Teapot Summer

Birthdays I remember the teapot summer. Thanks to Brenda I couldn’t forget if I wanted. I remember the day we found it I was strutting the center line on Main like a lunatic. Big-shouldered, daring cars to get past me. Drivers honked and flipped me off. I flipped them back, my tongue out. From the sidewalk, Shell and Lick begged me not to test the limits of my stupidity. I ignored them like I did most things back then. We’d been friends since elementary school, the three of us, so I should have known better, but that summer, the summer before junior year, I’d managed to convince myself they envied me.

            “No fun anymore,” I said. I walked from the hot street to the hot sidewalk and wiped my neck sweat. “What if I couldn’t afford shoes? Imagine the smell. Pavement cooking my feet.”

            Lick punched me in the hip. “Your new kicks not enough? Got to shit on mine too?” he said. He was short with baby-round cheeks, but his peeling skin and thin hair made him look older. An over-loved doll. His split-open shoes flapped against the sidewalk and flashed dirty socks.

            And I remember pretending my hip didn’t hurt. And looking to Shell for support but getting none.

            We walked into the shop for air conditioning. The shelves overflowed with junk. Electronics, Buddha statues, pocket watches, knitted caps. Sweat crusted onto our foreheads. No water fountain, so we were about to leave when Lick stopped and pointed at something. I followed his finger. Up on the highest shelf, sandwiched between a half-unfurled map of Moscow and a pair of yellow sneakers, was a teapot. Porcelain white, chipped handle, badly painted blue flowers, and a wrinkled paper sign dangling from its lid: Grants one wish per person. Say wish into spout. Made in Illinois.

            I bought it and threw in the yellow sneakers, too. When we were outside I draped the sneakers around Licks’ shoulders, the tied laces on his neck like a bow on an unwrapped gift.

            “I’m not your charity basket,” Lick said.

            I looked down at his shoes, sniffed the air. “You smell that?”

            “I smell an asshole,” Lick said. But he sat on the curb anyway and pulled off his old shoes, dirty socks too. Slowly, like a street performance. He slid the new sneakers over his bare feet.

            Something buzzed overhead. A drone maybe, or a beetle. I straightened my paper crown.  

            He said softly, “Thanks, Prince.”

            As usual, Shell kept quiet. Bent his long head to the sky.

            For an hour or two we ignored the possibilities waiting in the thrift store bag at my hip, and we walked around town like nothing would ever change. We punched and slapped and joked too loudly and left a trail of beef jerky wrappers in our wake as we strolled past the boarded-up pharmacy and the vape store and the gun store and the boarded-up floral shop and the tavern and the boarded-up barber shop and the boarded-up Mexican market and the boarded-up hardware store and some brown-leafed trees and some dried-up trees with no leaves at all.

            On any other day that summer, I might have chopped a branch or two as we walked, sent splinters flying into the street, scared birds into the sky. But the teapot had me feeling contemplative. Lick was asking Shell what he was going to wish for, and I was thinking: those dry branches are reaching toward me like tired hands. Like they want something. Like to bum a match.   

            I became Prince on my eighth. My mother had just moved us to town after becoming CEO of a nearby building company. She invited the whole neighborhood to my party. Probably just fishing for clients. That’s the cynic in me talking. When the time came for cake and gifts, a scabby kid with thin hair and stained clothes handed me a lumpy ring of construction paper and masking tape. A little stuck-on bow. “Happy birthday,” he said. After a beat, he lifted the strange object from my hands, set it on my head, licked his lips, and said, “See?” A crown, I realized. I couldn’t help but laugh. And we gave each other our nicknames, and the next day we went to each other’s houses, and that was that.

            At first kids made fun of me for wearing it. And I’d give them the finger and tell them all the things I’d done with their mothers. Which didn’t keep them from smacking the crown off my head or tossing it into trash bins, but everyone knows when you get bullied for something, you can’t stop or else the bully’s got you. I’d like to say I kept my crown because of loyalty and friendship. But I know it wasn’t always that. It was also stubbornness.

            As the weeks rolled by, taking it off felt stranger than leaving it on. Months passed, then years, and the crown became as much a part of me as my hair or skin. Kids at school forgot my real name, knew me only as Prince. I kept a roll of tape in my backpack to repair tears. When the tape turned brown and fell off, I used glue. Then paper clips, clothespins, cloth bandages, rubber bands, stickers, shoelaces, ribbons tied in little knots. Whatever broke could be repaired, and the repairs became part of the crown. 

