Indestructible

When I was 12, I stole rainbow marbles from a rich neighbor. I remember the hot satisfaction of it — like she deserved her loss — for walking by in a white miniskirt and matching Pomeranian dog — while my brothers and I played barefoot among thorns. Her home — a chess-game of order, cheese slices in the frig. Don’t lean on the walls, her mother told us. Don’t sit on the sofa, stand on the carpet, you dust and grime kids. Don’t you dare. The smell of poverty is red silt on rising floods, hot coals in the center of your heart. Fear and shame, that’s a constant, because you eat sticky rice and mango pickle, instead of gleaming cheese slices. We played hopscotch and ludo, slid marbles down her staircase. I took three when she wasn’t looking, hid them between my budding breasts. She had a bounty after all, bobbing on the white marble floor — swollen balloons in an extravagant milkshake. The smell of poverty is sweat, waiting at the bus stop in wedding finery, watching your neighbors whiz by in cocooned cars. And rage, always rage — a bloody morass that unfurls and spills out in odd places — like stealing something as useless and indestructible as marbles that you know you will never play with — ever again.