WHAT THEY CAN’T SEE by Jen Knox

Mom wears orange and smiles at people who thank her, smiles at people who yell at her, and smiles at the man who will soon rob her. Everyone near Mom wears yellow or orange and has matching ball caps striped with white, which makes them visible to my wolves.

Most people have trouble believing they’re there. The wolves are invisible to them, but they see us. They see oranges and yellows best. Browns and blues are night to them, like the deep part of a cave where bats live. My wolves have lavender eyes that glow when they are upset; when they do that, they can see everything.

“Ben, eat your food,” Grandma says.

Grandma is from New Orleans, and she says she’ll take me there one day. She doesn’t look up when she speaks because she can see me. I am one of the few people to know that she can see through the top of her head. She’s working a puzzle that uses words and numbers that make her memory strong. I watch her the same way I watch Mom when she sits after work by the computer and rubs the back of her neck until it’s red. She talks about bills like monsters that might decide to eat our home or car, but I know bills are just numbers and words, too.

The wolves are running fast. They know what’s coming. I reach in my meal bag for the plastic that, if I ate a few more meals, would fit together with other pieces and make a whole toy. A truck. It is so silly that I can’t just have the toy. It’s all plastic. I’m taking soft plastic off hard plastic to find the small dump truck butt that only has back wheels and can’t move. I toss it in the trash behind our booth.

“Ben! Why did you do that?” Grandma asks.

“Sorry.” I push my face against the glass of the window, pretending I am a puffer fish, which is the coolest kind of fish in existence, and I watch the wolves lick their paws in the parking lot. I squint, tilt my head, and blink my eyes like my dog. The wolves look back, squinting, tilting their heads, and blinking their eyes. My mirrors. A few run around, streams of light like sabers, day-glow reflections like eels and jellyfish and tropical Kool-Aid flavors but they stop.

My teeth hurt when I hear a bang. I call to the wolves while a man begins yelling. 

“Be still,” Grandma says. Her teeth are grinding, and I wonder what she’s thinking.

The man’s voice is deep and rattles. He is dressed in all black and may not be visible to the wolves, so I direct them with my eyes. The man is pointing a gun at my mother as she collects green bills from the register. The good monsters. Mom bites her bottom lip, the way she used to when Dad was around. The wolves tried to eat my father, tearing him down after he threw a chair across the room that almost hit me. They will take this man, too.

The gun looks heavy, and it points at Mom. I am no dummy, I have seen a gun on TV, but it looks bigger in person. I close my eyes and squeeze as hard as I can. I call on the wolves. They can morph into protectors: officers, firefighters, strong people who help people every day. The wolves know what’s going on.

My skin prickles like I just touched the magnetic thing at the science center. My eyes pop out like a cartoon. My pupils are expanding. What if I have to save Mom?

“Hurry,” the man says. He has something black but see-through on his head; it squishes his nose to his face. I stand in my booth and call him. “Get away from my mom!”

Grandma grabs my ankle and pulls me down. “Shut. Your. Mouth.”

“A hero knows when to shut up,” another man growls at me, and his voice is rough enough to tear a hole in my courage. I feel like a boy again as my butt hits the orange booth seat, and I can see the man’s gun is pressed closer to Mom’s head. He has orange shoe bottoms and orange laces.

A skinny girl with lavender eyes winks at me. The man who whisper-growled tackles the man with the gun; two orange tennis shoes leave the floor as a real bullet fires at the ceiling. Others, wolves in disguise, pile on top of the man. The man with the gun is flattened when the police arrive with handcuffs. I imagine him in stripes, hands gripping bars, a cartoon face, and this makes me smile.

Mom is released from work for a few days, but she gets a lot of free food from the restaurant. We get a new meal every day. I have enough plastic to make a truck now, but I’m no longer interested.

“I’m getting sick of this stuff,” Mom says as she hands me my fish combo. The fries are extra crispy today, and I am off school. She is looking at jobs online, sighing, and I am at the window licking the salt off my fingers. I will work one day. Maybe I’ll drive a truck or sell food like Mom, and I will give her my paychecks. My paychecks will eat the bills and help me to visit New Orleans with Grandma.

I watch the wolves and wonder if I will become one of them. I worry they are hungry. They need to eat.  

Mom asks what I’m looking at, and I say, “Nothing.” She wouldn’t believe me.

“Go on and play,” she says.

The door sticks, and I have to pull real hard. It’s broken like the dishwasher and our kitchen table. I toss tiny pieces of crispy fries into the grass, hoping it’s enough.

Jen Knox is the author of Chaos Magic Kallisto Gaia Press) and We Arrive Uninvited (Steel Toe Books Prize Winner). She is an educator and the founder of Unleash Creatives. Find her at www.jenknox.net