            We grabbed lunch at Patty’s Patties. The A/C was out again. I bought us burgers and strawberry shakes and we sat by the window, where a light breeze diluted the smells of grease and coffee and body odor.

            We ripped our straw wrappers to different lengths and stuffed the pieces into my fist. Shell drew long, and I drew short.

            “But I shouldn’t go last,” I said. “I bought the thing.” 

            Shell blinked sleepily.

            “Remember what you did,” Lick said to me.

            He was talking about the time a few weeks earlier when I’d slammed the front door of his house to announce my arrival—something I’d been doing lately when I came over to his place; you can call it a tasteless joke about the way the walls would shake—and a photo of his dead mother fell and shattered. I paid to replace the frame with a custom one, heavy and gold, and Lick’s father seemed thankful, but Lick told me his dad secretly hated it. Called the new frame “grotesque.”

            So I dipped a fry into my shake and changed the subject, which I figured they’d figure for acquiescence. “I’ve got it,” I said to Shell. “You’re going to wish for gills so you can live in the ocean.”

            “I want—” Shell said.

            “No, wait—invisibility. Invisibility is so you.”

            “I want to get into Stanford,” Shell said, bun in his mouth.

            I flicked a strawberry-shake-tipped fry at him, but it missed and flew into the empty booth behind him.

            “How many times have you failed chemistry?” I said.

            “Like you’re some genius,” Lick said. “None of us are getting into college without dumb luck.” Then Lick rubbed Shell’s shoulders like he was Shell’s boxing manager before a fight. He chanted, “Stanford, Stanford.” Shell pulled the teapot out of the plastic bag and brought the spout so close to his mouth I wondered if he was going to eat it.

            And as if he’d been rehearsing, he said: “Dr. Karis Banfield in the admissions office at Stanford University in Stanford, California will call me tomorrow morning to offer me a full-ride scholarship to…” and he babbled on with loads of specifics. When he was done he set the teapot down and gulped his milkshake without a straw, straight from the glass. Shell stared out the open window, then down at the table. The table was plastic, condiment stained. When he looked up, he locked eyes with me and made a twisted-up face, like he was about to cry.

             Lick draped an arm around Shell’s bony shoulders. “What’s the matter buddy? Tomorrow might be the greatest day of your life.”

            Shell stayed quiet. I figured he was embarrassed. That it occurred to him it was silly, what we were doing—he’d just whispered his lifelong dreams into a six-dollar teapot like it was a good listener. But later, I’d wonder if he was scared he’d wasted it. That he’d spoken into the spout his parents’ wish, not his own.

            Either way. The next morning, gathered in my basement after a sleepover, the dawn shining down through the windows, Shell’s phone rang. He put the call on speaker, and with the three of us hunched over the phone, Dr. Karis Banfield delivered the news. Full ride, a year early. Just like he’d asked.

            And up until the day he died twelve years later—from one of those cancers, I’d heard, that had once been rare but was becoming less rare all the time—things seemed to be going well for him. High-up executive in solar. Happily married. The whole deal. Somewhere up north. A short life, but better than most.

            Now that we knew the teapot worked, Lick wanted time to think. In the meantime, he promised to hide the teapot in a rotted hole in the wall in his basement. 

            But later that week, Francesco Robinson showed up to school wobbling on freakishly long legs, smiling and ready for basketball tryouts.

            And Amanda Lyons was arrested after riding a woolly mammoth through downtown and knocking over street signs and cyclists and food carts before following the police’s orders to fall into their outstretched net. The mammoth was tranquilized and sent to a big-city zoo out west. 

            And Brett Jackson hooked up with none other than Carlos Fernandez, who everyone knew was way out of Brett’s league.

            And Ms. Franks, the AP Physics teacher, posted a long, cussword-laden open letter to Principal Beeman on Instagram.

            And Principal Beeman died suddenly of natural causes.

            And Julia Fringe, a freshman living with her grandmother in the trailer park south of town, sent a deposit to my mother’s company for a countryside custom build, a mansion overlooking the mountains.

