Lovely Penguin

by marie gordon

Megan had a saying she loved to write on her hand in gel pen, “Fuck the world and kiss my ass.” I looked at the pink gel pen writing on her hand as we rode the bus to my house one day after school. She took the pen, grabbed a hold of my ten-year-old hand and wrote her saying. I looked at the glittering letters. “Fuck the world and kiss my ass.” I smiled and we laughed. We giggled. Because that’s what fourth graders do.

As far as I know, Megan and I had the dirtiest mouths of any elementary school girls I’ve ever met, but only around each other. As we approached my front door that day the two of us began frantically rubbing the tops of our hands with our palms, spitting and rubbing until the gel pen blurred into some incoherent pinkish smudge on our hands. We laughed.

Until I met Megan I thought I was the only girl who knew these words, these filthy words my mom had washed my mouth out with soap for saying. Megan and I found release in something so painless and yet so potent—cussing.

We crawled out the first floor window of her house at two in the morning. We scampered out to the barn barefoot in our pajamas and grabbed Megan’s horse “Blue” by its mane. From its stall we lead it outside, took running starts and leapt on Blue’s back. Blue would grunt under our weight. Megan was always the heavier of the two of us. Sometime we switched off, or if one fell the other kept riding. I remember the rain falling down, dripping off the roof of the barn and Megan and I at full canter quietly exclaiming, “God damn!” We giggled and let the rain come down on us. As we rode we would slander our parents, who were both divorced at the time. We would demean the purpose of life in general. And as Blue wore out, we would dismount and lead her back to her stall. We crawled back through the window and headed to the shower to clean the mud off.

Our favorite part of the evening began afterwards. Megan’s mom was a massage therapist and I learned from Meagan a few things about massage therapy. We took turns on each other. It was a release. The two of us spoke about things we never spoke about to anyone. We told each other the worst things we done. We told each other about what we thought of one another. We both determined that neither of us had it better than the other.

I can remember in her garage Megan had a huge box of individual packets of Halloween skittles. Those Skittles never ran out. We played basketball by her hoop, played teacher and classroom in her room and every time we went for Skittles they were there.

She had an old dog named Grey that she was always picking off fleas from. The dog looked about 20 years old, although I believe it was 10. Sometimes I helped Megan pick off Grey’s fleas. I felt sorry for the old dog. And I can remember the only time I met Megan’s father was because of Grey. The fleas kept getting worse as Grey aged and his arthritis was worse. Mr. Hart brought over a rifle and a shovel. I heard the gunshot and I remember feeling as if the world had flipped wrong side up my stomach got so queasy. Then I thought of Grey, laying there on the porch, too tired to keep fighting the infestation of fleas and bugs and I realized that he was decaying already.

After that day I realized something about Megan that I had never seen before. When she told me she understood why Grey had to be shot I was dumbfounded. But I knew she loved her dog, she loved it enough to have the mercy to call her father to come over and end its suffering. That’s when I knew Megan understood more about life than I could hope to in my immaturity. It wasn’t a façade anymore for Megan and me. We had friendship. I realize now our love of each other surmounted that of our overbearing lives at the time. We dumped our family turmoil into nights of horseback riding in the pouring rain and cussing, cussing like sailors never cussed, cursing like the words had as much significance as the inventions of Surge soda and quantum mechanics.

I think we took pain away from each other with our hands and our words. But when I remember seeing Megan, I remember sharing pain and as we shared, the pain weakened. We held on to each other and I learned what love really is. We loved each other enough to pick off the fleas together and to end each other’s suffering by doing the only thing we could do…

We took out our packs of gel pens and wrote on our hands, “Fuck the world and kiss my ass.”

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