuck my tongue. “It helps if you listen.’
“I am listening.”
“One more guess and you’re close.”
We held gaze. Good. I could see him relax into something on edge about the crafty strange to something more intrigued by her innocence and playful manner. I could see him visibly relax in the armchair as I pressed both palms to the floor, finding ground in the middle of the giant storm outside his doors.

she smiled and invited me to play.

Surely you stay my certain own, you stay
My you. All honest, lofty as a cloud.
Surely I could come now and ding you high,
As mine as you ever were; should not be awed.
Surely you word would pop as insolent
As always: “Why, of course I love you, dear.”
Your gaze, surely, ungauzed as I could want.
Your touches, that never were careful, what they were.
Surely — But I am very off from that.
From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrow.
That was my  naiveté and my faith.
This morning men deliver wounds and death.
They will deliver and wounds tomorrow.
And I doubt. You. Or a violet.

–Love Note 1: Surely by Gwendolyn Brooks

“I eat in pink restaurants which are better for the skin. Yellow turns you yellow. I actually spend time thinking about this. Vanity is becoming a nuisance; I can see why women give it up eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

–margaret atwood

“Do not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure.”–Charlie Kaufman

I felt her thin fingers caress my neck, leaving me tingling.
And then her two palms took hold of my throat, squeezing, leaving me breathless.

(two sentence horror stories: the woman who walked out of walls)

datura moon is a game of witches.

there’s nothing scarier than twelve powers at your bedside blowing ardent lullabies and telling you “it’s ok, it’s alright, there’s only one snake in the bunch.”