“That’s not how you fold a fitted sheet,” my naked 85-year-old grandmother said, tossing it back at me like a wet bluegill. I let it hit my bare chest and slide to the wooden floorboards between us.
The smell of pine tar and mothballs still lingered in cabin seven, mingling with the sharp scent of the bleach I’d just mopped into the knots of the old spruce flooring. Outside, a woodpecker drilled into the dead elm by the showers—three fast taps, then silence. Same rhythm as last spring. “Same friggin’ elm, same damn tar pits and same fuckin’ hiking trails” Granny had a goiter and naked grandpa was having a revival and “Hallelujahin” all over the place by resting his chin on his fiddle. Singing, “Shell we gather at the river.” However, it was only a leaking faucet in mama’s converted, little yellow school bus, that could sleep the Grand Ole Opry.
I scooped the sheet back up, fingers brushing against the frayed edge where Granny’s tomcat Clovis had sharpened his claws for fifteen winters. The fabric smelled like lye soap and the faintest hint of the kerosene we used to chase bedbugs last August. Somewhere beyond the screen door, one of the Winnebago regulars started tuning his banjo—off-key as always, plucking the same four notes like a castrated creek frog.
Mama’s bus shuddered as the faucet drip hit a coffee can she’d rigged beneath the sink. The metallic ping underscored Grandpa’s wheezy hymn, his fiddle now tucked between sagging chins as he scratched at a mosquito bite on his left buttock. “Homer,” Granny snapped, pointing at the ceiling with her corncob pipe, “you best get the ladder ‘fore the swallows nest in them rafters again. Last year’s guano took the varnish right off Doc Henderson’s bald spot.”
Early this morning I arrested my twin sister, Annachelle, after reciting her, her rights. “You have the right to have a lawyer present, blah blah blah,” for walking too fast on the hiking path. I had a siren that I cranked, it resembled a hurdy-gurdy, strapped to my keester, plus a crash helmet with a blue light, gorilla glued to the top. She had both middle fingers raised high, her patchouli oil stinging my eyes as I cuffed her with bungee cords from Grandpa’s Winnebago.
The ladder groaned under my weight as I climbed toward the rafters, my bare feet slipping on the rungs where Clovis had sharpened his claws. Above me, swallows darted through the broken shingles, their wings whispering secrets in the musty air. Something warm and wet splattered across my shoulder—not guano, but a fat raindrop that had seeped through the roof. Outside, the first storm of spring gathered over the tar pits, turning the sulfur bubbles into a slow, guttural orchestra.
