Lake Hartwell, South Carolina Beth Gilstrap
It's past lunch hour and Grandmother is still wearing her housecoat.
Tings and sprays bounce from the stovetop. A glimmer of steam gathers on her
upper lip, not sweat, mind you—not sweat. The peonies on the fabric are wide
and heavy pink like they'd fall over if they were out in the side garden as
they always are during late April. But we are in July and July is sweet and
frayed, the grass only green down on the banks of the lake. Me and Juna
played chicken on rafts all morning. Our suits still damp when we put them
on, hers only halfway up as we ran out the door, letting it slam too hard,
hearing Grandmother say, "Watch my nerves. For Lord's sake. My nerves." By
the time we come in, we're striped, our torsos a wormy kind of white, our
fingertips wrinkled. We're begging for the fried squash and okra that
Grandmother had in heaps by this point, for smushed up peaches meant for the
ice cream churn, for teeth-cracking chunks of rock salt, the wayward bit of
a watermelon seed, you know, that stringy bit you can't get down no matter
how hard you try so you wind up spitting the seeds on Grandmother's floor
even though you wasn't supposed to be eating them in the house cause y'all
know better, cause she done told you twice to get your butts outside. And
once you're outside, the menfolk stand in a circle around their cache,
taking stock of m-80s and bottle rockets and whirling spiders and whistling
dixie's, which was basically the same, but hateful, so hateful you could
feel it blow your cousin's pinky off even though some grownup yelled "fire
in the hole" and dumbass just stood there in a sulphur fog like it was all
happening to someone else, and next year when you and Juna went in at lunch
you were practically teenagers and ate rolled up honey ham cigars and
Chicken on a Biscuit Crackers—those buttery rectangles with chemical chicken
flavor—instead of spitting seeds on the floor cause now y'all were good
girls, making sure to let Grandmother lie down awhile and have herself a
little peace in the back room with the big box fan and a single bed and her
thin, yellow sheets.
Beth Gilstrap is the author of I AM BARBARELLA. She has work in or coming from Ninth Letter,
WhiskeyPaper, Split Lip, Cheap Pop and others.
Read her postcard.
Detail of photo on main page courtesy
of Michele Markel Connors.
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