Down the sumac path, I chase you, then step on your heel, not understanding my speed. It’s too much of this body. Your tennie slides off. You grab my arm, irritated. Stand still! I will myself to be dependable. You waver like you’re going over. I reach for your other elbow, and you hang, balancing off me, before sliding the shoe back on. Greens on their prickly branches hover over us as we spit unfamiliar words, targeting our tenders. We turn from each other and follow dried pine needles in opposite directions.
Back inside the bed sheet fort, the filtered lamplight, it’s me I find, a me bordered like a bottle reflecting outward. Your mother calls, Girls! By the brighter light I lose that centripetal focus, scattering like dust motes sifting through the beams. Like all the free babysitters, your mother produces Fig Newtons at the kitchen table. Where’s Michelle? I kick the table leg and slowly dissolve, visibly evaporating through the open door to the backyard.
Three Looney Tunes and one Lassie later your mother takes off her apron. Let’s go look for her. I don’t want to leave, knowing how I’ve blown away like a seeded dandelion. She pulls me by the hand, through the yards, to front doors–Mrs. Jackson, have you seen my daughter?–up the street to the market and the filling station. She’s pulling a ghost by the wrist and all that’s left to me is that bracelet of bone, yet I must follow.
At the entrance to the woods, oaks, elms, sumacs–poison you know–I balk, summoning physical substance with which to pull at the steel fingers, but she’s larger without her apron, her lipstick one straight slash across. Onto the path she drags me against my will, the two of us a force beyond a human being, a dust devil whipping up needles and prickers and finally you who sit there on the path watching the brown furred caterpillar arching its way across your knee.