WIP (Morphie Donna)

                                     Time is a game played beautifully by children.

                                                                                 --Heraclitus.

I wasn’t a child of time, had no parents, no forebears. I issued from a daydream drifting through afternoons wherever windows were left open, cloth drapes sucking in-out with breezy sunlight. It was a virgin birth technically but one beyond religion. I sprang from loneliness, the musings of a three-year-old, a kid kneeling on a floor playing with wooden blocks. The blocks were primitive toys, numbers and letters of the alphabet stamped on them and each cast in a primary color. As the child stacked them and built little hovels or skyscrapers she was learning about the culture that came before, that bequeathed her a mathematics and language. I knelt beside her, her phantom tutor, learnt alongside her these ways of measuring and expressing a world perpetually threading through rebirth and obliteration. Something about my nearness, my calm and silly voice, inspired trust. She noticed my shadow on the carpet next to hers, looked to the left and there I was. 

Who are you? She asked. I’m Donna. My mommy’s in the next room where God is. 

Hi, I told her, I’m Morphie. I’ve been sent here from somewhere inside you, to keep you company. 

We played alongside one another a quiet while before she turned to me concerned, whispered, Shhh…don’t be loud. God doesn’t like it loud. He’s angry today because he and Mommy aren’t good at talking. 

I told her okay. This child Donna, she seemed concerned beyond her size and years. Once a tower had been built, I noticed, she didn’t knock it into a tumble as most children might, but removed the top block then the block beneath it. The tower, with use of her tiny-fingered hands, disassembled itself, lay disorderly in a scatter around her. 

Sunlight slid slowly across the floor, like the tide. It was high tide in this room which had never known an ocean and hot light found us kneeling next to each other taking turns turning knobs on an Etch-N-Sketch. My new friend Donna had let me go first. She’d handed me the red plastic toy with white knobs and with a child’s version of patience taught me how to manipulate the knobs left and right to guide a thin black line across the toy’s screen. A drawing of a bird emerged from the ongoingness of a line unbroken. What kind of bird was it, I asked, but it made no sense to ask, I should have known, since I was the one drawing it. It’s a kind that flies, the girl told me. She was distracted, somewhere within herself. I was still new enough to remember what it’d been like to be part of her, a thought-feeling in a child’s everywhere brain. I could see her kneeling, chin raised slightly, and could discern from bodily memory the reason for her dreaminess. She was hearing birds in her head. She was following them on the wing. Songs and chatter and nests built at a speed uncommon among their species. There were birds alive in the hypothetical, imaginary but evidence of chipper migratory corollaries elsewhere across the sky. Trees in her zoning-out, trees as well beyond this sunlit window. Hello birdie, she said. Where’s it flying? 

To Antarctica, I guessed. It was my bird but once I’d finished discovering it wing by claw by beak, it was complete and beyond me. 

Where’s that? 

A very cold place at the very bottom of the planet. 

Why’s it going there?

It’s meeting up with its family. It’s a place no one would think to look, a good place to hide a family. 

Why are they hiding?

They’re tired of being bothered. They’re stressed. Most places where they live, people live also. People tend to do bad things to them. Even the nice ones can be a problem, snatch them off branches and put them in cages. 

Are there cages in Antarctica?

No, there’s ice sheets, icebergs and glaciers. 

What’re those? 

They’re different kinds of ice, large and very large and sometimes small. 

They’re like birds then?

Yes, they’re like birds that way. 

The child splayed her hands palms down on the carpet, rotated the hands until fingers pointed toward her knees, then leaned forward. More words were coming to her. 

So it’s cold there. 

Very, very cold.

Can people live there?

Not many and even then not for long.

So how can birds? 

Well they travel there in flocks or one or two at a time. They have sensitive bones in their skulls that attune them to magnetic fields coursing along the earth. These lead them south to the very bottom of the earth, the South Pole. And there they bunch and bundle together, fluff out their feathers, puff up and blend the heat of their bodies to keep warm. They’ll huddle like that for months until the northern part of the earth gets warm again. Then they break apart their home flock and venture every which way, across every country, to find trees and windowsills. Hear those birds outside?

The child turned to look at the window.

They arrived months ago from Antarctica.

The child stood, laid a hand on my shoulder. She was standing very still, as if listening. Intricate tinsel-speech beyond a blaze of rectangle lifted height-wise to flutter with curtains and breeze-sounds. 

I moved to stand beside her but there was a clatter. The Etch-N-Sketch had fumbled out of grasp to the floor. When I bent to pick it up the little outline of bird set against its gray background was blurred. Part of a wing had vanished, one leg gone. 

Donna saw my confusion and explained, this was how the toy worked. 

Shake it, she told me. 

I shook it. 

After the first shake there were no wings, no tail. After the second, no bird. 

It’s okay, she told me. You can do another one. 

The gray screen was dull but shiny and the toy rattled when shaken, as if filled with silt or tiny beads. 

Too late, I told her. Our bird has flown. Goodbye Antarctica, hello North America. 

What’s that?

What?

Norf Ameriga. 

Everywhere outside, the continent where we live. 

Oh. She was standing at the window now, hands on the sill, leaning out. 

Every part of the yard, the trees, those houses out beyond the gravel drive, the people in them, they’re North America. It’s a big place and not many who live in it can actually feel it. 

Oh. She was in that other place, the feeling place on the furthest side of her. I’d come from there just minutes ago, maybe an hour ago, so I knew. Never disturb a kiddo who is traveling from one end of themselves to the other. 

Who’s God?

Hmmm? The girl removed herself from sunlight, looked over shoulder.

Who’s God? You’d mentioned God being angry at your Mommy. 

God’s my Daddy. That’s what Mommy says.

What’s he like?

He’s loud and he yells and when he puts me on his shoulders it’s fun but sometimes it’s scary. 

Forever the same story, some child holding me in their confidence to tell me versions of the same. Once there was a man or a woman and fate struck them softly; from that small calamity came pregnancy; nine months of strange formulation resulting in a child. This one was curious as others had been. This was my newest. She had known me but a short while but signaled such comfort. I was the first of a kind in her life, a friend. She had asked me for a name and on a whim I’d invented one. Morphie was from somewhere but where? Having sprung from a child’s daydream, the name sprang from me in turn. It was a summer’s afternoon outside and she asked if we might go out and play. There was a brick walkway between garage and house, there were odd and busy creatures, “pill beetles” her Mommy had called them, waiting beneath each brick. Lift one, count beetles. 

You lift one, I lift one, she said. Whoever counts the most beetles wins. 

Okay, I told her. Let’s go. She walked over and I said, hold on, stay put, then stepped into the shadow cast on the floor behind her. Together we walked that way, her ahead, me behind, out the room. Her mother was in the kitchen with towel slung over shoulder, ashing cigarette into Mason jar on a windowsill. Beyond window was a white fence and rows and rows of corn. They were tall and stood at attention like alien soldiers. Sun was sizzling insects about their flowery tips. The child was too short to catch a view but I could change size and height depending on who I looked at. I grew to a mother’s height and watched what a field can do when no living eye draws sight from it. It was a beautiful afternoon. We asked to go out and become part of it. 

                       *

Everything outside told us more about what we were, so many things without names so she’d waddle over and point. This? she’d ask and I’d tell. Her mother would watch from a window washing dishes or from a stoop smoking and given how time flowed some of the far future would mix with those moments. Soon would come a time a mother would sit with a phone, cigarette in one hand, scrolling phone with thumb of the other. These were things I could see catching sight of a mother sitting nearby, half-watching her daughter trudge a yard. How the child might sit a quick two decades on this very stoop, doing same with her own. 

The cosmos here was a farm. It was a place beyond limits where fields were born season by season and on each occasion differently. To the west of the girl-child’s current waddle-spot, soybeans, squat and dusted leaves. To the east, wheat, golden flows in watery snaky patterns. Wind was also a playmate about this land and Donna would fight her own blonde from her face as it tagged her. She’d try chasing after to tag it back, would often stumble. Down she’d go, land on hands and knees, and I’d run to help her up. Wind was too fast and I’d whisper off to the side in wind-speech when Donna was talking through some queer monologue to herself, Hey, slow it down. Let the kiddo catch you once in a while. 

There was a cinderblock barbeque pit, a clothesline running between two metal poles. There was a ragged asphalt drive cut through this field-also-a-yard and on the other side three tall white and two black barns, the latter housing leathery vampiric hangs of tobacco. On a hot day late summer gusts of nicotine musk would float over and Donna would plug her nostrils with fingers. 

