A STORY by NILES BALDWIN
Hee Haw Means I Love You
We came up with it on a seesaw, floating between how our bodies had grown.
I kiss him by the arm when I wake up with fever and he gets caught faking sick so he can stay home from school too. The sick on my lips might leak through his skin and get in the blood and by the time it was second period he’d be coughing into his binder. The kids would scrape their desk legs away on the classroom floor until the teacher noticed and sent him to the nurse. He’d have no need to fake it and he’d feel the medicine fill into him from the cup the nurse would give him to drink. The emergency contact would pick him up while our phone was busy with our mother calling her mother, talking about me covered with blankets, higher up onto my face the more sick I got.
Tell grandma hee haw, I’d say, through the wool to my mom and through the phone she’d tell her what I said, and she’d relay to say the same back to me. Her sick little donkey.
Our mother would answer the doorbell when her friend dropped off her other son, sick too. I’d punch him where I kissed his arm. We’d have soup for lunch to remedy the both of us, sharing a blanket and our temperatures triple digits and the tv blaring so we can laugh away the time until sleep.
We use the last of our day’s strength to move our beds closer together. The bed legs scrape the wood floor, and we hope the scratches will disappear in the night.
We place our hot hands on our hot foreheads and say, oh goodness, you’re boiling. Then we look out the same window that looks out to the lawn and say hee haw until our mouths move slower and slower and sleep.
Hee haw hee haw hee haw hee haw, and in the mornings we say it like this too.
Niles Baldwin (he/him) lives and writes in Kittery, Maine. His work can be found most recently in MAYDAY, HAD, and Heavy Feather Review.