and it dived back over the mattress's edge. If Sandy sat very still in a forest filled with every kind of wild flower, chipmunks and squirrels would come up to take nuts from her fingers and lay their tiny warm heads against her thigh. She heard the turtle plodding along in the underbrush, eating soft leaves and meaty mushroom caps, the baby bear with a velvet bow tie listening patiently while the caterpillar, in his top hat, gave a speech in the style of Abraham Lincoln, talking mostly about Divine Providence but sometimes about Divine Intervention.
* * *
Sun baked the house. Like bread in the oven, she felt her mushy insides changing into a substance both dry and white. She was thirsty for water, for grape juice, for Sprite with crushed ice in super-sized wax cups, for a cold piece of watermelon, for a teacup full of homemade lemonade. And there was water and lots of it somewhere behind the plastic, a green lime quarry, or a man-made lake, maybe even an ocean. She heard the wet slap against sand and rocks and mud, and she pushed her tongue against the black electrical tape and for an instant hallucinated sucking on an ice cube, sitting in a baby pool, drinking from a cold can of Coke.
It was cute how her brother, when he was little, leaned against her legs, how he'd go around to the neighbor's front lawns eating the stale bread thrown out for the birds. Sometimes he'd take off all his clothes and run naked around the house. He was a preoccupied little kid. Once she asked what he was thinking and he said, “The big bang theory,” and threw himself onto the couch. Another time he found a baby rabbit in the garage and squeezed its stomach so hard blood gushed out of its nose. The frog he'd found in the back woods had an orange belly and crazy eyes. He'd caught a catfish in the graveyard pond. Its skin was like black rubber and he'd pulled its whiskers off on the asphalt driveway, cut its heart out with an old hunting knife. The heart looked like a piece of wet gravel and her brother skewered it on the tip of the blade and carried it into the house.
She'd watched from behind the peonies, deciding to punish him, to take his little red race car and hide it under the mulberry bush. Winter rains turned to hard ice and encased the tiny automobile;snow covered it like white frosting on a Danish. She stared at the dream car swerving left, the expression of the Italian driver confident and intense. Oh-u? Oh-u? Oh-u? The bird had attracted others and they were having a meeting, deciding how best to get her out. The blue jays, who thought of themselves more like marines than civil servants, wanted to bust the window, lead her out through the shards of splintered glass. The egret, a coy international spy, wanted to infiltrate the house solo, pin the man to his chair with its long lancelike beak, while all the other birds flew down the hall, pecked through the plywood door, and set the girl free. A flock of seagulls wanted to tear the man's eyes out, then send the water rats in to finish him off. There were other proposals, the robin's call for peaceful negotiations, the owl's for covert night maneuvers. Sandy listened until everyone started to talk at once, and the black crow said that there wasn't much time left and shook lemons from the tree to get everyone's attention back to the matter at hand. But what was time to her? A jewel beetle made its way across the ceiling like a floating emerald. The faucet pondered a melody of drips. The shy gecko stalked a fringy centipede. He was time, time was his heartbeat, time was his breath.
“Fourscore and seven years ago,” the caterpillar began, “all beings were dedicated to the universal notion that every animal is created equal. We were highly resolved in those days to the proposition that the dead did not die in vain, but for the greater good of these woods. That was when,” the caterpillar swayed hisbody to the right with whiplike rhetorical force, “this place was
* * *
Sun baked the house. Like bread in the oven, she felt her mushy insides changing into a substance both dry and white. She was thirsty for water, for grape juice, for Sprite with crushed ice in super-sized wax cups, for a cold piece of watermelon, for a teacup full of homemade lemonade. And there was water and lots of it somewhere behind the plastic, a green lime quarry, or a man-made lake, maybe even an ocean. She heard the wet slap against sand and rocks and mud, and she pushed her tongue against the black electrical tape and for an instant hallucinated sucking on an ice cube, sitting in a baby pool, drinking from a cold can of Coke.
It was cute how her brother, when he was little, leaned against her legs, how he'd go around to the neighbor's front lawns eating the stale bread thrown out for the birds. Sometimes he'd take off all his clothes and run naked around the house. He was a preoccupied little kid. Once she asked what he was thinking and he said, “The big bang theory,” and threw himself onto the couch. Another time he found a baby rabbit in the garage and squeezed its stomach so hard blood gushed out of its nose. The frog he'd found in the back woods had an orange belly and crazy eyes. He'd caught a catfish in the graveyard pond. Its skin was like black rubber and he'd pulled its whiskers off on the asphalt driveway, cut its heart out with an old hunting knife. The heart looked like a piece of wet gravel and her brother skewered it on the tip of the blade and carried it into the house.
She'd watched from behind the peonies, deciding to punish him, to take his little red race car and hide it under the mulberry bush. Winter rains turned to hard ice and encased the tiny automobile;snow covered it like white frosting on a Danish. She stared at the dream car swerving left, the expression of the Italian driver confident and intense. Oh-u? Oh-u? Oh-u? The bird had attracted others and they were having a meeting, deciding how best to get her out. The blue jays, who thought of themselves more like marines than civil servants, wanted to bust the window, lead her out through the shards of splintered glass. The egret, a coy international spy, wanted to infiltrate the house solo, pin the man to his chair with its long lancelike beak, while all the other birds flew down the hall, pecked through the plywood door, and set the girl free. A flock of seagulls wanted to tear the man's eyes out, then send the water rats in to finish him off. There were other proposals, the robin's call for peaceful negotiations, the owl's for covert night maneuvers. Sandy listened until everyone started to talk at once, and the black crow said that there wasn't much time left and shook lemons from the tree to get everyone's attention back to the matter at hand. But what was time to her? A jewel beetle made its way across the ceiling like a floating emerald. The faucet pondered a melody of drips. The shy gecko stalked a fringy centipede. He was time, time was his heartbeat, time was his breath.
“Fourscore and seven years ago,” the caterpillar began, “all beings were dedicated to the universal notion that every animal is created equal. We were highly resolved in those days to the proposition that the dead did not die in vain, but for the greater good of these woods. That was when,” the caterpillar swayed hisbody to the right with whiplike rhetorical force, “this place was
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