            And Shell ran up and down the halls waving his Stanford acceptance letter in front of everyone he saw.   

            We sat on the floor of Lick’s bedroom, the teapot on the carpet in the middle. Three witches brewing magic. A water bottle I’d filled with tequila from my parents’ bar passed from hand to hand to ease the stress. Returned from its adventures, there were new stains on the teapot, and the chip on the handle had become a deep crack.

            “I was being democratic about it,” Lick said in his defense.

            Shell nodded understandingly.

            “Everyone’s happy,” Lick added.

            “Principal Beeman’s not happy,” I said. 

            “You mean the guy who turned our school library into a weight room?” Lick said. “Cry me a river.”

            Lick’s place was always scorching in summer. He’d propped his cracked window open with an old math textbook. A useless wind flowed through—the air was thick, chewy. Peels of yellowish-white paint dangled from Lick’s walls. Metallica posters, hand-me-downs from his father, hung for dear life to thumbtacks. His carpet, stained brown in patches, reeked of warm mold. 

            “If I lived here,” I said, “I’d run away.”

            “Then you wouldn’t live here,” Lick said. 

            Shell reached across the teapot to punch me in the shoulder. My crown toppled to the floor. I picked it up, inspected it for damage, and set it back on my head.

            “What’s your wish?” I said to Lick, rubbing my sore arm, giving Shell my best I-don’t-give-a-shit look. “You should wish for a new house. Or air conditioning. Or a pony. A pony’s so you.”

            Shell eyed me, his jaw drifting open like an alligator’s.

            The bedroom door opened and Lick’s father popped his head in. “Iced tea? Donuts?”

            “Privacy,” Lick said. “And a billion dollars if you got it.”

            “Ask me again tomorrow,” he said and closed the door.

            “Okay,” Lick said. He yanked a wad of paper from his sweaty pocket and unraveled it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and last night I told myself, hey, don’t overthink things, it’s not that complicated.” He studied his paper, licked his lips, and read aloud: “At eleven fifty-nine PM, on this Wednesday evening, August the twenty-eighth, two thousand and thirty eight, a huge suitcase will appear outside my window, and it will just be floating there, carried by lots of balloons, as many balloons as it takes to hold the suitcase all suspended in the air like that, and it will stay there until I can open the window and pull the suitcase into my not-sucky, as some would have you believe, bedroom, and after I set the suitcase on my bed and open it up, which I will be able to do with just a zipper and no combination lock needed or anything like that, inside the suitcase, there will be—”

            Mostly, I had been watching Shell’s face, which, as Shell listened to Lick read, had grown soft. Something like pride. A parent beaming at graduation.

            Then I noticed something else at the back of the room, behind Shell. At the top of Lick’s rusty trash can, half-buried under food containers and wadded tissues and crumpled paper, was a flash of familiar yellow. The sneakers I’d bought. And there was the price tag, still hanging from the laces.

            “Seabiscuit,” I said, ducking in close to the teapot spout. “Inside the suitcase will be Seabiscuit, the famous racehorse.” 

            Lick dropped his paper onto the carpet. We were quiet. I glanced down. At the bottom of the paper, below a note about small, unmarked bills, Lick had scrawled, a billion dollars to be shared equally with my dad who works too much and should relax now.

            I reached for the water bottle, tipped it back, and gathered with my tongue the last drops of warm tequila. The carpet swirled a little.  

            “I mean,” I said, “you can probably sell Seabiscuit for almost as much.”

            “Get out,” Shell said.

            I stood to leave, but Lick grabbed my jeans at the knee. “No. You’ve got to help us deal with this. We don’t know what’ll happen.”

            Shell gestured to the window and burped. “Seabiscuit won’t fit.”   

            “A Seabiscuit-sized suitcase won’t fit,” I said. 

            I went downstairs for donuts, and on the way to the kitchen I passed the photo of Lick’s dead mother. Shiny as ever, like nothing ever happened.

            “What are you boys up to?” Lick’s father asked while handing me a paper plate. With tongs, one by one, he assembled a tower of donuts.

            “Rock paper scissors, jigsaw puzzles, model planes.”   

            He acknowledged my sarcasm with a yawn and went back to his crossword.

            We passed the time downing donuts and licking glazed sugar off our fingers and looking at our phones.

