If she were home, she would be in her room with the door closed, sitting in the middle of her bed, head bent over her pad of paper drawing shelter dogs from the Internet with chalk pastels, blue, pink, yellow.
She needs this distraction, this blurring of eyes, some filter through which she witnesses a world pressing her to dust. Her mother is iron and her brother, Bobby, the accused, is toxic lead, his too-red lips the only blot of color. The judge is honed in steel, the lawyers, gun metal. Each jury member is an angry stroke of charcoal-vertical slashes, leaning left, leaning right-like pencils in a cup. She occasionally blogs at Words in Place.Anny sees the courtroom in shades of gray. She’s published a small collection of eight stories, Pomegranate, a full-length collection, Rattle of Want, (Pure Slush Press, 2015) and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). Gay Degani has received honors and nominations for her work including Pushcart consideration and Best Small Fictions. Where was her father? Where was her handsome prince? Where in the world was Walt?
Oh, how she cried, rabbit nuzzling her neck, doves murmuring into her ears, but nothing gave her comfort while her bottom half was three feet away and shivering. She always worried he wouldn’t come back and one day he didn’t. Other times, Pop would lock doves, rabbit, and his precious daughter inside the wagon and tramp into town to curry drinks from the rubes who’d cheered his feats. What if the sheriff chased them out of town? It sometimes happened, and Pop would leap onto the wagon, whip the mule, and they’d take off faster than abracadabra, the rabbit jumping into his hat, birds flapping their wings, the girl’s top half in one wash tub, her bottom in another. Still, she wrung her hands before every performance.
“He loves us, even the rabbit and that stupid old mule.” “He takes care of us, doesn’t he?” whispered the birds. When she confided in the doves, they were sympathetic, cooing reassurance into her ears as they sat on her shoulders each morning, reminding her that everything would be okay because, after all, her father wasn’t really a doctor, but a magician, an illusionist, a prestidigitator! She fretted that one day she wouldn’t mend.
Though Pop claimed he went to doctor school once upon a time, something was always lost, a sliver off her kidney, a nick in her pancreas. She too was a prop because he sawed her in half from El Paso to Tallahassee and back, but always managed to join her top to her bottom before the next town, the next performance. She lived in a colorful mule-drawn wagon with her father, a snow-white rabbit, and three ring-neck doves he used in his act.
0 kommentar(er)