Opposite the drive was a wooden fence painted ancient chippy white and often we’d take fingernails and pry chips loose. Another game, who could pry away the largest piece unbroken. Delicate precise labor, required mature finger-control and patience. Sometimes I would snap my paint chips deliberately, let her win. Other times would ease a long thick wedge of paint off its plank and hold it before her. Never would she admit I was the winner. 

Trick was to select a chip ready for peeling, I advised. 

Curled along the edges, already curling off the wood, I'd say. She’d play at ignoring but her search thereafter became much more refined. Soon tiny fingers were peeling chips free like they were stickers from their sheets. That’s when an adult voice would call out, her mother’s. Donna! Stop whatever it is you’re doin’ over there, leave the fence be! A culvert was nearby so we’d wander over. Telescopic hardened pudding-like towers of dried mud. One every few steps along a trickly length of water, one end of culvert to the other. 

What’re these? 

These are crawdad mounds, I told her. 

She took a squat, bottom resting on backs of heels. With careful hand touched one. 

What’s a crawdad?

It’s an animal that lives near water, underground. It’s a crustacean, which is a big word that describes what armor animals of that kind wear. They have claws and antennae and little beady eyes and tails and are covered with a shell that keeps all their insides tight and together. 

Can you draw me a picture when we get home?

I could but I could also just imagine you one. 

Yes, please.

I pictured a crawdad, generic textbook illustration, brownish-red, an approximation of what I roughly remembered they looked like. The image bloomed in her head soon as I pulled one together in my own feeling-sight. 

Ew, it looks like a monster, she said. 

They’re not so bad or scary, I told her. They’re busy creatures and always occupied with making tunnels in the ground and towers to crawl out of, these holes. 

She was leaning over one such tower, one eye closed, other eye spying down the bubbly funnel of its dark. 

Somewhere down there is a crawdad, much much smaller than you. Imagine what it must be like looking up from the dark at some big eye. We’re so much larger; if you were down there hiding wouldn’t you be afraid as well? 

It’s okay, Mr. Crawdad, she said. I’m not gonna hurt you. I just wanted to say hello. 

Boys like to kick them, I told her. 

Kick them?

Boys I’ve known, soon as they see a mound, can’t help themselves and kick every single one, knock them over. 

Flash of mischievous guilt, child looks down. 

Want to know what it feels like?

I don’t wanna hurt Mr. Crawdad. 

It’s okay, I reassured her, when people are nearby they pull all the way down into the ground. Kick a tower over, they’ll rebuild it in a day. 

It was a sight, watching her negotiate the hazards of balance, one foot planting an anchor while the other lifted and snipped awkward kicks tower-wise. 

Mud buckled, crumbled. Sole of shoe scuffed it to a smear, moved to wipe itself clean on a patch of grass. Mound gone, hole remained. Child admired the handiwork. Tenacity and craft of creatures unseen. 

Mother’s voice would come running across the yard, calling for Donna to step away from that ditchwater. She’ll get her shoes muddy. She’ll make a mess only a bath can fix. Donna hated baths and soon as mother threatened, I felt it. 

It wouldn’t be so bad, I reassured her. You could pretend what it’s like to be a crawdad, down in water snug in a tunnel. We could splash around with no one watching and make a tower. She crossed the yard with her shadow, towards her mother, one of many mothers from the future brought to blend on a stoop, looking annoyed. There was mud on the girls’ knees and ankles, shoes and socks scummy. 

                *

These were heydey beginnings, for her several lifetimes, for me a few short years. We had privacy wherever we went. I was her talk-mate, symbiotic to her questions. She was curious without knowing meaning of the word and explanations were demanded. What’s that? Who and how? But why? When we shared time inside of a game, she could be bossy, would invent the rules and rehearse them with me only to change them on a whim, as she saw fit. Not fair, I would tell her then like her mother many times before, would have to describe what fair is. This was very abstract for her. In the end such discussions would always end with comparison of other people’s feelings with her own. What were feelings? That was the question that would come after, and I would summon my best wisdom pose and venture an answer. Never did she seem satisfied and often she would lose interest soon after I began talking. There were other mysteries to attend to, mosquitoes and spiders for instance. 

Living things that had arms and legs and a head yet were not human. It was a point of unending fascination, squinting to study their version of what passes for an eye or mouth. A mole found belly-up in the yard, fur matted by rain. Had it drowned? Had a cat caught it? A wasp’s nest tucked behind the motion sensitive flood light above the screen door rear of the house. We stood a careful distance to watch. Twitchy insects, nervous like adults after coffee; how their watch-gear bodies crawled in and out, in and out of little paper holes in the nest. Stay near, I whispered, let them be. Scare a wasp, they’ll sting you. What’s a sting, she of course asked, to which I responded, Their bottoms have needles and the needles have poison in them. They’ll stick you anywhere on your body, anywhere they can get to, squeeze poison into you. You won’t die, won’t even get sick, unless you’re allergic to wasp-poison. But it really, really hurts. You’ll cry, I promise, and you’ll regret you ever bothered them. A solemn look about her face as I described this. I was telling her of things she had no direct references for, from which to gather an accurate imagining. There was a lot of that. Me informing her of specific aspects of wilderness all about her. 

She knew a few truths. Early in our acquaintance she introduced me to certain absolutes, the circumference of a universe cut to a child’s size of witness. Never mind as she stumbled about grass or down a hallway I knew what she claimed was hers to offer, familiar with the broad reach of what that countryside drew close. This was Granddaddy’s house (pointing across a field to a small house slightly larger than the one we shared). This was Rusty (pointing to an Irish setter dozing in a dusty hole shaded beneath bushes near the house). This was Our Gawage (cinderblock garage five steps from the house’s side entrance). This was Mommy’s Cellar Door (on the other side of which were rickety wooden steps leading down to Mommy’s Preserves on a Shelf). 

Taking a seat on the back steps, she’d pat the step beside her, indicating I sit. From that vantage she aided my perusal of various buildings and oddities in the distance. Those? (Grain silos). That’s where Granddaddy put corn. Those? (Tractors parked beneath corrugated roofing). Those were Granddaddy’s tractors. There? (Large white barn). Granddaddy kept his combine there. And there? (White barn next to it). That’s where hay goes. 

How did she come to live there? This I knew, having sprang from her, but thought it useful to hear her explain for me as much as for herself. 

God and Mommy knew they were going to have a baby so they moved here. Granddaddy and Meemaw had run this farm for Mr. Raulston for longer than Mommy had been alive. When the baby was born, it turned out to be Donna. It was nice for Mommy being near Granddaddy and Meemaw and Mr. Buck and other people who help. 

This was the story, as she knew it. Before I’d gathered into a fully formulated awareness in her, then after brief gestation split from child-host and stood apart from her, willing audience to her chattiness and requests, I’d lived all about this place, within and beyond other lives. I’d passed through each principal person in Donna’s cosmology multiple times. In each case there was more to be accounted for, more difficulty than could be divulged without clean conscience to a child. It was not my place to challenge her, to press upon her a knowledge of certain disillusioning details. God was a drinker, for instance. Or Mommy was bored with life. 

It was my role instead to protect her from such things. To slow their ongoing approach toward her, often while she sat in a high-chair at the kitchen table looking from one face to the other, feeling the ambience of problems she hadn't lived long enough to be aware of, much less martial a vocabulary to accurately name. 

Her Mommy’s name was Lorella. God’s was Raleigh. For the longest while those would have been names for such feelings. 

        *

How old are you, she asked, and the truth I told then was divided. I’m three too, I replied. The next question of course was when was my birthday. A few months ago, I said; the confusion coming from her then was natural. I’m three because we were born the same time, but my true birthday came along a while after, when you first took notice of me. I’ve been here the whole time but until recently you hadn't noticed. She took this on authority and didn’t press. Being born and aging were still new to her. I sounded very certain, had given her no reason to doubt me. She was three she said and next she would be four. Already with fingers she could count far beyond her own age, to ten. 

The more we talked the more real I became, a conduit for inquisitive babble. I pre-knew whatever she told me yet never did this seem to surprise her. She taught me the quirks and shapes of pertinent discoveries and without patronizing a child’s pride I would add my own insights and adjustments. To the casual passerby, sight of our collusion would be typical, whimsical: a girl sitting on the living room or bedroom floor gesturing to the air, talking. Asking and replying, pushy with preferences and directions. Dolly’s sick, put her to sleep. She wants her temperature taken. Rub her back. Change her diaper. Don't touch the horsie. It likes to be left alone. 

In Donna’s hospital scenarios dolls were forever delirious with some grand fever. There were no doctors, only nurses, and besides dolls didn’t like doctors touching them. I would listen why, after asking for explanation, agree with the wisdom of her decision. She had come from a hospital only a few short years ago and nurses had handled her. She had gained expertise by osmosis, swaddled by kind and professional ladies. These dolls were sick as well because they had just been born. Where were their mothers? They had none. They had fallen from the ceiling to the playroom floor. Such was the nature of their common illness, they were motherless.