            “Do you think the teapot can tell voices apart?” Lick asked.

            We didn’t respond because we didn’t know.  

            Hours passed, and Lick said he bet no suitcase would come at all. “The teapot knows this wish wasn’t my true heart,” he said while lying on his back, tossing a foam basketball against a yellow spot on his wall, catching it, tossing it. “The teapot knows what you did. There’s not going to be any suitcase or balloons. And tomorrow I’ll try again.”

            Beyond the cracked window, beyond dying trees, the sun dropped lower, and Lick became more confident that everything would work itself out. But at dusk, Lick moved the teapot from the floor to a shelf far from the window. And we pushed Lick’s desk out of the way so we’d have room to maneuver. “Just in case,” Lick said. And a few minutes before midnight, we turned off the lights so we could see outside.

            We stared out at the dark neighborhood. We breathed into the silence. We checked our phones. 11:57. 11:58. 11:59. 12:00 AM. Nothing.

            “I told you,” Lick whispered, looking at me smugly. “The teapot knows. The teapot always knows.”

            But then a grey shape rose from below. A round silhouette. Then another, and another. And a bundle of strings.

            “Oh,” Lick said.

            Up rose the suitcase. A huge suitcase. Though, upon closer scrutiny, not horse-sized huge. More like medium huge, like someone had packed for a month-long vacation. The suitcase hovered in front of the window. Lick and I pulled it onto the sill. Then Shell appeared with scissors, and he bundled the balloon strings and severed them. The suitcase, now impossibly heavy, thudded to the floor.  

            Shell placed the scissors in my hand and said, “To defend yourself against it, if necessary.” And they backed into the corner by the door.

            I knelt over the suitcase. The suitcase was brown. A nice suitcase. Leather. With one hand I pulled the scissors back, stab-ready. With the other I unzipped the suitcase and heaved the top away from me. I leapt to my feet. 

            From the suitcase poured grainy blackness. I screamed, thinking: demon. But when I felt the cold weight of the blackness on my socked feet, I understood—dirt. Loads of it, weird-smelling. Lick and Shell stepped closer.

            “Look,” Lick said, pointing to something in the suitcase. 

            Shell picked it up.

            A thick, splotchy, yellowish log, longer than my whole torso. “Femur,” Shell said. “Horse femur.”

            “Right,” I said. “Seabiscuit is dead.”

            “Oh,” Lick said. “Oh.”

            It was nearly dawn by the time we’d cleaned the horse-dirt from Lick’s carpet. Shell and I dragged the suitcase to Lick’s neighbor’s bin. My crown was soaked with sweat. I stuck out my dirty hand for Shell to shake, but he went back into the house without a word, and I walked the mile and a half to my house in the dark.

            At home I went to the side yard where the hose was, sprayed the dirt and stench off me, and plopped onto the front porch swing. I rocked back and forth, my wet clothes dripping onto the seat cushions. I listened to the neighborhood’s nighttime sounds. The sun came up. A squirrel poked its head from my father’s geraniums and scampered off. A yellowish bird in the crabapple tree opened and closed its wings.

            I could hear my mother bustling. A closing door, jangling keys, her muffled voice. For a second I panicked—what would she think, stains on my clothes, dark rings around my eyes, tequila on my breath? And then she came out, cell phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, briefcase at her side, and she waved hello and goodbye as she jogged to her truck. I waved back as she pulled out of the driveway, but the windshield gleamed with reflected sun and I couldn’t see if she saw.

            My phone dinged. It was Lick, texting to say they were on their way.

            When they arrived we didn’t speak. We sat on the porch swing, Shell and Lick flanking me like prison guards, our hips and knees knocking, the chains grinding from our shared weight. Lick handed me the script he’d written, which I read into the spout like I was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, following orders, only half paying attention. When I came to the end, Lick grabbed the teapot from me with both hands, as we had arranged, turned his back to me, and whispered something.

            Lick and Shell traded glances as they slid off the swing.

            “You wise up and ask for a trillion this time?” I asked.

            “Oh sure,” Lick said. He licked his lips and stuffed the teapot into Shell’s backpack.

            “What’d you do? Do I have cancer now? Lupus?”

            They ignored me.

            “What are you doing with the teapot?”

