Candida
Runner-Up – COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards, Prose
Lilith Todd
After Miranda turned fourteen, she lost all interest in showers. When she was only thirteen, she could stand under the water nearly every day before school for twenty or more minutes. She would face away from the showerhead and let the water pelt her back. The water pressure was okay at best, and so it mostly drizzled down on her; she hadn’t showered in many other places besides her family home or gym changing rooms so had assumed this, a waning stream, was what pelting water felt like. In her days of showering, she learned to undress while the water warmed up; she clogged the drain with her hair once and stood ankle-deep in lukewarm water; having started shaving the same year, she learned a balancing act – to stand on one leg to shave the other.
After her birthday, what once seemed something the grown-ups in her life did before going to work, no longer was any fun at all but instead seemed more like a chore. She had other proofs that she was aging appropriately: going to high school in the fall, shaving.
These reassurances of her maturity allowed her to take as many baths as she wanted. Using babysitting money, she bought bubble bath, even when it wasn’t on sale. Lavender, lemon ginger, rosemary, Himalayan salt, coconut paradise. The water ran so hot she could hardly stand it. She stayed half-submerged until she got pink and sweat dripped down her face, and she knew it was sweat and not water because sometimes these clear beads would drip into the corners of her mouth and taste salty instead of like soap. Maybe because of the heat or the wafting steam that clouded up the mirror and the tiny window near the ceiling, when she got out and walked down the hall to her bedroom, she felt light-headed.
Not long after her birthday, Miranda joined a summer swim league that met every morning at nine and went until two. When Miranda arrived home, she headed straight into the bathtub to soothe her muscles with some hot water. She spent most of the first few months of her first true teenage year in water.
The itching started in mid-July.
As she waited her turn in the line of swimmers in front of the diving blocks, she adjusted and readjusted the crotch of her swimsuit. On their midday break, she peeled the one-piece off her sticky skin in order to go to the bathroom. It stung when she peed. A hot burning pain. Not localized but all around her swimsuit parts. While they swam their cool down, a slow and lazy breaststroke, she worried over her vagina. Each time her head came up for air, she thought over every gross toilet seat she sat on rather than squatted above.
A metal-linked fence enclosed the outdoor pool. Once you crossed it, the air tasted of chlorine. In the back corner stood one concrete shed building, in which boys and girls took their turns changing in. This gender segregation did little for Miranda – who used her towel to cover her bottom half as much as possible – and her embarrassment. To glimpse it or even to glimpse her underwear was to know that itchy pain radiated from there. She missed a hook when she clipped and flipped her bra around as fast as she could. The synthetic fabric tugged at her still-wet skin.
“You have good taste,” Elise said. Elise swam long distance, the 200- and 500-meter freestyle. Miranda was more of a sprinter.
“Thank you.” She put her t-shirt on, and it too clung to her still-wet ribs. “It’s new.”
“I’m very jealous. My mom doesn’t let me buy ones like that.”
Miranda and her mother bought this, her first underwire bra, when they went shopping for summer clothes.
Elise continued, “I really want one like that, one with padding. They seem softer and more comfortable.”
Miranda had insisted she’d grown another cup size and needed something sturdier. The pink strap sat tight against her ribs but gaped where the cups met breast.
“I like to think of the push-up part like little pillows,” Miranda said.
Elise wore a purple and pink-striped cotton band over her breasts with green straps across her shoulders. A training bra. Despite this glaring difference, Miranda saw them as having mirrored bodies. The practice had felt similar to them both: too hard and too much butterfly for their muscles that had begun to shape their thighs into curves.
The changing rooms and everything left in there stunk even with the sanitizing smells of pool chemicals and bleach bottles stacked up behind them. Light green mold grew in the grout between the dark blue tiles. In the humidity, the locker room might as well have been a sauna
Elise got picked up on time, which afforded Miranda some privacy to itch. She scratched herself through her jean shorts as she waited to be picked up. Her arms ached, stretched out from pulling her body through the water. Her nose skin peeled from old sunburn. She felt hard-pressed to find a body part that wasn’t failing her in some small way. Her body was shutting down as if it might be dying.
