It was after Mama died when I moved in. It wasn't like the city, where you could always hit the subway tunnels, build a home out of cardboard or filched wood scraps, slap on a few coats of pilfered paint. I went there once. New York City. I was 5, firmly grounded in the illusion of familial security, and what impressed me were the bums, digging through trash and caddying their entire lives around in rusted out wagons or grocery carts. Spending their time on park benches snoozing beneath the sports section, while passersby tsked in disgust.

In Weed, Nebraska there wasn't that high degree of luxury. So I found myself escaping the trailer park at the ripe old age of 15,dragging everything I owned in one jam-packed plastic bag, across the wheat fields toward the Peterson's old place, a once-prosperous but years-deserted farm. The house was boarded up, rotten, its floorboards so weakened I nearly went through in several places before I decided it was uninhabitable. The chicken coop wasn't much better, but the root cellar was snug. And I wasn't forced to live alone, but kept company with a few large wolf spiders, who ate little and complained about my slovenliness not at all.

I was christened Estelle-which translates to "stellar," I think. Or something celestial that way. But I prefer to call myself Tika, after a Goth girl I saw once, in the pages of a tattoo magazine. I don't have a clue what it might mean, but it sounded inspired. I'd studied her tattoos, got a few of them down in my sketchpad. A gorilla, grinning, its teeth pearly white with a little flash from each sharp incisor-a sort of saber-toothed ape-its arms so long the knuckles, fingers curled, dragged the ground. A dazed-faced Bill the Cat and three meticulously drawn skulls with socketed darkness masquerading as eyes. Each skull was an entity unto itself, one sporting batwings, another fairy wings. The last wore a blue baseball cap, holes at its sides so that the devil's horns sprouted, like horse-ears from an old lady's straw hat.

"Filth," my stepdad, Lucas, said when he saw them.

"Art," whispered my mother, her eyes shining, just seconds before he'd backhanded her.

Lucifer, I secretly called Lucas. And drew pictures of him on the peeling walls inside my closet, as I saw him: Horns, cats' eyes, flames engulfing a tiny rendering of Mama. He'd trashed my Tika art, unsalvageable among the coffee grinds and my greasy, uneaten breakfast eggs. And I'd had to redraw the entire series, but did it so much better the second time around-one might say skillfully, for a 10-year-old-for I was a precocious little shit. My loss was only painful for a little while, the way it smarted when Lucas saw fit to smack me around for dinner dishes left in the sink, the toilet unscrubbed. I was, after all, an artist and had no time for such drudgeries. Besides that, he never said, "Please."

For a time I did well in the root cellar. Someone had conveniently left entire shelves full of jams of every variety known to mankind. Strawberry, blueberry, wild plum and an unlabeled something: a pale, washed-out reddish concoction I finally figured out to be tomato. Disgusting, so I shoved that one far back in a corner and saved it for last. I sipped water from cattle tanks, though at first was squeamish of the bugs, then finally blew them over the surface, watched them skim across. I couldn't go into town. Hid when the rare car or rusted-out pickup drove past. This part of the country wasn't traveled much and I'd chosen the locale for this main attraction: near-total isolation.

Days I'd spend with the cellar door chunked wide open-a little strip of blue sky overhead-sketched the cellar, its dank corners, jam-laden shelves, the occasional beetle, the spiders. The grasping, tangled tree roots pushed through the far wall and hung there in semi-darkness like some grotesque objet d' art. I wove bits of my plastic bag through it, tying festive little knots.

Sometimes I'd leave to wander the countryside, always on the lookout for the telltale dust trails that signaled a distant vehicle. As time went on I explored farther, widened my circle till one afternoon I discovered, at the edge of town, as far north as I dared venture, a series of cement tunnels. They appeared to be a whole underground network of viaducts spreading out, I assumed, beneath the entire town of Weed. I scoped out their smooth, sloping walls, ecstatic. To me these weren't simply tunnels. Not simply a vacation home where I could drag a few of my essentials and spend a few days (careful to watch for rain). To me it was a vast, empty slate. A canvas I could spend weeks, months, years filling and still not cover every inch.