            “My Aunt Cassandra. She’s got cancer and lupus. So she gets next wish. She could really use the help.” Lick spat onto my shoes. “I’m not explaining anything to you.”

            Shell stared into the street. Like I was just an idea in his head. Then they left. 

            I sat on the porch swing as they turned the corner and disappeared behind the big brick house across the street. I rocked a little, watched people drive off to work. I pulled the crown off my head. The day’s heat was already here.

            That night, that week, that year, my eyes were open in all directions. I carried a pocket knife wherever I went. I wouldn’t so much as drive near anyplace with a horse—zoo, farms, the city carriage tours. One night, in my room playing video games, a bird crashed into my window and I yelled so loud the neighbors sent the police to our house. I sent hundreds of texts to Lick and Shell, and they sent nothing back but emojis—smileys, halos, reapers, ghosts.

            These were clues, of course. But I didn’t put it together until my next birthday. I was in math class, in the middle of Pythagorean review, when a woman in a black business suit emerged from the dry erase board. Stepped right through as if it were a waterfall. Her head was messed up, kind of dented, but there was something familiar about her. She smiled and waved at me. My classmates were squinting at the triangles on the board, seemingly oblivious. The woman talked right over my teacher. “Hey,” she said to me. “Give me a ride home after school?” I scanned the classroom. Nobody seemed to hear. “I could get there on my own,” she continued. “But we’ve got some things to discuss.”

            In my car—a birthday present from my parents, an SUV with leather trim—she let me know how disappointed she’d been when Lick told her about Seabiscuit. “Sean tells me you were always one of the nicer boys,” she said, massaging her forehead dent, smiling wistfully, as though I was supposed to know Lick’s dad’s name was Sean. “He figured you’d turn out to be one of those quirky Southern gentlemen, you know the type, from inherited money. Like your parents, but more fun. A gentleman who’d wear fancy hats and donate to the arts and open doors for people. But—”

            I pulled into her driveway. Lick’s father was standing in the yard. He dropped his rake, cupped his hand over his eyes to block the sun.

            “So are you supposed to be like, haunting me or something?” I asked.

            “Am I doing it wrong?” she asked.

            “I don’t know,” I said. “I do feel worse now, I guess.”

            She nodded. “Then I’ll leave you to it.” She drifted through my windshield. Then she paused and motioned for me to roll down my window. “Not sure I’m supposed to tell you this,” she whispered. “But I’ve got to do this sort of thing every so often. Pay you a visit, bring you down a peg or two. Can’t do much about it—part of the whole deal. You understand.” 

            Lick came out of the house.

            “So you gave him his birthday present,” Lick called from the front stoop. “Terrible, isn’t he?”

            “See you, Prince,” she said.

            “See you, Lick’s Mom.”

            “Oh, soon we’ll be old friends. Call me Brenda.” 

            Every year since, she’s appeared on my birthday.

            On my 20th, as I was leaving my internship at my mother’s company, Brenda appeared in the lobby to tell me that the teapot had fallen off Lick’s cousin’s boyfriend’s countertop and shattered. The family tried gluing it together, but the teapot hadn’t granted a wish since.

            On my 24th, under the covers with my girlfriend, thinking Brenda wouldn’t dare haunt me there, she seeped through my headboard and laughed wickedly as I leapt from the sheets to find my clothes, my girlfriend so bewildered she broke up with me that same week.

            On my 25th, Brenda’s dented face appeared through the fabric of the airplane seat in front of me. This was before the electric storms settled over the Atlantic, back when you could still fly almost anywhere. I’d learned by then that I had to ignore her in public to avoid raised eyebrows. So she asked me to blink once for yes, twice for no to a series of questions. “Do you think someday you’ll have kids?” she asked, and I remember studying the darkening sky beyond the window, afraid to blink.

             On my 29th, she sat with me as I drank beer after beer in my apartment. She asked about my father’s recent stroke, my mother’s company folding. A little to my surprise, Brenda didn’t mock me. She listened. Her greyish eyes nearly alive. After she left, I spun around and around on the barstool until I couldn’t sit upright. 

            On my 30th, I asked her how she died. “I know I should know. I should have asked a long time ago.” And she told me calmly about her train accident, a stalled semi-truck, her passenger car the only one that rolled off the track. “How unlucky and shitty,” I said. And I shook my head at myself, in disbelief I could forget. Lick must have told me. How does a person lose a story like that?

