Blanket Girl lives under a blanket. She has been living under the same blanket for twenty years. It’s a pink cotton world to the Blanket Girl. She has a toy train that she takes for trips under the blanket. It Choo choos and chugs around her crossed-legs while her balloon heart in the bag that is pumping in her ribs keeps lubbing and dubbing, keeping alive. The train is a Thomas train, wood and blue. It was her next door neighbor’s. She stole it from his house when he wasn’t looking, when he was playing with a GI Joe. She put the train under her shirt, in the small of her back, pinned between her jeans and her back skin, and stood straight, still, so it would stay there. So, her neighbor couldn’t see it there, resting on her back skin.
This was when her heart was strong and real. The train started to slide and she leaned backwards, made up some excuse about a sore stomach, hoping the pressure of leaning backwards would stop its descent. Her neighbor cried, didn’t want her to go home but she did anyways. He always cried when she was leaving. He thought she was lying, which she was, but not about stealing, about not wanting to be there. The very proximity of their houses was the only basis of their young friendship. Blanket Girl would go to school, civil, but play with the other kids, while he would sit with his toys by the orange steel doors and brick walls of the school. He needed walls, never wanted to run into the yard with grass and soccer balls and screaming kids in air that makes your lungs cold. He needed walls. But Blanket Girl never wanted those walls.
So with the train in her back, Blanket Girl walked out of her neighbor’s brown house. Around the side, her neighbor still crying inside, she opened the side gate to her grey house, walking like a Christmas ornament, a string pulling her straight from the top of her head, dangling in danger. The train stayed, parked in her back. When she was furrowed in the shadows of the hedge that wound in the fence between brown and grey houses, she lifted the back of her shirt and held the Thomas train in her hand, small and with a smiling face. It was hers.
Now the train runs under the hot blanket. Now she doesn’t have a heart. She wears a backpack that delivers meds to her on her program. The yellow liquid through the tube she can always see on the inside of her left breast is thick like a banana flavored penicillin. It isn’t penicillin though. But, the blanket is a blanket. A real cotton one. A peach on the inside salmon outside world. The constant friction of the blanket on the top of her head pushes and pulls away some of her hair. Sometimes, the cotton is hot against this clearing for skin. The spot is the only red in her pink cotton world – or what she thinks is red, because she can’t see the top of her head under the blanket, in the dark, without a mirror. She can only feel the hot, that she imagines red.