And I was in heaven, toting my pastels there, some paints, a lantern I'd found in the Peterson's old barn, and began my work. By day I shoved the manhole cover directly above open, so that a bit of light sifted down. I wished for candles, but had none, so that I had to use the lantern sparingly till the kerosene ran out. I drew Muffet, my black cat who had been my closest friend, till Lucifer joined our happy family. Only I depicted the dark side of Muffet, the part that crawls out of the gutter my stepfather'd stuffed her into. The part that reanimates and comes back in a gory sort of Stephen King dream, trails bloody little pawprints on my pillow, whispers, "Kill him."

Deep within the tunnels I painted Muffet surveying her underworld through golden eyes. I stood on a crate dragged in from the barn. Had placed my Muffet up high, where the rain waters wouldn't damage her. Okay, a parody of Muffet, because her body was never that bony, the joints showing, fur ragged, her jaws never so wicked with its silvery dagger teeth, the slash-wound of a mouth. And there she rose, scepter clutched between paws, from a jewel-encrusted throne whose cushion oozed blackness that crawled, stagger-winged, morphed into bats that swept up the tunnel walls and out into the night. I spent whole days, well into dusk, drawing Muffet's kingdom. Spiders, rats, blonde little girls who'd lost their way, a dead stepfather with xx's for eyes and wondrously violent creatures spilling out his gaping mouth. I drew myself: too-pale skin, lips MTV-slut red, black hair a wild torrent played by an unseen wind. My eyes green as an after-dinner mint.

Then it started. I'd come home evenings to an undeniable vibe. An I've-been- intruded-upon vibe. I'm a slob, yeah, but there's nothing wrong with my mental acuity. I knew where everything was and though nothing was missing, things had moved. A jar of peach jam. A sketch. At first I chalked it up to paranoia, but knew better. The third time it happened I shoved some jeans, a few jars of jam, my art supplies into a remnant of plastic bag and hauled ass out of there. I was Snow White, Desdemona, the Little Match Girl, and someone was bound to show up with the poison apple. The tunnels didn't scare me. I'd spent all spring exploring them. A few bats, some bugs. The occasional misdirected critter. It'd do till the rainy season. Even so, I remained alert, always, for the ominous sound of thunder.

I slept in one of the small tunnels that cut off from the main one, all my gear tucked away, and pulled the Army blanket I'd scrounged from my stepfather's things over myself, pillowed my head with a scrunched up corner. Sometimes I'd wake, my arm or cheek icy-cold against cement, and quickly tuck myself back in. I'd been there a couple of weeks when I woke one morning, not so sure I'd heard something. Maybe dreamed it. But stayed put just in case and then I did hear it-the undeniable echo of footsteps. A circle of light played weakly along the walls, as from a distance, and I receded farther into my sleeping quarters, listening. Something tickled at my face and I shuddered. Didn't move.

"…saw someone down here the other day," said a male voice.

"You're sure?" This one female. "You think it's the same person?" Then silence. They'd seen my art, of that I was certain. I concentrated on breathing as quietly as possible, thinking my pulse rate down to near death, like the fakirs do. They can slow everything down to the point you couldn't feel a pulse, would think them dead. That's what I wanted to do. Play possum, my lips curled back into a death grin. But I wasn't stupid, knew that was impossible. So I stayed hidden, kept my ears open.

"God, look at this," the female voice again.

"Jeez-us, you think it's some kinda Satan worship?" The male sounded giddy.

"I think it's-beautiful. Fucking incredible."

"You think it's all one person? I mean, lookit all this. It'd take months, Rhonda."

Ah. Rhonda. Now we were getting somewhere.

"One person. Has to be. It's all the same style, technique. Same as the sketches we saw in the cellar," said Rhonda. I imagined her with red hair. Scorching red. Flaming as Tabasco sauce. Imagined him a caustic blond, like Lucas.

"Where d'you suppose she is now?"

"Why do you say 'she'?" Something of the militant feminist crept into Rhonda's voice and I nearly laughed. "Could be a guy."

"Naw. There's something feminine about this."

Rhonda laughed. "'Something feminine' about a fucking dead guy foaming creepy crawlers at the mouth."

"Whaddayou s'ppose is up with the bizarro cat?"

"Hmm. Maybe it is some sort of Satan worship. Black cats, insects, bats. Is this a clothespin? It's got teeth. And look at this girl here. The one with the green eyes. Cold. As though she's got no soul. Yeah, maybe this is some sort of cult work. It's just-scary."

I wanted to shoot out of my hiding place then, scream my art had nothing to do with Satan and everything to do with life, the temporariness of it all, the horror in simple everyday things. But I hadn't a clue what these people were about. I stayed hidden.