She dictated orders with such solemn concern. Those were serious afternoons and I could see in them much she would not understand until much later. 

The seasons came as they pleased, it seemed, often out of order. She didn’t know better. Windows began marching in place, snow scribbling sky to earth, and she’d beg me to dress her in outdoors clothes and boots and walk her through busy white air. You have to ask your Mom, I told her. She’s angry, Donna would say as way of justification, she’s said no already but if you asked she’d say yes. Then we could both go. 

Her Mommy hadn’t met me yet, I explained. 

Look on her face at that, evident until then she had taken my existence for granted. She didn’t know what existence was yet so didn’t yet have a grasp on what it wasn’t. Mommies only see children that are alive and have been born, I explained. It’s a mark of how adults look for things. Because I wasn’t born like you, I’m not visible, I’m a half of you no one sees. 

You’re making excuses, she said after a pause to think. You don’t wanna go outside so you don’t wanna ask. You think Mommy will say no if you ask but you’re wrong. 

This was our first argument and I celebrated it by withdrawing into a corner. She sulked a while also, scooted to turn her back to me, pretended to dress one of her dolls, Moochy, in a snow suit. She pulled a sock from her foot, worked it onto Moochy’s head, tucked it tight over ears for warmth. Moochy then lifted to window, girl-breath in blush on glass. We were still connected, fight notwithstanding. Wounded resentment flowed from one feeling-space to another and I transformed it into apology care-packaged as stubbornness. This child could stand a few minutes of silence, I knew, but no more than she could count. I coughed, sniffed, she looked over subtly, watching me from corner of an eye. I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t mean to disappoint you. I swear, if your Mommy knew I existed and could hear me, I would go right now and ask permission to go outside. 

Her anger didn’t last long. It was a small anger. She held fists out before me, unclenched and clenched them. Their squeezing into themselves was meager but forceful. I stepped out of my hiding place to join her, mirrored the gesture, fists held side by side, blooming then crabbing tight in slow unison. This calmed us. This a helpful rhythm to make use of, next time we argued, got angry. 

We’re like God, she said later. Kneeling next to one another arranging tiny furniture in rooms of a new Christmas dollhouse. 

We got angry and yelled at ourselves. 

I guess we did, I told her. She appeared to gather a lesson from this problem. 

We were God, you’re right, but look, we came back. 

I’m glad, she said. I don’t like it.

                    *

There was a summer then there was winter, a fall followed by spring. Seasons were being learned because she asked after them, so side by side we walked beyond bushes and beyond the asphalt roundabout near the end of the long drive. White fence lines held fields from crossing onto that lawn that Granddaddy cut every two weeks with a mower hitched to tractor. I told the story of a planet that revolved around its sun at a distance ideal for a warmth even and steady enough to foster life. Nothing alive could remain one shape, I told her. Look at what a day is. You go to sleep at night, in the morning wake. You eat and food goes down into stomach and later comes out poop and pee. Rhythms of dormancy and revivification advance with varying constancy each green or breathing thing. Seasons are the largest expression of this and arrive generally the same each year but differently according to their specifics and days. 

This is how a two-year-old becomes a three-year-old. 

This is how chickens become eggs. 

Having crossed the lawn we stood in far view of the house where Mr. and Mrs. Raulston lived. It was a fancy house, as Donna had heard her Meemaw often comment. Large trees called elms, which resembled so many earthbound clouds, clouds chained to ground as punishment, forced into servitude as pets, hung about the house and its fanciness. See those? I asked, heightening their existence by pointing. Donna looked at the finger then beyond. Girl-eyes travelled at speed equal to wind and found trees and trees at the end of it. When air gets chilly, their leaves will blaze from green to red and purple and yellow. Over a few days they’ll change their mind without thinking. Very pretty, like your Mommy in her best summer dress. But because they’re pretty, they’ll drop from their branches, color the ground. They turn to mush and feed the ground and roots beneath. Two seasons, two great steps later, tough buds untwist on those same branches and there they are, brand new leaves. Green again. But are these the same trees and the same leaves?

       This is boring, she said, reaching up to take hold of my pointing finger. Let's play. I was bored myself, I realized then, so thanked her. Her mother stood out of a crouch in a nearby garden and waved.

*

Meemaw was here, Donna told me. A bang and clatter of screen door from the mud room and Donna wrestling herself to unsteady legs; then with gravity as her marionettist, led out the room in a child’s rendition of a sprint. Voices from down the hall, a cough and cackle and a kind lady cooing "honey". I stayed put, next to the electric harmonium. We’d been playing four-handed songs of our own invention. After the child left, I sat enjoying the sound of the harmonium’s hum. There was a little fan in its side and when you pressed a key its tone emerged softly and once it achieved volume would hold and tremble a bit and breathe. 

They were in the kitchen. Sounds of cups and chairs, something being poured into something. Donna’s mother and another adult woman talking. This must be the girl’s grandmother, the woman who made the woman who made the girl. 

There was lunch, sound of spoon scraping potato salad from a bowl. Sandwiches assembled from several small plates laid about the table, plate with ham slices, plate with rips of fresh cold lettuce, plate with cuts of washed garden tomato. The bread was Wonderbread, I could hear the crinkle of its plastic untwisted, slices removed by the handful and stacked as well on a plate. I heard plastic-on-plastic tap-sounds and from that deduced Donna was in her high-chair, chomping blueberries and wielding her sippie-cup. Sometimes she would invite me to mealtime but often could read my reluctance; would leave me in the room by myself while she joined her parents and ate. 

After lunch came dessert. I was especially skilled at guessing desserts from sound alone. Metallic crackle of pie tin. Sucking thump of refrigerator door closing. Lemon ice-box pie, quick-to-make favorite of God’s or anyone who stopped by for a chat during summer. 

Donna begged for a slice. 

Her mother told her hush now. 

Kind-lady-voice said Lorella why not, let the child have a taste. 

There was a pause with maybe some frustration in it (I’d learned much about how Donna was often made to live in such pauses, Donna and much else). Tin-crackle, knife pressing and breaking graham cracker crust. Tap of gooey pie into hard plastic bowl. Bowl set before greedy Donna. 

Though out of sight in the kitchen, she was still with me, and this bright new flavor-texture filled my mouth as she chewed it. The gooey parts mixed with the crumbly cracker parts and were cold everywhere around mouth; swallowing we could feel the cold travel down our throats to stomachs. It was made from frozen lemon concentrate, as she’d once heard Mommy explain to her sister over the phone. The recipe was simple. Cool Whip and lemon concentrate mixed and poured and smoothed in a tin. None of these words were known to a girl’s understanding but here, during lunch, they came together as a flavor. 

This was her first taste of adult dessert, I heard her mother tell her grandmother. No coming back from that, just look at her. 

All finished? Grandmother asked. 

The girl begged for more. 

Grandmother told her no, hold still, time to get you cleaned up. Donna’s least favorite stage of a lunchtime ritual, mouth and chin and cheeks and hands wiped with a warm wet washrag. Bib undone, lifted from highchair and lowered to floor on uncertain feet. 

What’s a girl to do? Grandmother asked her laughing. 

I closed eyes and gazed out from Donna’s looking, moony benevolent country matriarch face looking back at her. The taste of the washcloth. One last firm wipe across bottom lip left behind an dank pungency. The girl dapped her lips, squinted. 

Not long after she came walking, grandmother behind her. I hid between wall and crib, in the corner. Often when she’d leave me in a room I’d welcome her back with a game; she’d have to search about and find me. This afternoon did the same. 

What you looking round for, honey? Grandmother asked. From my crouch-place I tracked the movement of legs across floor. 

Bi-fold closet doors were rolled open. Rear reaches of closet dug through. 

Behind clothes hamper, behind dresser. Toy chest thrown open and toys pushed about and uncovered. Had I made myself small? Had I hidden myself in the mouth of the rocking horse? 

Strategic in my hiding, I’d located myself nearest to her greatest aversion. Even leading her Meemaw in guided tour about the room, unconsciously she kept a distance from the crib. She didn’t want to inspire any notions of naptime. So thusly I hid in shadows beneath its elevated cage-bed. 

