the sunlight bowed down, and the lightning
bugs weren’t yet out. The city lights just on, we threw
our whiffle ball bats in the lush yard, and ran between this
world and that one, taking two steps at a time up to our
steamy back porch where last year a hummingbird had trapped
herself inside a plastic bucket of bleach left outside the door,
her green and purple wings shimmering and bent as she buzzed
inside the soppy solution next to a scrubbed rag made
from dad’s old underwear. On some nights like this one,
when we knew we were driving to the river house in the morning,
mom had us take turns in the bathtub. My brother went in first,
singing The Beatles in his blue bathrobe, a towel swinging from his hand.
A slush of water welled through the pipes, shaking the walls
as it nearly ran over the bathtubs edge. From the couch in the next
room I yelled and told him to shut the faucet off, afraid there wouldn’t
be more of that tepid-ness for me to run through
my mud-caked hair. This night, he emerged, a frightened look
on his face. I rushed around him to get to my Cinderella bath powder.
He said to tell Jesus hi. An instant, his words shrouded the room,
coloring the air, burning it and making everything smell electric.
I knew he believed what he was saying, I knew he was too old
to imagine it, I knew that here was yet another thing
that he knew well that I did not.