"I've seen better," said Caustic Blond.

"Nothing like this," said Rhonda. There was something I liked about that Rhonda, though she'd done a shit interpretation of my art.

That night I bunked down, shivering beneath my Army blanket. Dreamed the night of Mama's death. Of Lucas, reeking, reeling whiskey-clumsy, into my darkened room.

"This won't hurt a bit," he'd said. And pulled out a couple of clothespins, the spring- loaded kind with a wicked bite. But it wasn't going to happen. I'd seen it coming for ages, had known it was coming. Had placed, strategically, the can of Mace behind my alarm clock. I reached for it, felt it cool and reassuring in my grasp. Waited for the perfect moment, gritted my teeth when the clothespins snapped shut, my nipples hardening not with pleasure, but shock. Waited as he moved above me and shot him, full in the face, scrambled toward the door.

I think they should do truth in advertising on Mace. Tell it like it is:

"A possible deterrent, but not guaranteed. An over-glorified agent, derivative of pepper, serving well to piss-off an angry, 200 lb. stepfather."

Because piss-Lucas-the-hell-off it did.

I woke in darkness, the chill cement damp beneath me, unsure as to why I'd awakened. Then heard it again. The deep, resonant booming. A guttural roll. The unmistakable sound of an incoming Nebraska thunderstorm. Only it wasn't incoming. It was in all-out progress. It suddenly hit me. Where I was. Storm!

I hurried to snatch up my things, the water only a trickle, then deepening, surging. I hung onto my soaked blanket, gripped a bagful of art supplies, scooted into the main tunnel awash with darkness, chaos, roaring water and floating debris. The bag I'd gripped was gone by the time I slogged my way out into the night. My paints, my pastels! Water hurtled in torrents through the pipes, slammed into me and I dragged my blanket, shivering, staggered shin-deep in muck up the sides of what I'd come to know as the dried creek bed. It wasn't dry any longer, but filling with a rushing, swirling current. By the time I'd reached the root cellar the wind had claimed even my blanket. I pried the door open, let it slam shut above me and curled in a corner, giving in to the tears . . I all-out cried, finally sobbing in great, sorrowful heaves the way I'd never allowed myself at Mama's funeral. Cried for all my losses. Not because I was wet or scared or had very nearly drowned, but because I'd lost everything and more. Didn't have Mama. Or Muffet. Not one sketch, one pastel or tube of paint to my name. I could hear the wind die down as I cried, and then Weed returned to its blue-sky normalcy, but things would never be normal for me again.

The cellar door thunked open to daylight and I scuttled, crablike, into a corner. Hid behind the empty bushel basket.

"Hey," said Rhonda. "Anyone down here?"

I peeked out from my dark spot. They both stood at the entrance, as if reluctant to trespass. But they'd trespassed before. Why the sudden manners?

"C'mon out," said Caustic Blond.

"What d'you guys want?" I stood up and stepped into the light, squinted up at them, seeingnothing in detail. Just darkened silhouettes, the sun pouring in behind. I climbed the steps slowly, until we all stood outside , looking at each other. I finessed my way to a spot where I could bolt to a more advantageous distance. But no one was making any moves to grab me or otherwise do anything physical my way, so I relaxed.

"Are you okay?" Rhonda moved closer. She couldn't have been much older than I, but I'm small for my age and thin, my eyes overlarge so that I've always pictured myself as one of those old 70's wall hangings of the bedraggled cats starving in alleyways. The way my ribs stick out you'd think I hadn't eaten in days, though in truth I'd been feasting on wayward sugar beets left over from harvest.

"That wasn't real smart," Caustic Blond surveyed my still damp clothing. Only I'd been wrong on the hair color. On both counts. It was more like Caustic Dyed Inky Blue- Black. And Rhonda's hair was dark, too. Gleamed purplish in the sun.

"Coulda drowned," continued Caustic.

"Cody," said Rhonda. She had a little warning in her voice.

I studied them both. Cody's punker t-shirt with little flaming deaths' heads all over it, his jeans artfully ripped and strategically pinned back together with black safety pins. Rhonda with spiked hair and both ears pierced several times, all the way up into the cartilage. She sported a dark reddish crystal heart dead-center below her lower lip. Both had tattoos running the lengths of their arms.

"You guys aren't from around here," I said.

"My Gawd," said Cody. "Astute, isn't she? Or should I say, 'ain't'?" He poked at Rhonda, a smart-ass grin on his face.