They looked a while longer, Grandmother asking her questions and girl half-ignoring, a huntress in frustration. It would be dangerous to linger, she and I both knew. Girl trundled to the door and called for Meemaw to follow. The woman stood a while in the middle of the room after girl had left. Gazed about the sights of small child culture. New dolls mixed with hand-me-downs on a shelf. Took an old porcelain in hand, held it. Tipped it back, angled it again upright. Clicks. Little clicks. The eyes. Weighted eyes of porcelain hand-me-down babydoll. Baby horizontal, they closed; baby upright, they opened. Grandmother walked to crib and laid this one among blankets. Then she walked softly out the room, a pair of legs out the doorway down the hall. Residue of feeling still about the doll, warmth of a hand fading from its dress-cloth. I reached an arm between bars and touched it. By time fingers found doll and cloth, it had become lukewarm. In lieu of Donna and under shadow of crib, I curled into myself and napped.

*

Stop that, Donna, leave yourself alone. A child naked in a tub with floating toys about her. While her mother bent to shampoo her hair into sudsy sculpture, child’s fingers would fumble between legs. I had snuck into hallway and from doorway watched that sight again, one I’d witnessed many times before, many children before, a mother laboring to clean a child. Sheepish indecision a bit in this mommy’s harping after her child’s behavior in bathwater. Was it proper to correct? Once on a phone with her sister Donna’s mother had asked for what she called parenting advice but since I heard only half the conversation couldn’t gather what exactly that was. Lately during baths she fools with herself, she told her invisible sister, the telephone. What the telephone said had a comforting effect, because mother stopped her pacing about the kitchen and shoulders lowered, relaxed. 

While Donna napped one afternoon I had overheard discussion of this same issue with grandmother. Don’t worry yourself, Meemaw advised, it’s a phase. Make a big deal over their privates, you might get them paying too much attention to them, and from there given years you’ll have a problem. It’s not diddling. It’s nothing. 

They were smoking in the dining room and out the window combines were crisscrossing golden wheat fields in miniature. There were two of them, blood red. They looked like fire ants or ticks, both of which Donna and I had recently studied. These were International combines, which Granddaddy endorsed over John Deere. This preference overheard several weeks earlier, man-folk conversation over barbecue. 

The child don’t know any better. Talk with her gentle, tell there’s a difference between public parts and private parts. You don’t remember but when you were the same age we had that same talk and look, you turned out fine. 

I played with myself? 

You surely did. Playin the banjo, me and your daddy called it. 

Oh Jesus, Mom! 

Oh get on now. If you can’t joke about it, it’s not natural. Point is, you did the same and outgrew it without any shaming on our part. You can screw a child in the head making them think too quickly like adults. It’s the way of nature. Don’t bring any of those worries with you to church on Sunday.

This was the child’s Meemaw, outlook imminently practical. None such overheard conversations warranted retelling to a girl who wouldn't understand. As I’ve said, I knew more than I offered. Another afternoon I heard the same Meemaw tell a niece she’d never once in her life had an orgasm, that such a thing was mostly for the man, that for the woman it wasn't an option. The niece, newly a woman, balked a bit. I don’t know, she pressed gently, I know some girls who really seem to enjoy themselves. Naw, the older woman responded, as if niece had been exposed to malicious rumor. I can't hardly imagine. How well you know those girls?

*

The room grew large in the dark, even with door opened to a crack. Hallway light slimming along edges of door and nightlight plugged into socket, dark became big, pulled walls and ceiling and floor away until it seemed crib was suspended in free-fall. 

After bath time came story time, mother sitting crib-side to read from books. Donna’s favorite books were ones she could touch, lifting to turn their stiff cardboard pages. Each new page featured some new animal, a plastic button to press to trigger a recording of cow or dog or sheep. Or at turn of page pictures stood up in 3-D, a house or school or barn. Bedtime books were ones that only Mommy was allowed to read. Mommy would sit in fold-out chair on other side of crib-bars and Donna was made to lay covered in blankets. Many stories she read featured the adventures of sleep. Children flying to the moon and stars, bears and beavers and other such mammals tucked beneath the ground hibernating. 

The child was unconvinced. This sleep propaganda, it lived in books but not in cribs. After book-time mother would stroke her head or rub her back and sing a song, as she would announce before beginning, “one of the old songs, one your Meemaw sang to me, and her mommy sang to her.” Lilt of a mother’s voice in low softish tones, melodies that began on islands long ago then crossed oceans as immigrants, settling in mountains a while before abandoning as well those desolate home places to locales more profitable for families. “Froggie Went A’Courtin”, “Lazy-Bones”. Children bedtime stories descended from an oral tradition, ones I’d heard many times before, different children under different circumstances, some high in mountains or hollers, others across oceans. Donna would fight the trance of nearing sleep under spell of lullaby a good ten, twenty, thirty minutes, but always the song would win. I’d lay awake watching. Her mother’s yawn not from tiredness but from boredom. Careful footsteps to the door then carefully easing door to a slender crack, lights off in hallway. 

Other regions of the house still lit, dull indoor twilight would find the door. Donna elsewhere inside her prone and warm body, eyelids twitching. I would watch the changes pass over her. The brain of the child active, growing. Slow waves traveled in even pulses from back of the brain to the front and neurons resumed their rootlike knitting towards one another. There were billions, far higher than the brain would or could ever count. Since I was neither alive nor not-alive, it wasn’t in my nature to sleep. Corner of the crib I’d sit crosslegged listening to night-sounds or the battery-powered mobile above turning like a constellation repeating its tinkly lullaby, “Star-Lite, Star-Brite”, “Hush Little Baby”, or whatnot. A hour could pass like that, or two. Then the child would stir or cough, roll over disoriented. I could hear concern in her voice when she’d ask me groggily where we were. 

We’re in your crib, in your room, I’d tell her. We’re sleeping. 

Child would grasp hold of crib-bars and lift upright on knees, look around. Everything wobbled and drifted like toys underwater, furniture and windows and closet doors. Ceiling withdrew to a great height and darkness poured down on us. I could feel her heartbeat break from a jog into running. She was scared. She was exiled and alone in mommy-less afterlife. Dark would hurt her. Dark was predatory with child-hunger beneath crib. 

Sssshh, I told her. You’re fine, we’re fine. Your mommy’s with God in the living room watching T.V.. 

To a child caught up in panic, consolations were useless. She cried out, wept. Blurted terror larger than could be contained by bedroom. Hallway lights flicked on. Silhouette of Mommy came walking. Through the door into the dark, mother smart to not flip the switch and bring bedroom back to summertime. Sssssh, mother would say then, lifting, holding the child. Same assurances I had offered, everything’s safe, you’re fine. 

Sometimes God would come to the door. On rarest occasion would step to crib, lay massive palm on forehead of Donna and tell her, tell us both, Enough ruckus. Get yourself back to bed, kiddo, sleep. I’d never been so close to God before. His breath gave off a brassy sweetness. His words smeared slightly, hard but friendly. When he stepped to crib it meant Donna had to lay down. There were things larger than darkness and when Mommy left, God brought them away with him. Big hand on Mommy’s waist and door closed in full, he'd bring the bedroom back to order by leaving it. A child and I left to dark, breathing. 

*

Who’s that, her mother had asked. Who’s that you’re talking to? Sprawled on living room floor with sheets of paper and colored pencils and markers which her mother had brought for us before vanishing elsewhere to push a loud vacuum, a wheezy groany anteater. We’d been lost in shared immersion of worlds we were drawing. We hadn’t noticed vacuum grow louder, room to room, nor sudden silence when mother unplugged it. Mother must have taken notice, sight of Donna with one sheet splayed before her, another sheet set across from her, markers arranged neatly beside it. The child would scribble a tree or hut or mountain on her paper then lean on carpet elbows to peer at the blank sheet a reach away. There was nothing to see but the child would nod and gesture. She was talking to someone. She was commenting on the quality of a drawing that wasn’t there.

Who’s that, her mother’s voice asked. Donna rolled over and there was Mommy, a fixed watchful manner about her. 

Who’s that you’re talking to? 

Donna looked over shoulder to check with me. I was laying on my stomach, pretend marker in hand, halfway through a pretend drawing on real paper. 

Go ahead, I told the girl. You don’t need permission, I’m yours to tell. 

Girl returned from her over-the-shoulder consultation to sight of Mommy with a peculiar focused alertness about her face. She was studying the nuances of the girl. Some previously undiscovered dimension of child revealed.

I’m talking to Morphie.

And who’s Morphie?

Morphie’s my friend. 

Oh I see, how long have you two been friends?

No quick or sure answer for this, Donna looked over shoulder again towards me. I responded with a silent shrug. Child didn’t take shrug for an answer, narrowed eyes and waited. Mother was watching and the longer we took to reply, greater chance she might grow concerned. Past experience had proven troubles began when adults paid too much attention from the wrong angle and got concerned. 