The young kids, aged seven to ten, swam behind her. They flailed and splashed until the concrete around the pool and even the grass beyond the fence was wet as if it had just rained. Miranda watched them while she waited. None of them wore racing suits, and so she looked out on a sea of tropical prints.
Her father was usually the one to pick her up because he got summers off. These summers he spent on projects – trimming back the forsythia bushes, repairing the broken fourth dinning-table chair, preventing the squirrel from eating at the bird feeder – at Miranda’s home. He got very involved in each of these tasks and, as long as Miranda had known him, never wore a watch, meaning he was often quite late to various events. Legs spread, which was her best effort to air herself out and relieve some pressure on right there, and piling up pulled blades of grass next to her, Miranda waited until the car pulled up.
“Sorry kiddo,” her father said out of the unrolled window. “Been waiting long?” He wore his painting clothes.
“Not too long,” she said as she got in the passenger seat.
On the drive home, she felt sick to her stomach because the itching wouldn’t stop. Surely, she had contracted something. The itching was so hot it felt to be growing, felt to be swallowing her entire pelvis with infection. The only distraction out the window was the occasional billboards and yard signs for the county fair. A big yellow ear of corn lay flat on a white background. July 19-29 at the fairgrounds off the highway. She rolled and unrolled the window to feel and hear the breeze just briefly until her father told her to stop.
Her father brought up the utilities’ bill at dinner. Apparently, it had gone up.
From the kitchen, Miranda looked through the doorway into the study where the computer screen was still lit. The screensaver circled through pictures stored in the photos folder. With the lights off, the place was a movie theater for every event in Miranda’s life that she remembered or, at least, that she had a photo to remember.
Miranda standing beside a half-made tent. A smaller Miranda in a pink leotard and fairy wings. Her father holding a slice of watermelon. The Grand Canyon on a cloudy day. Her mother holding a big zucchini in the garden. Then, the image Mirada had seen already too many times in her life: blood and shit on top of a wet diaper. Her mother was an ER doctor, and she documented each of Miranda’s childhood sicknesses with the care of the researcher she had been before medical school. As a two-year-old, Miranda came down with a stomach bug that lost her all control of her bowels and her digestive system. Her mother took pictures of her stool in case the bug was something more interesting than just the kind of bacteria that winds up in the stomach of small children without strong immune systems. Taken on a digital camera, the photo got uploaded to their family desktop computer and then placed one day, due to some technological misunderstandings, in the rotation of screensaver images.
In front of her, for dinner, was a plate of pork chops and soggy spinach. As her chore for the day – her only chore due to how tired she was from swimming and how much she complained about it – Miranda mixed the salad dressing from olive oil and red wine vinegar. But she was still figuring out the right proportions. Due to this failed batch, each leaf was coated in a film of oil.
“How was practice?” Her father asked.
“Fine.”
Her father liked swim team the best. He signed her up when she was little and often called it a “lifetime sport.”
“I’m definitely sore from it.”
Miranda folded her leg up onto the chair so she could press the heel of her foot onto her crotch, relievingthe itching the subtlest way she knew how.
“Have you guys been practicing starts?” He asked. “I’ve noticed that you keep losing time from that. You’re otherwise such a strong swimmer.”
“I’m just not that good at streamlining.”
“What’s streamlining?” her mother asked.
Miranda dug her heal more and more into her crotch.
Her father looked like he wanted to answer but then asked Miranda to explain.
“It’s when you keep your arms up in a cross and kick really hard behind you.”
Her mother put her arms over her head and asked, “Do you hold your hands like this?”
“Can I be excused to go to the bathroom?” Miranda asked.
She left the table before fully getting permission. Sitting on the toilet and scratching at herself, she tried to take deep breaths through her nose and out of her mouth. In the medicine cabinet, she found a compact mirror. It was shaped like a heart and made of soft brown wood. She learned to use a tampon by angling the same mirror to look at herself. When she placed its rounded surface between the tops of her thighs this time, everything was red, a swollen red.
