Fiction

The storm started coming through just then, the line pop popping with electricity, my mind wandering and thinking about sparks coming up through the holes in the receiver. 

“Mama, I got to go. The connection’s bad. You’re breaking up.”

Only this time I wasn’t lying when I said that.

The storm came and took the power with it. I had filled up the tub with water already. We   didn’t have much food in the fridge to start, but I packed what I could on what was left of the ice. Nothing would last in this heat anyhow.

Shelby thinks it’s all a game and I do a good job of not convincing her otherwise. We play pretend outside all morning, because I figure it’s more natural to be sweating out of doors than to be soaking through our skivvies in the house. I let her run around the yard with no shirt, even though I know she’s getting too old for that.

From time to time, Mother says Shelby will pay me back for all I’ve done. She will be one wild heathen of a teenager too. I don’t say so, but I think no such thing. Shelby is smart in all the ways I am not. She will make better for herself. She will not be like me. And for that I am glad.

This afternoon, when the sun dipped down, she and I came out back to dig around in the wet dirt, pulling weeds out of my someday-flowerbeds. I don’t know what the protocol is on this kind of thing, or what the ideal weather is for yard work, but what I do know is the green strings come out easy this way, after a storm, just like plucking my eyebrows after a shower.

Next to me, Shelby holds up one earthworm after another for me to see, all of them washed up with the deluge, whipping themselves wiggly-confused from her fingers.

My child takes care of living creatures. Always has. When she was smaller, her daddy used to take her scouting for animals at night. We’d all hop in the truck and take the big flashlight, scanning the woods for their eyes, seeing how they reflected like mirrors when you shine on them. A green pair meant a deer; yellow dots were for coons. Once we went to the pond and saw pairs of red eyes glowing back, peeking from just above the water—gators they were—and Shelby started crying at their plain meanness.

I tease her just now and say that worm would make some good bait. “Where’s my fishing pole? Let’s go catch something.”

“No mama!” She squeals. “This isn’t a fishing kind of worm.”

“Well, what kind of worm you think it is?” 

She sits and I can tell she’s thinking real hard. “It’s a breeding worm. We should keep it to make more worms and then we’ll have a worm farm all to ourselves for all the fishing we want.”

My ex-husband was good for breeding, even if he was good at leaving too. Suit yourself, I told him. Don’t come around here again. I was fine either way, to tell you the truth. I hadn’t given him too many reasons to stay. I only loved him because he gave me Shelby, which is all I really wanted to begin with.

It’s a wonder Shel is as pretty as she is. Robbie wasn’t a good-looking man, nothing handsome about him. His feet, I swear, they were tough as hide, made me cringe when he would wrap his legs around mine in the bed. But he was nice to dogs and I thought he might be nice to children and he was. He was good with Shelby, even when she was a baby. He didn’t ask me many questions, which was fine with me, because I didn’t have many answers.

I know Shelby misses him fiercely. I’m sorry I don’t feel the same.

“Shel, what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m making my worm a home.”

“In my good china?”

“It’s the only kind of bowl we never use.”

I didn’t argue because I knew it was true.

A dandelion, some dirt, a leaf—a nice home for a bottom feeder. Holding the thing in her palm, all curved and exposed, it leaves a trail of dirt along her hand. Shelby has my hands, I think. Otherwise, my babies do not look like me. The both of them, the spitting image of their fathers. See already my traits do not carry. They do not take after me.

When I got pregnant in high school, they sent me away to have the baby. Nowadays, girls just go away for hours, but then, we were the girls who went away for months, months taken to give away our babies. The home for girls where they sent me was a big old house in Charleston, and we all slept in one room, like some hospital ward in an old war movie. At night there were moans from the heat and humidity, from swollen bellies and ankles. Someone was always sniffling in the dark.