I took up a marker and drew a number on the paper between us. Donna leaned on elbows again, strained to read. The number was upside-down. Little hand snatched it, pulled it towards her, rotated it on carpet to read. 

It was a simple number, one we’d practiced many times before.

Two. 

Two what, mother asked. Months? Weeks? 

The child was counting on fingers as if they were days and she knew how many could make a month or week. Sloppy with the count, she quit with fingers, wiped them down front of her t-shirt. 

Where did Morphie come from?

Child didn’t look for an answer from my face. This she answered with confidence. 

Morphie came from her bedroom closet. They lived there for a while before Mommy and God had moved in, lived there before the house had been built even. 

I see, mother said. Do they sleep there? 

No, usually they sleep in the crib next to Grover (her favorite Sesame Street stuffed animal, purple and furry). 

Do they snore? Do they talk too much and keep you awake?

No. 

Do they ever bother you?

No, we just play together, they don’t bother.

Can you introduce us?

Sure! Child took to stand, turned to me. Usually I would scramble to find her shadow and hide within it but for sake of introductions kept myself open and in view. 

Mommy this is Morphie. Morphie, this is my Mommy. 

Hello there, mother said. Smiling and hand raised to wave but slightly to the left of me. 

Child drew me up into her voice and spoke. Nice to meet you, Donna’s Mommy. Donna and I were drawing pictures. Could we play alone again? We won’t bother you, we promise. 

Mother looked where Donna looked, correctly where I was standing. This time our lines of sight met and she saw me. 

Of course, no problem. You and Donna go right ahead playing. I’ll try not to disturb you. Mind if I finish vacuuming the floor here first? It’ll only take a minute. 

*

I was common knowledge thereafter, a running joke between the child’s mother and family. Could they see me? Was I real? Did it matter if they could gain more from pretending? 

Upon entering a room her mother would often greet me before acknowledging her daughter. It was only polite, she explained, that she do so. If Morphie was a guest in their house, it was their job as hosts to extend Morphie the finest hospitality. 

It seemed I was a thoughtful guest in turn, given how often Donna’s mother praised my good manners and thanked me. 

Often the child’s manners would be compared to my own, not always favorably. 

If Donna wasn’t in a friendly mood, bent on ignoring whatever was asked of her, her mother would turn to talk with me. She would ask me questions, invite me to translate. Why was Donna so frustrated? Why was Donna not talking? Her mother would kneel eye-level with the room and converse with the air and the air would respond so quietly to her mother Donna would angle her head as well to listen. Mother would repeat aloud what the air would tell her and the girl, nodding head, would interject. No, that’s not what Morphie said. Morphie said Donna was angry because she didn’t want to go to bed, she wanted to stay up and play. Mother would thank Donna for this clarification, as sometimes it was difficult to discern exactly what Morphie was saying, quiet as they were, invisible as they sometimes were among adult company. 

You’re welcome the child would say, unaware she’d been fooled yet again into abandoning the silent treatment. 

If Donna refused to brush her teeth, mother would politely ask me to show her how to do so. If Donna refused to eat her vegetables, mother would offer them to me then praise how well I chewed and swallowed. I was often the first to lay in bed, the first to say sorry. I was the best version of anyone’s daughter and Donna’s mother would ask, Why did we have to be so difficult, why couldn’t we follow Morphie’s good example? 

This lasted a short while until the girl became resentful. Instances of petty sabotage followed. Toys weren’t cleaned up after playtime, a curtain was stained or torn from its runner, a plate was broken. Mother would arrive to the scene and admonish and the girl would point to the air next to her and report, It wasn’t me, Mommy, it was Morphie. Morphie was being bad and I told them not to but they did it anyway. With bad faith and innocent guile the child would advise I be sent to time-out in my closet. 

Any punishment in the house thereafter was double. Should Morphie break a rule, both Morphie and Donna would be held responsible. Not fair, the child would protest. When mother asked who was to blame for some misadventure, she would answer before the girl could say otherwise. Who broke the alarm clock on the nightstand? Morphie, of course. But if Donna knew then Donna must've been there to see it. It was Donna’s job to make sure Morphie didn’t break Mommy’s rules. If Morphie broke something and blamed it on Donna, she would tell them the same. 

*

And so it went, such was the course of things, the greater struggles enfolded by childish ones. Unaware of more mature terrors, those within a girl’s own immediate sphere of reference would do. Elder folk were forever cajoling her to spit her pacifier into a palm opened before her. Smile, talk, chew on a blueberry. None could explain why the child clung to that nipple-once-removed but all expressed their worry. Habit, her grandmother surmised. Laziness on her mother's part, her mother admitted, too exhausted to defend herself. It was often the one sure strategy to calm the girl. Unplug it from her mouth and she’d cry and cry until walls and ceilings and floors begged her stop. I did my part or tried. Since I was more than half the child, I could talk to her from within her, when I had to. 

Having yanked her head away yet again from a mother’s reach; having run barefoot from the room in diaper and nothing else, she’d stop where her shadow stood and there I’d appear, summoning every technique of toddler diplomacy available to me.

We can’t talk if you’re sucking on your passey, I’d tell her. If you need to suck on something, here, try your thumb. 

A shake of head no. 

Here, take it out your mouth. Say no aloud to me at least.

Shake of head again, hair flopping back-forth.

Like this, I'd say, then turn in profile to show her. Non-thumb in non-mouth. See? 

The girl would watch without comment. Was I trying to trick her, fool her into slipping the passey from her mouth?

        I would remove my thumb then, encourage, Give it a try, just once, I won't ask again, I promise.

Stillness in deliberation, the child blinking and thinking. It would happen soon, I could tell. 

One hand would lift, crank a finger around the pacifier’s ring, pull it free. The free hand would be waiting, thumb extended with grain-of-rice thumbnail and delicate inchworm construction. Between lips the thumb would plunge and a sucking would soon follow. 

Did this feel the same, I would ask after a time. Would it do? 

        It would, the child would admit.

Convenient, I would tell her, because often wasn't it the case she had to beg or fuss for someone tall, a Mommy, a Meemaw, to bring her a pacifier? This way she would only need to ask herself for permission. Simply lift one of two available thumbs and get sucking. Warm, pulsatile, fetus-thumb in mouth-womb. Summoning to nurture her own special rhythm. 

*

Stories lived in books but they also moved between people, I told her. Not all could be summoned before bed-time. There were stories that wandered alone or together without any human person to memorize and retell them. They were written in quiet moments when no one was around to notice. This was where I came from, I explained. This is why I knew so much about the goings-on around the farm and beyond. 

What was happening now, she’d ask. I’d pause, lift chin slightly as if listening. Tune myself to the lay of the land, its fields and barns and ditches, its omniscient mundanity. 

In the weigh station there’s a fly walking across a dirty windowsill. It’s been trapped for three days. Mr. Buck had opened the door last workday of the week, fetched the medicine gun from the fridge to inject something healthy into the hindquarters of cattle. The fly had flown into the station when Mr. Buck entered but found the door closed after he left. Did the fly feel fear or confusion? Maybe. 

At the far western edge of the furthest field, there was a rabbit warren hidden among brambles. Six tiny heartbeats nuzzled in warmth. Their hiding place was lined with their mother’s fur, which was waterproof and protected them from illnesses born of moisture. Their mother was away, hunting for food. They were all but blind, unaware they were six infant creatures, not a multitude blended into unison. 

In the hay barn there were dust motes spiraling upwards through slashes of sunlight. Among the shade-leaves of soybeans a rat snake curled waiting for a smaller form of life to feed it. Within boundaries of the farm’s territory there were precisely two thousand twenty-two mice, three dogs, fourteen cats, and one hawk. The hawk had landed just a minute ago on a post along the old Ogden fence line. It wasn’t resting its wings. It was eyeing the ground. Elsewhere, above that same ground, seven buzzards were circling, waiting for something to die so they could harvest its flesh for more flight. 

Die? the girl asked. 

The girl had asked but she already knew. Earlier that spring, before I’d appeared, she’d seen a creature of the earth, a ground hog, blown apart by a shotgun. Unbeknownst to her grandfather she’d been watching from the screen of an open window. She’d been watching the creature bumble about the yard, doing nothing much. Her grandfather had come to join her at the window then cursed beneath his breath at sight of it. He’d called to her mommy to come take the girl away, he had something to attend to. Her mommy had been washing dishes with her back turned, hadn’t heard. Grandfather had quick-walked out the side door, fetched shotgun from pick-up, strode to edge of the drive, took aim, blasted the ground hog’s guts across the lawn. Bright red gory glistening. Instantly after turned at the sound of a child crying, his granddaughter at the window. This was death, his mother had explained to her later, girl curled under the kitchen table, terrified at the sight of her grandfather’s advancing boots. He’d killed a thing without reason. He’d taken a life and given nothing in return. 