She came back into the kitchen trembling.
“Everything okay, sweetheart?” Her mother asked.
“I need to talk to you, mom, in private.” Miranda maintained her poker face as well as she could and even kept her voice stern, assertive of what she needed from her mother in this moment of her physical distress.
“We’re in the middle of dinner,” her father said. “Can it wait?”
She shook her head. “It can’t wait.” Shifting her weight between her feet, she said, “Mom, please just come with me to the bathroom.”
Jostling the table as she got up and glancing briefly at her husband, Miranda’s mother met her in the bathroom.
“Can you close the door, please.”
Her mother sat at the edge of the bathtub, only to knock over one of the bottles of bubble bath.
“Please be quiet. This is so embarrassing. I don’t know what happened to it. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything to it.”
“Everything is going to be okay. What did you want to tell me?”
“I’m really itchy and red. It hurts really bad.”
“Where?”
Miranda wanted to cry. What do you call it to your mother?
“My vagina area.”
After Miranda had barred all, pulling down her underwear and pointing to the red parts and after her mother had looked with the delicacy that she treats her patients with, she told Miranda that she had a yeast infection. Everything was going to be okay. Lots of women get them. It’s from the baths, she said. You’ve never been good at staving off infection. I’ll write you a prescription for an antifungal and pick up the medicine for it first thing in the morning.
Miranda calmed down. It was something common, something women got, something not worthy taking a picture of.
Her mother asked her if it was okay for her dad to know. Miranda nodded.
That night, the three of them watched Juno. Her dad picked up the DVD from the local library because it had been nominated from some Oscars and won one of them earlier that year. One of the excitements of Miranda aging from what her parents said to her was getting to watch award-winning movies, with all their grown-up and serious themes, again.
On the couch with a bag of frozen lima beans pressed between her legs to ease the swelling, Miranda ate French vanilla ice cream, which was one of her sick day foods, out of a light blue bowl. Well past Oscar season, it was mid-summer, the heat of which melted the ice cream into a soup. Her father called these movie-viewing playing cultural catch-up.
After the movie was over and after she’d brushed her teeth, her mother knocked on her door to check on how she was doing. Miranda sucked the spit in and out of her braces while her mother closed the blinds. Her mother asked her what she thought of the movie and then told her not to have sex just because she was bored.
*
Miranda wished that medicine from one problem could cure everything about her. The whole morning of swim practice, she could not wait to be home. The itchiness got worse with time instead of better. She awoke that morning to white gunk in her underwear. A thick cream clung to the delicate skin of down there and dried into clumps onto the cotton.
As soon as her mother was home, she would get better but until then she would have to suffer and to wait. For the whole first set of laps, she imagined going back in time and never coming to practice. When doing her backstroke, she breathed through her mouth, gaping open her lips like a fish as water splashed around her mouth onto her lolling tongue. She miscalculated her flip turn, rotating her body too early, and water flooded her nose.
Finally, they got a Gatorade break. She sat next to Elise on the edge of the pool, dipping her blue-nail-polished toes in the water. Travis, who swam the 100-meter butterfly and the 200-meter individual medley, joined them. Miranda avoided looking at his exposed chest or at the spandex just a bit lower. Instead, she focused on his hands, gripping the plastic of the bottle, squeezing it just to hear it pop the cap off.
“I found out our pig’s going to die.” They’d been talking about pets.
“Why would you tell us that,” Elise said.
“Yes, it is too sad,” Miranda said.
Travis finished his drink, looking smug, having meant to shock perhaps.
“Well, it’s really more my brother’s pig so I guess he gets to decide what happens to it.”
“What does happen to it?” Miranda asked.
“I don’t want the gory details,” Elise said.
“My brother’s auctioning it off at the end of the fair so I guess whoever buys it gets to decide what happens to it.” Every time Travis opened his mouth, a blue tongue poked out. “I’m a bit happy about it because he’s going to put the money towards a car that he can drive me places in.”