"Sorry. He's an asshole," she said. "We bought this farm," she continued. "Actually, it was in our family. Got all fucked up in a bunch of legal bullshit. Finally, though."

Then she looked around, scrunched up her nose.

"Wasn't counting on the smell," she said.

I wasn't sure what smell she was referring to, but if it bothered her sensitive city nose, then I wasn't about to admit a thing. I glared at Cody, who'd tucked his thumbs into imaginary overalls straps.

"Wa-hell, doggies," he said.

"Fucking shut up," said Rhonda. "If you'll notice, no one around here talks hillbilly." It was a chore to keep my voice steady. I narrowed my eyes at Cody. Rhonda shrugged.

"He doesn't mean anything by it," she said. Cody turned to smirk at me, a dangerous gleam in his eyes. A stepfather kind of gleam. I knew his sister had no idea.

"Where you from?" I asked. "New York?"

Cody laughed. "Man, that's kinda narrow-minded."

"Wa-hell, doggies," I said.

"Yeah, point taken." He kept grinning. I didn't trust him. Didn't like him one bit.

"Chicago," said Rhonda. "Cody's got a tattoo shop; I pierce."

"Chicago?" I ran my fingers through my hair. Avoided Cody's gaze. "What's in Chicago?"

To me, Chicago was a 40's movie: gangsters in expensive suits, hair slicked back, blasting around the city in fast, dark cars. Beautiful, Lauren Bacall-looking women, smoking long, elegant cigarettes. I knew it wasn't accurate. Like Cody's screwed-up mental image of Nebraska: a toothless hillbilly on every corner, pigs watching TV at the corner barbershop. It was all Green Acres and HeeHaw to him, I supposed.

"Where are your folks?" This from Rhonda.

A tough one, I thought.

"They're not," I said.

"I'm sorry." She fingered her lip piercing. I coughed, watched Cody, who surveyed me unabashedly, seemed to take all of me in, sizing me up.

Mama was dead. I was glad of it sometimes. For her, thoughts of death must have conjured up sweet release from life in our 2-bedroom box. For my mother tried escape in one form or another every year since I'd turned 10. Passing Lucas in the dim hallway or sitting across from him at dinnertime, I tried hard not to smell the sweat- stench of alcohol. He lived whiskey, breathed it, reeked it from every pore. It was as though he immersed himself in it regularly and I wondered how Mama could stand there, expressionless, when he backed her into corners to lecture, lecture. For as far as Lucas was concerned, my mother could do nothing right.

"Your art. In the tunnels," said Rhonda.

"Yeah, you could do something with it maybe," said her brother.

Do something with it.

"I thought I was." I swallowed. My throat ached a little. "But no one will ever see it down there." Rhonda shook her head as she said this, reached out a hand, but I flinched away, the way I always do when someone tries to touch me. She backed off.

"You don't have anyone? I wish-maybe Chicago," she said. She looked at her brother.

"Nuh-uh," he said. "How old's she? 12?"

"I'm 15." That age shit always rankles mebut he was right. I looked like some skinny, snot-nosed preadolescent.

"Still," he said. "We can't take off with some kid from the sticks, Rhonda." He studied me, scratched his arm and I scanned the tattooed black widow that crawled his forearm toward a glistening web. I stared. Wondered how they'd done that. Such intricate detail.

"Maybe someone's lookin' for her." He tapped at a little naked Hawaiian dancer on his neck, grinned when I glanced, my face growing warm.

"I don't have anyone," I said. I stuttered a little. Then imagined slapping myself.

They'd closed Mama's eyes. An open-casket ceremony. I'd leaned over, wanting to will them open. I'd wanted to see, once more, the calm gaze of my mother, the blue dusted-to-turquoise irises that people, in her lifetime, had commented on. It wasn't an actual eye color, was it? Did she wear contacts? But she didn't. They were the eyes of someone from a far distant star. Of someone stranded, beaten, unable to take care of herself. Someone who had to rely on others. Papa, who left when I was 6. The series of now-and-again boyfriends. Then Lucas, who moved in soon after I turned 10, because he was a sometime paycheck, a wind-buffeted trailer on the outskirts of Weed, and someone for Mama to cling to.

But the funeral. It was the kind she'd never wanted, her wishes being cremation with her ashes scattered to a vicious Nebraska wind. But no one would listen.

