What If World

by Randall D. Brown

I alight upon the branch in the willow tree with the secret knothole full of crystals, stream-smoothed rocks, dried daffodil petals.

"There you are," Annie Rydell says. How strange to see the elfin features —the milk-white face, the thin layer of freckles, the tiny nose and ears, the wild red hair—that appear in the stories I tell myself. Annie as the porn store clerk, the subway R.E.M. fan, the wife behind the surgical mask, the agoraphobe confronting the white birch woods.

We are ten. In the next moment my mother will reach up and grab Annie's leg, will get in the way of Annie's tumble through the branches. My mother will pick her up, shake Annie as if she isn't real, and spit, "I'm tired of your mother fucking my husband."

The white streak of my mother's hair will burn. Her face will curl up into a fist she will hurl at Annie. Annie could fall backwards from the blow, except my mother will hold her in her too-tight grasp.

I will fall too, unhook my mother's fingers and push my mother away from Annie and to the ground. Her head will bounce off a root. She won't wake up right away.

I will hold Annie's arms, imprinted with my mother's nails, only she will twist away, run past the ten houses on Meadow Lane to her own house. I will climb back up to the branch and gaze down with my bird's eye upon my fluttering mother under the umbrella of the weeping willows.

But that is the next instant. Now Annie and I sit, our hands interlaced. Her breath smells of Swedish Fish; her lips glitter with pixie stix dust.

"I could never unlove you," she says. The crystals in the secret knothole, only the ones she sprinkles with the dust and breathes upon seven times, protect me at night, allow me to sleep despite the fact that someone could bury me alive, the house could catch on fire, or murderers could come with swords and firebrands.

"But what if you didn't live here?" I ask. "What if you were born in France or Australia?"

"That could never have happened."

Sometimes there's silence and I cannot even hear her breath.

"The stars," she says. "Let's wait for them. I think they're just there."

"Why just there?"

"So we can wait for them."

I didn't understand completely, not then.

Maybe I tell Annie then how she is my best friend. How I cannot sleep without her breath, cannot talk without halting when she's away. Maybe I tell Annie Rydell there is the willow tree and her —and all the rest is unlove.