The ground hog wasn’t so innocent, her grandfather had told her. It was one of dozens that dug about the yard and ruined it. They were known to dig around the foundations of houses and weaken them, houses sinking into ground. 

None of these were things the child had seen. None were real to her. 

Clean it up, Dad, she heard her mommy hiss to her grandfather in the mud room. The girl refused to leave from under the safety of the kitchen table, chair legs barring entry of unsafe things around her. A screen door slapped and clattered. Her mommy muttered in a tired voice “goddamn”. At mention of God the girl thought of her father. 

The next day remains of the poor slain creature were gone. But there had perhaps been a smell, a slickness of blood and scraps of flesh on the grass, for waddling across the yard towards that spot were large black birds with wings raised. They huddled like people in church around the spot. They fished about and pecked the ground. Sight of them upset her. It wasn’t fair. Birds were cruel, they reveled in the aftermath of meanness. There was this suddenness called death and here from the sky they descended to profit from it. Where was her grandfather now, with his gun? 

So she had seen buzzards before, she knew what inspired them. Maybe she asked about death this time to see if I might answer differently than her mother. 

I demurred on that point. It wasn’t my place, I said, to define mysteries by explaining them. Rather it was my role to gesture in their direction, even when they were nearly invisible, especially when they were nearly so, to acknowledge them. 

All about the farm, every given moment, perennial themes of the earth were at play. In so many words, this is what I said. Death and birth and desire and terror and envy, neurogenesis and apoptosis, big words cut to modest means. All of it filled out the details of a story no one had particularly conceived of nor was in the business of telling. Everyone she knew and loved and everyone she would never know and therefore could never love were cut to the verve and measure of its plot. It would never end, far as they could tell, but it would end them. It would end them to seed new beginnings and painlessly they'd be forgotten.

*

We were sucking on Icy Pops, standing a ways from the drive as Donna’s mother had demanded. Can Morphie have one too, the child had asked. Her mommy cast a side-eyed glance at her daughter’s gamemanship, calling on a mother's sense of fairness to score an extra Icy Pop. Would the child eat it, she surely wondered. Would she eat it or hold it out for her invisible friend? 

Donna asked for a cherry flavored pop. 

What flavor would Morphie like, mother asked. 

Morphie likes the blue ones, the girl said. 

Berry?

Yes. 

Mother held the screen door open and advised the girl to be careful stepping down the steps onto the driveway. Wait, mother said. The girl turned, waited. Cherry Icy Pop in right hand, berry in the left. Mother slipped back into shadows of the mudroom then returned with a bucket and two empty plastic ice cream gallons. She lifted the bucket and with a spare finger pointed to a lawn chair beneath the large elm between the house and the drive. I’ll be over there, she said, so keep in sight, and don’t play nowhere near the road, hear me? 

The girl led me to a cool place in the shade between house and garage. There she taught me how to eat an Icy Pop. 

Flavored length of ice sealed in a long plastic sleeve. Cut or chew the top off, push length of ice through the opening. Like toothpaste from its tube, work the contents from the open end by pushing up from the bottom. If mother watched from her lawn chair, as I noticed she did now and then, she’d witness a child extending an arm to the air before her, Icy Pop in hand, talking to the Pop or the air, advising just how it should be eaten. There would be instructions then a demonstration. The child extending the Icy Pop to no one in particular then pulling it back to suck and bite a chunk of flavored ice in her mouth. A mother might be tempted to assume this was trickery, a girl feigning invisible friendship to win an extra summer treat. What a mother might not consider then is the generosity of the gesture. I had no mouth to speak of, no tongue or hand or stomach. There, in the child’s hand, was an Icy Pop for my enjoyment, but I wasn’t human enough to taste it, so relied on Donna to curate step-by-step how one ate such things and enjoyed them. She was versing me in the ways of smaller pleasures, just as I had versed her in the vagaries of larger uncertainties. It was an even trade and perhaps one a mother wasn’t best suited to appraise. 

The mother didn’t call the girl out though. She let her be. The Icy Pops were eaten and later the girl came by to visit her mother sitting in her lawn chair beneath the shade tree. Her lips and tongue were stained red and blue. Girl, her mother joked, you look like you done French-kissed the Fourth of July! 

Her mother was breaking green beans. Snapping ends off each, pulling the stringy bits off their seams. The good parts she dropped into one bucket, the refuse she dropped into another. The girl begged to help and offered my help as well. Mother laid out an extra bucket for me and by end of our labors mine remained empty. 

They're lazy, the girl explained, when her mother asked why, at the end of our work, my bucket was unfilled. The girl’s wasn’t much better but the bucket's emptiness distracted from the fact. Lazy as a lapdog, her mother sighed. The girl looked my direction and mother looked also. Had I taken offense? Since I had no feelings of my own, it was hardly possible. But the girl admonished her mother nonetheless, defending my honor. Morphie's not good at chores, Morphie's shy when people try to make them do things. Be nice, say sorry, Mommy.

*

God came and went as he pleased, we’d overheard her mother complain to the telephone. God maybe worked at the warehouse, maybe he didn’t. His hours were irregular and often he arrived in the middle of the night, stayed a short while, slept on the couch, downed a few slugs of bourbon, only to leave by dawn. When she tried to talk to him they argued. He had a wife and a daughter, when they were together they made a family. Did he not want a family? If he did, he should come around more often. 

God was silent on the matter because God was often not around to answer. 

Sometimes Donna’s mommy would strap her into the carseat and drive them to church. The girl would sit on hard cold varnished wood and listen to the blahness of boring adult singing confused at the purpose of church. She’d whisper questions to me, Who’s he? (The priest.) What’re they doing? (Handing around the money basket.) Why’re we kneeling now? And now why are we standing? 

People were praying together so God might forgive them. This was the most of what the girl gathered from watching. People had broken their parents’ rules long ago and this was time-out, communal holy punishment. They had to repeat the same phrases acknowledging their complicity in certain offenses, repeatedly. They had to write apologies not on chalkboards but in the air, with their very mortal breaths, as a group, none exempt from tedium or labor. 

I’d try to save her, playing patty-cake or other such hand games. I’d mesh fingers from both hands and transform them with a nursery rhyme: Here’s the church, here’s the steeple. Open the doors, see all the people. Fingers would wiggle upturned, interlocked, and the girl would giggle. Mother would look down our way disapprovingly. This was a serious place and we were embarrassing her, quiet. 

Distractions only worked for a while. Soon the girl would be looking about, swiveling in her seat to view faces familiar and unfamiliar behind her. God was here, she’d gathered. He came and went during the night while she slept, as her mother often complained to the telephone, but her Mommy and Meemaw and Granddaddy also often spoke of this place as his house, so maybe he lived here separately from them? Any one of these people sitting behind them might be her father then, including the children, maybe even the women. Hadn’t she heard Meemaw and Granddaddy talk about God as manifest in all people, so it might be the case he was a shapeshifter and playful, fond of hide-and-seek as she was, and about the place here hiding? It was his house, so he knew all the good hiding places. And what better place than to hide in people? Especially here, where they were hypnotized by a priest droning on about Galilee? God might be hiding behind their faces and they wouldn’t even know. He was tired of being her father, it seemed. That also the girl had overheard her mother say to the telephone. 

Later they would step into sunshine, people dressed fancy and standing about. Her mother would lead her by the hand to this family and that family, where she’d meet other children, some her size, most taller. They'd stare and blink at each other as mother forced introductions. The Tarner boy with bowl haircut, shirt untucked from khakis. The Whitehouse girl in Minnie Mouse shoes and frilly lace. Donna would grip my hand, bashful, look to me for safety in things to say. To the children and families about, she appeared a child looking away to spare herself scrutiny and direct sociality. Chatty when alone, among her kind, other children, she was awkward, fearful. Why were there so many adults and so many other children and why did she have to meet them? It was good practice, I told her. One day she would go to school and be around children and adults all day. I don't want to, she said, after a troubled pause to reflect. Perhaps she imagined kindergarten was a kind of church and would require she dress uncomfortably and sing old hymns about rowing boats ashore and forsakenness and glory in death. It was very different, I assured her, but on this point and many others she remained skeptical. 

*

It was a holiday but she didn’t know. Anytime more than three people visited the house, it was a holiday. In the mud room there was a card table upholding handles of bourbon and Cokes and Sprites for mixing. In the kitchen women of the family were washing ears of corn under the tap, slicing tomatoes, simmering gallons of burgoo in tall pots on the stove. The burgoo was from the family’s favorite restaurant, Big Hickory. There were shiny aluminum trays which her mother warned her against touching. They were hot, she could burn her fingers. Tell Morphie to keep hands off too, she instructed. 

