Big Red
Sarah Cavar
My uncle rolled out Big Red like a Cadillac. A musty penny-board, her name was on her belly. Beneath her, four tiny toy wheels I could hardly believe would hold me up. Against my grandmother’s wishes he offered me (hardly eight) the board; the smoker’s cough and weed-stink room and beer belly I once mistook for pregnant all seemed evidence of his penchant for risk.
“She’s ready,” he said of me or Red, shifting in his sneakers as the whole house creaked. I flexed my barefoot toes.
My grandmother, grandfather, and Uncle Michael all lived at the midsection of a small cul-de-sac, once home to parents with little children and now largely home to aging grandparents without. I, only grandchild of working parents, spent the better part of my young life in the neighbourhood, passing long afternoons on my grandmother’s couch. The two of us played dolls and watched Survivor and practised piano and psychoanalysis in her hot living room. When the weather was good, we would venture outside and leave fruits for the animals – skunks, raccoons, possums, squirrels – that lurked in the mossy shade behind her home. I’d pretend to tap dance on the back porch, surrounded by the dishes of cheese and meat and milk. I’d jump off the raised concrete, run to the hollow tree on the sunny side of her lawn, and leave some fruit for the fairies and the slugs. It was always the slugs that showed.
As for my uncle, he was always in and out. Between Jeep drives with some girl (or, I now know, guy), he would, much to my dismay, loudly return home for a Coke-flavoured belch and a fresh pack of cigarettes. He never brought a girl home with him. Instead, he tracked the mud on his thick black sneakers in the door, down the hall, and into his room, his childhood room, from which Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy could be heard at any hour. For decades, Big Red had languished in that room, deep at the back of his closet. Today, she would ride again.
He laid Big Red on the floor and, legs shaking beneath his straining stomach, demonstrated how to mount. “It’s a penny-board,” he reminded me, “good size to start out with, for a kid.” I bristled at the word kid but stepped on, my own legs shaking even more than his had.
I gave the thing a push with my bare foot and stumbled, landing hard on my knees in the middle of the living room. The coffee table rattled. I fought tears.
“See, Michael, no,” said my grandmother. “She’s not – eight’s just too young.”
But I read adult books and sheet music and self-identified as an agnostic!
“No I’m not,” I declared, claiming Big Red as my own.
I practised for the remainder of the hour, until my knees and the heels of my hands glowed the same shade of pink. Eventually, my grandmother called me to the couch. She presented me a chicken patty on a bun, all coated liberally with mayonnaise, and a pickle besides. I ate dutifully. When finished I made a demand of my own: that she accompany me outside while I practised the board. After some needling, we went: me with Big Red and she with a pack of Camels.
The neighbourhood street ended abruptly at the cul-de-sac I had nicknamed ‘circle hill’. Circle hill was steep and covered with sand, the asphalt likely last paved before I was born. At the moon-shaped foot of the hill, gravel and dead pine needles marked the seam between pavement and grass. Beyond was a thick grove of pine trees we’d nicknamed the Hundred Acre Wood. From the top of the hill, I could make out beige lakes of sand and pine below.
My grandmother stood beside me, clad in her usual uniform of all-black clothing and a head of bright-orange curls. She lit a cigarette and placed an upturned wrist on her hip.
“Now, Sarah,” she began. “I really don’t like you going down the hill on such a little board.”
“Didn’t you let Dad and Uncle Michael do it?”
“I let them do a lot of things I’d never let a child do now.”
Child. There it was again! I huffed. “Just watch me do this, and if I get hurt, I won’t do it again. Deal?”
My grandmother took a long drag.
“And smoking isn’t safe, either,” I grumbled.
My grandmother stepped aside.
I placed my left foot at Big Red’s head, paddling twice with my right before descending the hill. The sun blessed the crown of my head. My curls formed a frenzied halo. I was full of the sound of the wind which licked my winged wrists and ribs and nervous ankles as the wheels ground beneath my feet. All was, for a moment, in the air.
At the entrance to the Hundred Acre Wood, I at last stumbled from the board, landing on all fours. Big Red glided into a patch of yellowed grass beside me. I knelt for a moment, confused at the sudden end to my small eternity. The birds sang. The pines gusted. Quaking like a foal, I rose from my bloody kneecaps and stumbled toward the board, shaking sand from her belly as blood dripped onto my socks.
My grandmother, seeming a black and orange dot amid a cloud of smoke, called my name.
As I waved back, I felt fast, as if still suspended mid-flight.
Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. Author of two chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press, 2021) and THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit, 2021), they have also had work featured in Electric Literature, Bitch Magazine, The Offing, and elsewhere. Cavar navel-gazes at www.cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.
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