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When Daddy is hunting, I always cheer for the rabbit.
For the past week, Skeetah has been sleeping in the shed, waiting for the birth. Every night, I waited until he cut the light off, until I knew he was asleep, and I walked out of the back door to the shed, stood where I am standing now, to check on him. Every time, I found him asleep, his chest to her back. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.
He sucked on his arm and played with the dangling skin of his ear, like he does when he watches television, or before he falls to sleep. I asked him once why he does it, and all he would say is that it sounds like water.
Daddy spins away from us like a comet into the darkness.
China’s next puppy is black-and-white. The white circles his neck before curling away from his head and across his shoulder. The rest of him is black. He jerks and mewls as Skeetah lays him on the blanket, clean. His mewl is loud, makes itself heard among the crickets; and he is the loudest Mardi Gras dancing Indian, wearing a white headdress, shouting and dancing through the pitted streets of the sunken city.
The shower we needed was out in the Gulf, held like a tired, hungry child by the storm forming there.
Skeetah ignores everyone like they’re pits of inferior breeding.
He has eyes the color of bleached-out asphalt, and when he smiles, they shrink to fingernails in his face.
All the checkout lines are long. All the steel baskets are full. Skeetah rocks from side to side on his feet, and me and Big Henry bump into each other and don’t know what to do.
the puppies had just opened their eyes, and then the first one died, and then each day after that, every time his cousin walked out back to his doghouse, he would find another puppy dead, so small and hard that it was difficult for him to imagine that they might have once lived.
In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.
He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts.
The meat is stringy and hard, tastes of half red spice from the hot sauce, which has turned the bread pink, and half wild animal. I bite and I am eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees.
This is the closest drink to real fruit juice we’ve ever had in the house. Mama used to put it in the cart while I rode in the basket through the grocery store, wedge the red punch alongside me in the seat so the jug turned my leg cold. But I liked it, because later in the truck that didn’t have any air-conditioning, my leg would stay cold, like a piece of ice melting in my hand.
He splashes water that catches firelight and turns red. Drops, like fireworks from the sky, hit Skeet. Under the cicadas, I imagine that I should be able to hear it sizzle.
Papa Joseph is no more than overalls and gray shirts and snuff and eyes turned blue with age.
The ceiling in the living room fell in years ago, so now it’s easy to see through it to the attic above, where the beams of the roof are showing in snatches. Skeetah tries to jump and hoist himself up, but even though he can jump that high, he can’t grab the beam because the plaster that sticks to it like barnacles makes it difficult for him to grab it.
his calluses are like pebbles embedded in the soft sandy skin of his hand, where Daddy’s whole hands are like gravel.
Egrets picked their way through the grass, attentive and showy as fussy girlfriends at the cows’ sides.
We run out the door, scatter the chickens before us, and they whirl about like crape myrtle petals blown loose by summer rain. Brown and rust red and white, the only sound the swish of their wings.
Away from the Pit, the pine trees reach skyward, their green-needled tops stand perfectly still. Once in a while, they shiver in the breeze that moves across their tops. They seem to nod to something that I cannot hear, and I wonder if it is the hum of José out in the Gulf, singing to himself.
Skeetah wets his fingers again, but this time he wipes away the droplets of blood that have gathered on my legs like summer gnats. He wipes them away in dabs, licks his fingers again, wipes. He has the same patient look Mama had on her face when she used to find us crusty in public, smears of Kool-Aid along our mouths, crumbs on our cheeks. She cleaned us like kittens.
A rabbit sits, watching us, as we make the halfway mark around the circle of the field and its quiet house. It twitches its ears, stares at us in profile, one large black eye like a wet marble in its face, wide and glazed as if it is seeing something supernatural.
Wait, his lacy knuckles say.
The house is plain from all angles: its white is faded to tan by the sun, and all the windows are shut with white curtains drawn over them. It’s a blind house with closed eyes.
and I don’t know if he’s telling me to be quiet or calling my name.
refrigerators rusted so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika,
Junior crouches next to Daddy. In the dirt next to him, a beer bottle, half full, is screwed into the sand.
The seat is peeling away at the seams like plastic Kraft wrappers,
The dash and the steering wheel and the glass are coated in dust turned candy shell hard.
When we went to school, Daddy brought Junior to Mudda Ma’am, who had white hair she’d braid into pigtails and loop over her head, and who I never saw wearing anything other than a housedress. She watched kids for money while their parents were at work. She watched Junior until he was old enough for Head Start, which is when her memory started going, so she let the kids go with it. Tilda, her only daughter, moved back in with her to take care of her, but mostly spent her time wearing a dirt path between Javon’s house and her own for crack. I wonder if Junior even remembers Mudda Ma’am. He never
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Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.
I wade through a tide of kids at the door, all Junior’s age or younger, trading small candies they are sucking from wax paper and salty cheesy chips and neon cold drinks