The girl led me out the house into the loose bustle of the yard. Adults familiar and unfamiliar and all of them either standing or sitting in lawn chairs. Throw an adult to the ground, they’ll break into three or four children. Is that how babies are born, Donna asked. Not exactly, I said. That bit about throwing adults to the ground, I was joking. 

There were blankets laid on grass here and there and on each children were sitting or crawling. There were boys chasing one another around the house and girls tearing daisies from the grass to work with little fingers into floral jewelry. Chains of daisies made into crowns or necklaces or bracelets. Two such girls were nearby, busying themselves over their infant brother, adorning him with artisan daisies. A bandolier of flower-sashes crisscrossing his chest. That was Mimi and that was Moggie, Donna explained. They were cousins. They were born the same time and had the same body. Twins? I asked. Yeah, she responded. 

The twins waved at sight of Donna and Donna waved back. 

There were conversations all around. There were fathers and grandfathers standing around the barbecue pit drinking beers. I walked their direction and Donna followed. Generational knowledge was at play and the girl was unaware so I showed her. There, that bucket? Sloshing around in it, barbecue sauce. Together the men had made it, we overheard them talking, it took four days to prepare and let settle so flavors could blend. With a paint brush Donna’s uncle Poe basted blasts of heavy meat on the grill. Those hunks would be tasty to eat, given time, and had once been chickens. Chickens? the girl asked. Yep, her Uncle Poe told her. Some chickens lived to old age but many became barbecue. He had lifted the girl off the ground, held her with an arm, front-row view of his free hand working the brush to baste breasts and wings. Just then the direction of the wind shifted and smoke from the pit changed course and stung her eyes. Donna whined, eyes squeezing. Set back to ground, she ran a distance from the pit and the adults, eyes red, watery. 

Donna? Hey Donna girl! A young woman ambled over to check on us. This was a second-cousin named Rhonda. Many a time while the girl had been doodling or daydreaming image-flits of this very woman had appeared in her thinking and feeling and a cozy calm would move between us. Rhonda was nice. Rhonda was her favorite. And Donna, as Rhonda had confessed to the girl many a time before, was Rhonda’s favorite also. Rarely did they get a chance to see each other since Rhonda lived one town over. Rhonda was a student, she was studying to be a nurse, she had recently begun doing rotations at a hospital. Or so Rhonda said as she stopped to chat with a pair of aunts standing near the beer cooler. Rhonda had lifted Donna skywards and landed her square on her shoulders. From that mobile height Donna and I watched the picnic transpire in miniature. Rhonda gripped Donna’s left ankle and with a spare hand cracked open a beer. This was adulthood, I whispered to Donna’s ear, pay attention, take careful measure. See how smaller everyone appears from up here? 

After a while at that height Rhonda set both of us down and sent us running. Mothers came from the house bearing trays and bowls. These were laid on fold-out tables under shade of a tree, paper plates and plastic forks and knives and spoons as well. The horseshoe games ended, baseballs and mitts were laid to ground. A line formed, a long one, and the girl wandered a distance from all this and with an impatient wave called me over. 

I see ants, she said.

Aunts? Sure, from here I see a few of them.

No, ants, silly. Bugs.

What do you mean?

Over here, she said, finger pointing. We walked straight to where her pointing finger led us, to the brick walkway between house and garage, shady, damp and quiet. The girl took a crouch and in exaggerated fashion, head moving side to side, scanned mossy bricks for evidence of what her finger was pointing towards. There, she said, hushed, excited. In the sandy canyon-gap between two bricks a nervy line of ants were wandering. Where’d they come from? Where were they going? They were ants and they were forming a line because they were hungry. I see, I told her. They do seem similar to people at the food table. Watching them makes me hungry. Why don’t we go and join the others, get something to eat? I think I hear your mommy calling. 

       The girl didn't hear me nor did she stand. She mumbled something to the ants, words of encouragement or a warning. Later that afternoon her mother found the girl picking scraps of food off a paper plate, kernels of corn, a baked bean or two, dabs of chicken gristle, to lay between bricks to be eaten. 

*

A largeness came rushing across the land and the sky darkened. Rain thrashed against the bedroom window. Rusty whined in the mud room. A half hour before (an eternity in girl-time) she’d watched the dog spring up from his napping place in the yard and run towards the door. Beyond the hay barn and the field between their house and the Raulstons’, clouds formed a massive churning bruise. This wasn’t her first storm. From past storms she knew what to do, where to run. Her mother was forever nearby keeping an eye on the girl. At first sight of lightning would call her back to the house, her and the dog. 

Mother held the screen door and with a spare hand lifted the child up the steps. The girl was worried, glancing over shoulder. Had she left a toy in the yard? Was Rusty coming? No, she was concerned about Morphie, don’t close the door until Morphie made it home too. I was sitting on the fence other side of the drive, wind in my face, watching the storm gobble light far out on the horizon. Voices were calling out from behind, mother and child shouting Morphie! I turned and there they were. I climbed off the fence and ran towards the door they were holding for me. Drizzle busied the air. Treetops hissing and creaking. 

Everyone was in the house, safe from what the sky was bringing. Donna’s mommy carried us to the bedroom and told us to stay put, she would need to check and make sure all windows were closed. There were big sounds outside. Through the bedroom window we watched rain stand up from the ground and start running. It ran everywhere around the house and grain silos, barns and tractors in their sheds. I reminded Donna her mother had warned not to keep near the window. Best to sit on the floor in the corner. I don’t wanna, she said. Let’s go to your room. 

She pushed open the closet’s bi-fold, stepped in, and I followed. From inside she pushed the bi-fold closed. It was dark but a shared dark and through wooden slats we could spy goings-on about the bedroom. This was a place where Donna could often be found hiding. A bedroom inside a bedroom, safe and unseen. 

Here the storm would have a hard chance finding us, I told her. If a tornado came and took the house away, we’d remain spared inside the closet. 

There were blankets on the closet floor and a pillow. Put there by Donna weeks before as a gesture of consideration. If this was my bedroom, surely it should have a bed, a blanket and pillow. This in response to her mother’s attempts to encourage Donna to sleep alone without me nearby or her singing. She was becoming a big girl. Let Morphie sleep in their bed and her sleep in her own. To this Donna countered that Morphie didn’t have a bed, only a closet. So let’s make them one, her mother responded. Together they gathered spare blankets and a pillow from her mother's closet and brought them to her own. On the floor of the closet made a comfortable nesting place for her friend. 

First night of sleeping alone, Donna called out from her crib. She was bored, she told me, she missed me. I’m right here, I assured her, on the other side of the closet doors. I could see her through the slats. 

Really? she said. How many fingers am I holding up?

Three I told her. Two on one hand, one on the other. 

A giggle in the dark and approval. 

She made me promise to watch her until she fell asleep. I would keep watch and make sure no one snuck into the bedroom to steal her. That first night I stood vigil and having nothing much else to do, watched strange visions form and disperse within us and between like clouds across a windy sky. Witches flying on broomsticks and houses uprooted and thrown high and spinning on air, original to the moment she believed, but I knew better, remembering how months ago we sat on carpet before the T.V. watching for the first time The Wizard of Oz. Since we were joined by feeling and everything else, the girl could rest assured, secure, I was watching over her within and without. I was her Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and moreover her White Witch. She was scared, the sleeping girl dreamt. I know, I held the dream and told her. Keep sleeping and I’d wake her once the storm was gone. Not long after her Mommy opened the closet doors and found her, scooped her into softer, warmer arms and brought her to bed. 

*

Behind the bedroom door Donna’s mommy was crying. It sounded like doves and coughing. 

The girl made to knock at the door but I stopped her. Instead we stood just short of touching the door listening.

How long had it been going on? 

What had upset her? 

There were answers to such questions and I knew them but telling her would only confuse and worry.

The crying stopped. Then there was quiet. Quiet in the house and behind the door in the place where once there’d been crying. 

The girl took a step and lifted hand again to touch door. 

This time didn’t hold her but lifted my own also, both hers and mine splayed palm-flat onto the wood. There was a key hole in the iron above the knob. Girl bent to lower an eye to look through it. 

She did the looking and I looked through her, blurry-edged a fixed view of the room, carpet and bed and white curtains pulled shut before a window. In the bed her mother lay on her side, back turned. Staring at the wall or sleeping. 

Earlier that morning while Donna sat at the kitchen table drawing, her Grandad had come by and her mother had excused herself to step outside. There’d been faint talking for a short while but the voices had gotten loud, her mother yelling I don’t wanna hear it! When her Mommy came back through the mudroom she had a different kind of face than she’d left with. 