"You did a bang-up job covering the bruises," I'd said to the mortician's girl, who stared, her face suddenly stone. I'd shrugged, leaned over close as if to stroke Mama's hair, but what I'd done was snip a lock with a tiny scissors and tuck it in my pocket. Some small part of Mama was going out the way she'd wanted. I held a private ceremony the next dust storm, my mother's hair (not ashes, but the best I could do) escaping my fingers, blowing upward. Scattering to the four corners and rising on gusts of heat current, each strand finding its way home.

"No one would miss me," I said. Cody and Rhonda shared quick glances. I wanted Chicago, I decided. The tall buildings, pavement everywhere My mother went to Chicago once.

"It smelled," she'd said, "like people. All different types of people, from all walks of life." And she'd loved it.

Cody's lip curled into a slight sneer, but he stayed silent. Rhonda shook her head.

"There's got to be someone," she said.

"My dad's alive, maybe," I said. "People think I'm with him."

"So no one'd have a clue," said Cody. He eyed me steadily and I thought of Mama. She was that way. Madness covered over with calm. Her manner deceptively serene while inside, bells and whistles must have been ringing, insane thoughts crowding everything else out.

"Pour me a drink, Tika," she'd said, for she respected my right to not be Estelle. I'd poured the bourbon, solicitous daughter that I was, watched her drink.

"What's your name?" said Rhonda.

"Comes and goes," I said. Laughed. "Tika. It's Tika."

"Teacup?" This from Cody, who joined me in laughing, though his laughter cut, edged with malice.

I went silent. Watched an ant make its way through a jungle of weeds. It was hauling what looked like a cricket's leg. Jagged. Spurred.

"Okay," said Cody. "Express leaves in 2 minutes. You with us?" He nodded toward the house and I followed him, followed Rhonda around the corner where an ice-blue Hummer sat, its tires caked with muck.

"Jesus," I said.

"We rake in some pretty good loot," said Cody. Rhonda nodded, fingers twirling her heart-shaped lip jewelry.

"It's a different world out there," she said.

"I'll teach you tattoo, you want," her brother offered. For a price, his eyes said. I didn't answer. Stood watching a tumbleweed navigate its way eastward with each gust of wind till it halted against a bit of fencing, trapped with a zillion other tumbleweeds.

"Pour me a drink, Tika," my mother'd said. And I'd watched her down an entire handful of sleeping pills, chase it with great gulps of bourbon. "It wasn't your fault," she'd told me, growing sleepy-eyed. "None of it." She'd come in from the late shift that night, smelling of cheeseburgers and onion rings, her uniform crusty with ketchup. Had heard my screams. He'd moved too slow-awkward with booze-when she'd hit my bedroom full force, bulldozing her way in though he'd shoved my heavy dresser in front of the door. I'd never known Mama owned a gun. Sat up staring and staring at the hole blown through Lucas's chest, at the surprised expression on his face, at my Mama, open- mouthed, silent.

"Woman's got to do what a woman's got to do," she'd said that night.

But that's not the way it happened. That's not the way it happened. It's what I've played and replayed in my head. The ugly truth too painful. Mama busting in on us, yes. But standing motionless at the door, never making eye contact though I screamed for her. She'd backed up, silent, retreated to her room. Lucas had finished with me, passed out, a string of spit trailing from his mouth to my pillow.

I gazed beyond Cody and Rhonda, across the prairie, out past the windbreak of elms, to a far distant windmill whose blades spun erratically, to Doc Nelson's alfalfa farm miles away, shimmering Emerald City green in the distance. I wasn't naïve. Knew Chicago was escape, but also a sort of giving in. A capture. Still…

I wanted to see Muffet's kingdom again, though the entrance was all underwater now. Impossible to get there. I could always imagine it and though probably, possibly, no one else would ever see it, I would never forget it was there.

"You could be famous," said Cody. "And isn't that it? What we all want?"

I didn't know. Still don't know. But I looked at Cody, his expression untranslatable. "A woman's got to do…" And if things didn't work out, what the hell. I figured there was always New York City.

§ § §

Season Harper holds the M.A. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She teaches fiction at Gotham Writers' Workshop online and has published fiction, book reviews and poetry in The Cream City Review, The Rocky Mountain Review of Modern Language and Literature, Mudfish and other journals. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. She lives in the Chicago suburbs.She can be reached at therainyseason@earthlink.net

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