The burning feeling again down below.
“It the pig on display now? In one of those pins at the fair?” Miranda asked.
She chose to focus on his face. As Travis’s mouth moved, the red zit on his cheek moved with it.
“Yes. He even won some ribbons.”
“I forgot all about the animals,” Elise said.
“I go for the rides usually,” Travis said. “I’m a bit of a daredevil. My favorites are always going to be any of them that take you up really high.”
“Me too,” Miranda said. “From those ones that drop you, you can see the cars in the parking lot.”
Elise said, “sometimes I can do them; sometimes I can’t.”
“I guess you guys are going to the fair then?” Travis asked.
They arranged for a “swim-team meet-up.” Miranda sustained herself on these fair plans for the second half of practice.
Her best friend, Lacy, got a boyfriend for about three months of last year. They went to movies together and held hands in class. Lacy hadn’t told her herself. Instead, Miranda found out while doing crunches at track practice from someone Lacy had once said she didn’t even really like. Feeling hurt, Miranda avoided Lacy until February, when she decided to forgive her. Lacy showed Miranda her Valentine’s Day gift from the boyfriend, a small, golden star necklace, before she had even shown her own mother.
Besides Lacy, the other gossip at school was that one of the girls in her class claimed to have had sex last year at the fair. They’d apparently done it in a parked car away from all the rides.
*
When she got home from practice, she took the first dosage of her anti-fungal medicine. The pill tasted like a powered mushroom.
Her parents liked the idea of the fair. They sat by Elise’s parents at the last swim meet.
She’d be a good friend for you, they said. She also feels frustrated about how boy-crazy other girls are. You two should talk about it. Miranda regretted ever telling her mother about her frustration with Lacy.
Before she went to bed, in the low light of her bedside lamp, Miranda inserted a small plastic tube into herself and pushed up the white cream of her medicine. It reminded her of putting in and taking out a tampon seemingly all at once. She turned off the lights and crawled into bed without putting underwear back on. The other prescriptive advice was to let her vagina breathe.
*
Her father dropped her off along the fence-line leading up to the fair entrance so that he wouldn’t have to pay the car-entrance fee. At the walk-in gate, a single red umbrella shading a man in sunglasses, Miranda fished out five dollars. He stamped her hand, already colored red from the shade of the umbrella, with a red star. Her clammy hands seemed to forebode sweating in the future
Buzzing against her leg, her phone displayed a text from Elise: I’m at the Ferris wheel! And I have sunglasses on btw!
When she found Elise, Miranda looked into her two big heart-eyes.
“Aren’t these fun?” She said, pointing at her sunglasses.
They went on rides until Elise complained that her stomach hurt. They sat down by a trash can. Miranda touched the top of Elise’s head, laying her palm flat against the part in her hair. The grass was dry and yellow around them, and a gray light drained everything of color, even the yellow and blue of the funhouse. After a shake-up lemonade, Elise felt better but they held hands anyways while swaying left and right and then upside down back on the rides.
When they flipped her upside once and then twice, her toes tingled and her head felt light. Strapped in next to each other, Elise and Miranda exchanged scared glances each time the pendulum re-ascended. Miranda shook her own hair out of her face to see Elise rendered different under brief anti-gravity.
When they went to the port-a-potties, the air around them thick with hand sanitizer and pee, Miranda cleaned out her underwear again. A new thick white discharge sat there; but, it seemed creamier and thinner than sticky gunk from before. The medicine was washing out of her.
*
Four barns, green roofs with white sidings, stood in rows behind the Ferris wheel. Without a map, Elise and Miranda wandered through them one-by-one in search of the pigs.
At first, bunnies in cages surrounded them. Miranda poked her fingers through the cage holes to pet at the soft brown fur of a particularly fat bunny; its skin spilled and pooled out across the floor of its home. Its ear flopped and lay limp. The two of them conducted their own judging contest.