            On my 34th, she came through my bathroom wall while I was throwing up after a night out with some work friends. “You look terrible,” was all she said, and she left. 

            On my 39th, we talked in my apartment over breakfast. She asked why I was usually alone on my birthday. “I’m almost 40,” I said. “You never made it here, right? So you wouldn’t understand. Adults don’t have birthday parties. We have bigger stuff to worry about.” She nodded slowly and said, “Is that right?” And I said, “Get lost,” and she left through the exposed brick wall.

            On my 40th she didn’t visit until late. By then my work was remote, and that day, I didn’t see or speak to a single person but for my mother via text, didn’t even change out of my pajamas. When Brenda floated down through my living room ceiling, the ceiling fan spinning through her, she said, “What were you going to wish?” I stared at my computer screen. A half-finished game of solitaire stared back. “You gave Lick your one wish,” she said. She was eying me. “Right,” I said. So I told her, embarrassed. “A what?” she said. “A Carrera,” I said, louder. “An orange Carrera. It’s a sports car. They didn’t make orange Carreras back then.” Brenda’s eyes grew bigger than I’d ever seen them.

            For a long time I told myself: another teapot must be out there somewhere. Or at least other wish-granting dishware. It wasn’t until my 46th—it was sunset, and I was raking dead grass in front of the house I live in now, a small country house outside the city, and I’d stopped to watch more black smoke billow from the hills—that the simple conclusion came to me: that teapot was magic, and magic is magic because it’s so rare you never find it twice. I told Brenda what I’d concluded and she said I was being very thoughtful.

            I’ve got a daughter. Lila. She turned four last week. Asking all sorts of questions.

            Recently, Lila saw a robin on the mailbox. We were by the big window in the living room, and she didn’t want me to read to her just yet, so we weren’t doing anything. Just talking. And this says a lot about me: Lila was pointing, speechless, which is rare for her, but still I didn’t realize it was the robin she was pointing to until it was flying away, flapping its little grey wings. Which means that even after everything, I’m stuck in those days when a robin wasn’t anything to comment on. The days of everyday beauty.

            The other day, on my 48th, while Lila was playing with her wooden block puzzle and her mom was at work, there was a knock. “The front door?” I said as Brenda floated over my welcome mat. “At a convenient time? You’re losing your edge.”

            “Well, you’re aging fast. And ungracefully,” Brenda said. “I don’t need a heart attack on my head.”

            “You couldn’t set a hat on that deformed head of yours, let alone a heart attack.”

            The two of us sat at my kitchen table. I ate tomatoes and greens from my hydroponic garden. Lila on my lap with her sippy cup.

            “Why don’t you ever ask how Lick is doing?” Brenda said.

            I sent Lila off to her bedroom.

            “I don’t know,” I said.

            “Is that right?”

            And I thought again of the paper crown, which was sitting in a shoebox in my closet. I considered mentioning it, digging it out. But why bring up all that?

            I poured myself more water. Jokingly, I offered her some, and jokingly, she accepted. “Why not?” she said. So I poured the water from the pitcher straight into her open mouth. The water ran down through her body and splashed everywhere—the upholstered seat, the rug under the table, the hardwood floor. Suddenly Lila ran out from her room, saw the water, and asked what had happened. Brenda smiled a smile I wished Lila could see.

            “There’s a ghost visiting us today,” I said, “She’s my friend. And she was thirsty.”

            Lila, unamused, stormed back down the hallway. “Don’t waste water!” she hollered from her room.

            After I finished my meal, Brenda and I sat at my creaky table while I drank the rest of my water. We sat for nearly an hour without a word. Studied the other’s strange face and considered the past. Main Street, the teapot, the trees. All that was alive and dead. The questions of blame, the questions history won’t stop shouting. And now look out any window.

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Brandon Ahmad Haffner earned his MFA from UNC Greensboro. His fiction appears in the Sewanee Review, New Orleans Review, Harvard Review, Carolina Quarterly, and other journals. Recent residencies include VCCA-France at Moulin à Nef and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. He teaches creative writing at Longwood University, reads fiction for Variant Lit, and lives in Richmond, VA.