Are you angry at me? the girl asked. 

No, honey, her Mommy said, but her eyes wouldn’t look back at Donna’s. 

Conjoined as were, visible girl to invisible companion, I felt worry tighten her. Was Mommy not happy with her again? Was she not wanting to be near? 

What’re you drawing there? 

The girl still held a lime green colored pencil in hand, but had forgotten it. Mommy had changed the subject but Donna, still a novice at discussions on serious adult topics, took this as interest in her drawing rather than relief from an uncomfortable moment. 

It’s my froggie.

Days ago while walking along a ditch the girl had discovered a tiny speckled frog, size of her thumb, leaping among grass blades. Between cupped hands she caught it and carried it home. Her mother had punched holes in the lid of a mason jar and into this Donna dropped a pebble and several handfuls of grass and clover and the frog. 

The next morning her mommy made her take the jar out into the yard, lay it on its side and unscrew it. Why couldn’t she keep it, Donna had asked. It would be cruel and unnatural to make it live in a jar any longer than a day, her mommy told her. 

I like it, her mother said of the drawing, but her voice didn’t sound like it liked anything.

Not long after her mother said she had a headache and was going to lay down. After her nap, she’d make lunch. Would Donna be okay drawing by herself a little while? She would. 

Did headaches hurt bad enough to make people cry? Donna asked me through her feelings instead of aloud, behind the door. Yes, I said, they can often hurt that bad. Far from me to tell the truth and complicate her with too-early knowledge of the adult world, its tediums and disappointments and many subtle forms of argument. Instead of opening the door, I stood next to her behind it. Come away from there, I said. Let’s go outside and hunt for more frogs, maybe one smaller than before. Halfheartedly, she followed me out the hall to the mudroom and out from there onto the driveway. Passing through to the yard we noticed the curtain drawn over her mother’s window. Donna brushed hair from her eyes and watched it. The day was brimming with time and no one was missing but it was hard for her to tell otherwise. 

*

July August September (clap clap) October November December (clap clap), Donna chanted the song her grandmother had taught her. January (clap) then February (clap) then March. We sat beneath an elm tree grown taller than the house, roots popping out of the ground around its trunk like big fat veins. Before being ordered to sit and sing with her, I’d been commanded to spy about tree trunk and grasses for cicada shells. Delicately, ancient-slow, I’d been instructed to prize these from their spots to not damage the husks. Some were crusty with dried mud, others ragged from the insect’s struggle to shed itself. 

These we’d lined along top of a particularly fat root before assigning each a name. 

Here was Bosco and here was Dora, here Lamphead and Duck-Duck and Moonpie. 

Silly, each, so I laughed. In a mood, she frowned that I’d laugh, so I straightened my face and invited her to continue. 

Once the cicadas had been named, I was told, it was time to sit cross-legged facing each other to sing the months of the year. Around the year we chanted while enjoying a bright afternoon in June. In a few days everything would change about where we sat because a new month would have begun, a hot one, as her grandmother warned, wiping her forehead with a napkin as if mere thought of it caused sweat. 

June was an aunt as much as a month, Donna told the world around her and the tree.

This she took pains to say aloud. It was important information. Meemaw had sat her down recently to explain why. 

Meemaw wasn’t sure if Donna’s mommy had talked about it yet. Aside from Aunt Mia and Aunt Amberley, her mommy once had another sister, the oldest of the four. Like her cousin Rhonda she’d been a nurse also. The first of the family’s nurses. She lived in a town far away called Memphis and was a beautiful beautiful girl. She was funny and a bit of a troublemaker. But Meemaw and everyone in the family loved her and during the big holidays she always came home. She was born in November but Meemaw and Granddaddy named her after the most beautiful of months, all sunshine but not yet too dang hot to breathe. June Marie. Hated the pairing, June and Marie, so they called her Juney. That she didn’t care for much either. 

What happened? Why did she not come around anymore? She had come through her time on this earth and had been called early to heaven. Of course the girl asked where heaven was and received the brief, vague explanation Where God lives. In a church? I felt a thought pass nearby where I sat inside her, before the girl spoke aloud to ask. No, not there girl, grandmother clarified. Up in the sky, up there (pointing with casual grandmother finger) past sun and stars, far far from here. 

The girl looked up but eyes snatched harsh into a squint. The sun was huge and mean to look at. 

Mind yourself now, her grandmother warned. You’ll go blind.

Another girl-thought passed by and I watched it travel, out her brain and mouth. Why would she go blind looking at heaven? Kindly laugh in amusement of the sorts of funny collisions that can happen when a girl is sent hurtling towards metaphysics. Never mind all that, she was told. When the month comes around, remember your aunt, your momma’s sister. She comes around once a year and it does her memory good to think of her. 

*

In the cabinets beneath the television there were photo albums and together we discovered several hundred versions of the world as it had existed before Donna or I had been born. Some of the versions were familiar, with barns and kitchens and fields she’d seen just yesterday. There were versions of Meemaw and Grandad and Mommy and her aunts who rarely visit and in most they were visibly younger and shrunken and frozen onto neat squares of paper, they appeared fresher and less exhausted. When people were paper they were smaller but happier, look how often they seem to smile. 

The photos were fixed six or eight to a page and were held in place by clear plastic sleeves that were sticky and didn’t want to peel from the pages when Donna picked along their edges. After much effort she finally stripped one such sleeve from its page, folded it to the side like a bedsheet from her legs on a summer evening. Having accomplished that, she set about picking the edges of a photo of a lady standing next to her mother when she was smaller and younger. The lady held the reins of a big brown horse and her mother was patting its forehead. As it peeled free, the photo made a gummy sound. Girl pressed a fingertip to the paper to feel its stickiness then flipped the photo to see what the scene looked liked from the other side. 

There was a message on the back. In blue ink and in block letters, Donna & June, 1983. But seeing as the child couldn’t yet read, this held no meaning. Kneeling on carpet she turned and asked, What did it say? Anything she couldn’t do yet on her own, I reminded her, I wasn’t allowed to provide shortcuts for. Those were the rules and we’d discussed them many times before but this didn’t seem to discourage her from asking whenever she butted up against some hinderance to curiosity or knowledge. If she wanted it translated, she’d need to ask her mommy. Leaping to her feet, she did just that. 

Her mother was in the mud room where the washer and dryer was, ironing a blouse on the fold-up board. Girl came rushing over holding the past outwards before her, like a flashlight. Who’s this? Mother stopped her push-pull of the iron, held it huffing and steaming, free hand taking the past from the girl. That’s me and your Aunt June, honey. Way way back when. And that was our horse Chestnut. He’d not around anymore. 

What did it say on the back, the girl asked, and mother read the names and date aloud. Mother anticipated the girl’s next question so address that also. In this version of the past she was twelve years old. Did that sound old to Donna? If Mommy was twelve, how old was June? She was sixteen and only a few short years of becoming ageless. And how old Chestnut? Here her mother handed the past back into the child’s care and straightened the blouse upon the board. Oh I’d say about as old as you are, she said, assuming a brief likeness to her photograph. 

What happened to Aunt June? 

Soon as asked, the question aged her mothers face and eyes lowered to track the slow glide of iron along cloth. 

She crossed over the Rainbow Bridge, honey. (Rainbow Bridge being her mother’s preference over heaven, mentioned many times before, anytime something died and the girl came talking about it.) 

She got taken from us by a car wreck. She’d been walking in a parking lot after a concert and someone driving by hit her. We have a place for her at the cemetery we drive by every time we go to Kroger. That’s why I kiss my hand when I drive past. I’m blowing her a hello kiss. 

This was news. Until then Donna had assumed blowing kisses is what people did when they drove past cemeteries, confusing to her, because on other occasions when driving with her grandmother, her grandmother wouldn’t kiss but instead would cross herself. Touch forehead, then chest, left shoulder right shoulder. Not nearly nice as kissing oneself then sending it with a puff of breath on a leisurely float over headstones. 

We could go visit her sometime, if you like, her mother said. Every year on her birthday we bring her flowers. 

Could Donna draw her a picture of flowers?

Yes, that would be nice. It will be a few months yet, at the beginning of winter. For now, let’s keep her picture safe from dust. Would Donna mind putting her back where she belonged, in the album? The girl promised she would. But the past, when she worked it back onto the sticky page, was returned hastily and in contrast to the other pasts it shared a page with, appeared crooked. The clear plastic sleeve was smoothed back over its photos in such a way as to leave wrinkles which, worked over by the girl’s pressing hand, became creases. Noting this, I abstained from correcting her. Could I have expected otherwise, a child’s rough handling of the past? 

*