The next barn contained big stables. The air was heavy with manure. A horse face greeted them. By one of the stalls, Miranda recognized her neighbor, Greg, sitting with one of his sons. He shot fireworks off nearly year-round and burned his trash sometimes out in his backyard. Her parents called the police on him once, when the black smoke of burnt rubber and plastic got too thick and suffocating, and so Miranda was no longer allowed or, at least, no longer felt comfortable biking around the block with his son. She didn’t end up saying hi to Greg, his son, or his horse.
Elise and Miranda continued along, hay sticking to the soles of their shoes with each step. Past the horses stood the muddy open cages of the pigpens. Troughs lined the four picket-fence walls of their sties. A dark green tag hung off each pig’s ear, a big plastic earring. Miranda wanted to make eye contact with them – she had heard pigs had eyelashes like supermodels – but their faces remained downturned towards the hay and the mud.
“They’re browner than I thought,” Elise said.
They found Travis sitting on a black plastic lawn chair in front of a caged-in pig. How strange to see him without a swimsuit on. He wore silver athletic shorts and a neon orange shirt from a 5K charity. They shouted his name, and the pigs oinked in response. Miranda felt thrilled to receive any kind of attention.
“Hey guys, how do you like the fair?” he asked.
“We’ve been going on rides. Have you been on the upside-down cage yet?” Miranda asked.
“Nah, I have to babysit the pig.”
A big blue ribbon was pinned on the top bar of the pen. The pig looked about Miranda’s size.
“I have to babysit because my brother nailed the auction. He’s going to get a buttload of money for it, so he’s paying me to be here.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I get off soon, though. He’s supposed to come back. His girlfriend is up for fair queen.”
Elise reached her hand into the pen.
“Is it okay for me to pet it?” she asked.
“Go ahead.”
Miranda joined Elise and reached her hand down towards the pig. She was a bit too short to reach and so she lifted herself up. She balanced herself on top of the fence on her armpits. While running her knuckles over its pink back, the little hairs scratched a bit at her hand.
“I’m used to hanging around here,” Travis said. “Our tent and car are parked way out back, and we sleep there until this is all over.”
“Can we see it?” Elise asked. “I’ve never camped before.”
“Sure. My brother’s supposed to get back in a half and an hour. We can go then.”
The two girls looked at each other.
“My baby cousin’s in the kiddie pig chase if you wanted to see that,” Travis said.
“Oh sure. What is that?” Miranda asked.
“A bunch of little kids try to grab ribbons off piglets. My sister thinks it’s super cute.” Travis twisted the plastic of the chair’s armrest.
Miranda felt hot breath against the back of her knee, an area of her body that was already sweaty. Behind her, the pig sniffed. Maybe it smelled the daisy body mist Miranda spritzed herself with after her shower.
*
Bleachers surrounded the small arena. The kiddies of the kiddie pig chase stood in a line at the edge of the mud field below them. Each wore knee-high black rubber boots. Some of the little girls wore dresses. Elise stuck her feet on the bleacher in front of them. Miranda tried to angle her body to place her crotch against the metal of the bench without it looking too awkward.
“Travis is right. The kids are pretty cute,” Elise said.
“Which one do you think is his cousin?” Miranda asked.
“Don’t know. I think some of the junior swim team might be here though. I think I recognize one of them.”
Below Elise and Miranda, two older women sat like two swim team moms as they pointed out their children among the small bodies. One talked about why she chose to use formula instead of breastfeeding. Miranda learned she would eventually need to worry about how her children would stretch out, flatten, and ruin her breasts. Or, she would need to worry about her formula child being as fat as one of the pigs.
“If you had to adopt one of the kids, which would you choose?” Miranda asked Elise.
“Whichever one is going to win.”
Small pigs with bright colored ribbons on their curly tails trotted out onto the mud field. The pigs were a soft pink and about the size of Miranda’s now-passed beagle.
A buzzer. The kids ran. One girl slipped right off the bat, landed on her knees, and splattered her chest in mud. She started crying, crying one of those scream cries, and one of the organizers came over to her, grabbed her arm, and carried her over to the edge where a wood bench was made the appropriate height for a child from having sunk into the mud.
A little boy in an oversized too big black jersey jumped on top of a little pig and it squealed. Miranda did not know that pigs made any sounds beside oink let alone one that sounded so scared. The pig slipped away and the boy caught himself with his hands. He held up his mud-covered palms up towards the audience.
“I think I would adopt that girl who’s crying,” Miranda said.
More squeaks and squeals as other kids grabbed at their assigned pigs. The audience clapped and whistled when kids got close. Soft awes resounded in the wake of children falling face-first in the mud when a pig ran out from under them.
There was no announcer, so the squealing of the pigs and the slap of the children’s bodies against the mud made the only official sounds of the event. They flung their tiny bodies on top of the pigs’ tiny bodies.
Elise tapped her feet against the bench in front of her, causing it to shake. Miranda checked the time on her phone.
“I want one of the girls in a dress to win,” Elise said. “Don’t you think that would be funny?”
Miranda nodded. As one child reached her arms around a pig from behind, its pointy ears flattened out and squished under the pressure of her hands. Its mouth opened wide. The girl pulled herself on top of it, trapped it, squiggling, in-between her knees, and then reached behind her back for the yellow ribbon wrapped around its curly tail. Whatever the girl had on before she began chasing the pigs around disappeared under the mud and dirt she now wore.
“That looks like my kid,” Elise said.
It had begun to rain a little, making the mud pit bigger for when the teenagers stepped into the ring.
*
Travis was bent over the same chair, playing snake on his phone. The bright white trail of blocks zigged across the screen, following itself and curving in on itself. Miranda thought he seemed happy to see them.
The tents, RVs, trucks, and cars parked in densely-pack rows constructed a metal maze for the three of them to navigate through. The air reeked of gasoline. The grass was dead around here, dried out and driven over. Elise and Miranda could only follow Travis as he weaved in between the camp setups. His black rubber boots left dried dirt, loosened from the cleats in the soles, behind him, a breadcrumb trail for the girls. His family had two big blue tents staked near a pick-up truck.
“Jack and I sleep in here and my parents sleep there.”
Miranda pressed her hand against the tent. The whole structure responded to her hands when the thin synthetic fabric moved and crinkled.
“We have snacks in the car if you guys are hungry?”
“I’ve never been in a truck,” Miranda said.
When Travis turned away from her to open the truck doors, she scratched at herself by reaching into her shorts and moving her underwear around. She remembered that she was wearing an older comfier pair. The very same pair that had a brown period stain all across the front.
She crawled in after Travis and sat in the passenger seat while he sat in the driver’s.
“The truck is so big. I feel really high off the ground.”
“Yeah, I drove it around our yard once. It’s really powerful.”
Out of the rear-view mirror, Miranda saw Elise pull herself up and into the cargo bed and dangle her feet over the edge as if she was on just another ride.
“Are you ever going to raise a pig?” Miranda asked.
“Probably. We have two more pigs at home and one’s a girl so I bet she’s going to have babies again, and then I’ll get one to raise.”
“Will you sell your pig?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“What will you name it?”
“No idea. We usually don’t name them.”
“I got to name my dog. I picked ‘Milly.’ She died recently. I think I’ve never been sadder.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you feel sad when you give them away?”
“We don’t really give them away.”
“Oh, well, you know what I mean. When you sell them, do you feel sad?”
“It’s fine. Once it’s dead, the meat doesn’t really seem like them anymore. Or, at least, I don’t think of it that way anymore. We don’t always sell them so they stay closer to home afterwards.”
They sat still and Elise started jumping a bit in the back, which rocked the truck. Miranda fingered the ends of her hair. They felt like straw, bleached from the chlorine.
“I think we have chips in the back seat.”
Travis crawled over the middle and dug around under the seats until he pulled out a family-sized package of Doritos. Travis then made his way into the front seat, opened the door, and got out to lean against the side of the truck and eat out of the chip bag.
Miranda sat by herself. She let herself sweat and then scratch a bit more. How silly, how stupid. Her crotch still burned from its fungal overgrowth.
*
The sky got darker both from dark rain clouds rolling in and from the nighttime approaching. Elise, her hair discolored in the wet suddenly upon her, knocked against Miranda’s window and pointed up. A storm gathered and spread out across the fair. Elise tapped and tapped again at the windowpane until Miranda opened the door. Crawling and tumbling over Miranda’s lap and over the gear shift to the back seat, Elise trailed in raindrops and dampness. The front of Miranda’s t-shirt got a dark wet spot from where Elise’s hair had rubbed against it.
“It’s a summer storm. Really awful out there.”
After checking some ropes around the tent while Miranda watched him, Travis too returned to the car, letting in a gust of wind. Just beyond the windshield, rain hit Travis’s family’s tents hard enough to shake them. The wind blew through one until, as if were a set of blue synthetic lungs, it expanded and contracted with the intake of air. Thunder pounded.
“Your tent’s not going to blow away is it?” Miranda asked.
“Your truck’s not going to blow away is it?” Elise asked.
“I’m worried about the pig,” Travis said.
As the only course of action against the storm, they ate out of the Doritos bag.
Midwest summers shook Miranda. Her earliest fears imagined her house blown away, smashed to bits, and torn apart by the force of wind. She knew to get low to the ground, get away from windows, leave any mobile home, get out of the car and into a ditch if she heard the blare of the sirens. Starting in May and lasting into July, the car radio buzzed with tornado watches. Miranda and her family would put on their rainboots, collect a few favorite things and a manila folder with their birth certificates, passports, and social security cards, and climb down into the damp concrete basement. Not unlike the three of them now, they would eat snacks underground until everything passed.
*
Miranda licked the orange dust off her fingers while Travis shoved the empty bag into the glove compartment. The tent stilled. The sky stayed dark from remaining clouds and approaching night. Most of the grass died in the baking heat the week before until the ground was nothing but trampled on dust. The rainwater collected and stayed without roots to absorb it until they became a truck island in a sea of mud and water. Elise tapped Miranda on the shoulder and cupped her hand around her ear.
“I really need to pee. Can you walk with me to the porta-potties?” Elise asked.
Miranda swung the door open, took her sandals off, and went first. She needed to go to the porta-potties as well. She needed to check on the culture collecting in her underwear.
The water covered her toes and was warm. The water itself was too cloudy, dirty, and yellow to see the ground. Plastic cup tops drifted and bobbed across the deeper puddles.
“We’re going to the bathrooms,” Miranda said.
“I’m going to wait for my family here,” Travis said.
“See you at swim practice,” Miranda said.
Elise got out after her with her pink tennis shoes tied together by the shoelaces and white socks stuffed in her pockets.
*
The two of them splashed towards the rides. The light bulbs, now illuminated, reflected in the water. Each looked like a little blurry star. The ride workers, dressed in giant flowing transparent blue ponchos, loitered ghost-like on the platforms of their machines, just above the deep puddles.
Writer’s Statement
“Candida” grew out of my own frustrations with the pervasiveness of girls’ coming-of-age narratives that mark growth with bleeding and with trauma. In general, I am drawn to moments when things fail to happen, when we experience disappointment and subtle rejection, when fantasies disappear without much struggle. The yeast infection at the center of the story is my effort to present a narrative of a less violent but perhaps more annoying genital maturation. From my perspective, these kinds of infections are reminders that sexual organs have a life of their own; the vagina literally maintains its own ecosystem. This story also came out of my desire to write about wet and moist places: tempests, bathtubs, public pools, puddles, locker rooms, underwear, humid air, pigsties. I set the story in the Midwest, in part because it is where I grew up and I know its details well, and in part, because Midwestern summers involve these semi-surreal rituals around animals that I find striking.
about the writer
Lilith Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She writes on 17th- and 18th-century transatlantic literature, intimate labors, and body fluids.