Shutoff

Morgan flashed her keychain light in my eyes. “I need to go inside”

“Shut that off, it’s not even dark yet. Stay outta the house. if you have to pee, just go over by the trees.”

“I need to ask Momma something”

“No you don’t. Leave them alone in there, you know they get cranky when it gets hot”

Morgan gazed idly around the green tent at nothing in particular, rolling a frozen water bottle along her stretched-out legs, maybe thinking of another needling question. I knew she didn’t really want to go back up to the house, she was just testing the atmosphere, seeing how much patience I had tonight. 

I regretted not being more positive. Morgan was like a little spoonful of yeast, feeding on sugary cheerfulness, no matter how insincere it was. I perked up. “Go on, pee before it gets dark, I bet Haley brings you a treat tonight”

“Yessss!” she latched onto my sudden leavened tone and expounded upon it, bounding up and not even bothering to grab a tissue as she marched out of the open tent. She went towards the edge of the timber, skinny white legs sticking out under a huge adult tee-shirt, hair a tussle of dark unwashed curls. Like a child’s drawing of a bird. I taught her how to grab onto a narrow tree as she squatted so she wouldn’t fall over, or dribble on her legs, but I couldn’t see where she’d gone. Didn’t much matter how far into the trees she went, there wasn’t another soul for at least a mile, ‘cept Momma and Steve up at the house. And they weren’t looking out the back. 

I grabbed Morgan’s water bottle and put it against my own sweaty forehead, running my fingers across the corners of a book I’d brought out, but wasn’t going to read. Tonight I had an itch, and I was anxious for Morgan to get to sleep.

The summer air was so still and damp, a muggy soup suffocating everything. The overgrown yard was dead- like the rain had just caught in the thick air before it ever reached the ground. It seemed to be the way of things, anymore. Every summer it got hot, every summer the power went out. 

Morgan doesn’t remember a time it wasn’t like this. I do. I remember when me and Momma lived with Grandma in a real house. Momma said it was just “a double-wide” but it was real to me. Full of sunlight, where the power never went out, and cold, chemical-smelling air poured into the living room through a box in the window. But Momma didn’t like the “double-wide”. She said we needed more space, more fresh air, a place that we owned. Even though Momma and Steve spent all day in the dingy, rectangle house, with busted windows, where the power went out when things got hot. 

I heard voices. Morgan slapped at the canvas tent. I ducked out.

Haley was flicking her eyes from her phone to Morgan, smiling with her lips and nodding at Morgan’s breathless act-outs of our afternoon without power. Morgan desperately wanted her oldest sister to engage in this glad game. My heart panged. Haley looked at me. 

She extended a plastic grocery sack from one lazy finger, jerking it up when Morgan made a grab. 

“Don’t let her eat all that junk tonight. I won’t be back for a few days.” Haley was back to her phone, Morgan was still prattling. 

“Can I go? The Muhler’s always have power…”

Haley’s eyes rolled back, I didn’t wait for her to quip something mean. 

 “No they don’t. It’s dark everywhere around here, we just have to wait for the weather to change,” I said carefully and deliberately. 

 I gave a cautious look at Haley, but all she did was ‘hrrmph’ derisively, look back at her phone and flap the plastic bag at me. I stepped forward and took it off her index finger, as she tapped away at a message. Pop pop pop popopopopopop. Where her polish had chipped away, grime showed through the half-moons of her nails. I handed it off to Morgan without looking inside.

 “Tell Haley thank you, and don’t eat all that at once,” I said without looking away, still anxious my half-sister was going to take us off the narrow precipice of our tenuous feelgood play. Please don’t make Morgan cry. But she just bid us a flat ‘have fun,’ and let Morgan squeeze her around the waist, before turning, head bent, to walk back around front. I could already picture the truck that was waiting to take her away. 

“Pop Tarts!” I heard Morgan squeal as she rifled through the Fareway sack. “I wanna go to the Muhler’s house too, they have Fruit Roll-Ups, I’ve seen it when Kellen brings them to Sunday school-”

“NO” I said low but curtly enough to get a pout from Morgan. “Only Haley is allowed at the Muhler’s”

She avoided eye contact as she bit open a foil wrapper. 

 “...and don’t let Momma catch you with those boys, neither. Go lie down, you should go to sleep soon” I said, more sternly than I meant to. She crunched back towards the tent with her sack, I didn’t even see her turn on her flashlight. 

The sun was low, and the moon was already bold and yellow above the flat, bare fields north of the house. So bright you might think it was a huge street lamp out in the distance. The corrugated aluminum patching the garage roof gleamed, the heavy air smelled like dirt and faint gasoline. 

When I ducked back into the tent, I cupped my flashlight with my hand to peer at Morgan in the muted light. She was lying sprawled wide on top of her sleeping bag, plastic sack, and wrappers near her head. Usually, I would make her go rinse the sugar out of her mouth before bed, but I clicked off the little keychain light and sat quietly, listening for her breath to slow and deepen. 

When I was sure she was asleep, I crept out of the tent. The air had gotten slightly cooler, the moon was even brighter, the trees and leaves cast shadows that made the ground look like a rippling lake of oil. Wandering the forest at night was thrilling, the organic sounds of the woods snapped and rustled cleanly and loudly through a flat, uninhabited vacuum. But it was slow and painful going. Tonight I had another destination in mind, and I knew the way well. I walked towards the front of the house- it was easier to get to the road near the drive than spend too much time in the tall weeds alongside. I wasn’t too worried about someone looking out into the yard.. When it got hot, sometimes Momma and Steve would see shadow people in the woods and around our property all day and night, and I would be a small shadow, nothing to get worked up about.

Out front, I paused to make sure I didn’t hear Morgan up and out of the tent and looked hard at the dumpy old house. The glossy vinyl siding was mottled with stains, one south window was duct-taped up with a garbage bag, with a twin on the opposite side. Through the bent, twisted living room blinds I saw the flick of a lighter. And again. I breathed deep, like I could smell the sweet vaporized fluid from here. I imagined how the plastic lighter would feel as I shuck shuck’d the little metal wheel in my hand. I imagined putting a smooth bulb to my mouth, tilting my head back to drink in the thick acrid smoke, the way I saw Mom and Steve and Haley do- like the grown-ups swallowed down the little communion cups at church. Then I would lay back gently, with eyes wide, seeing a fantastical adult world, finally seeing the flitting shadow people…

I shivered, and my mouth was dry even in the hot humid air. I hurried myself across the drive, skipping quietly but quickly out of view of the house, down into the sparser ditches on the other side of the road. My mind quickly refocused to my night’s objective. Following the rough gravel at night was almost as exciting as the woods. Traversing the sloped sides of the path wasn’t hard, but I had to keep alert for the sounds of a car, so I could lie flat in the ditch until it passed. Not that it happened much. Even in the day I hardly ever saw a car come along our gravel road. It was just a lonely string between two highways, not even worthy of a real name. It seemed to exist purely as a suggestion towards Town. I stumble-jogged forward, arms out in a T for balance, head down, picking through the dim path with squinted eyes, like a crude stick puppet being flopped up and down. The ground was softer and muddier here, where the incorrigible weeds hoarded the runoff, and I knew I’d have more than one bloated tick to pick off before I went to bed. But thoughts of my return trip, of a shortened night’s sleep, didn’t faze me, I was too intent on where I was going. I had been wandering along this road many times before, both ways: Westward it seemed to go on forever, with occasional lonely houses and farms along it, some even more dilapidated than ours,  but because Steve always came and went from that direction, I figured eventually it linked up to a bigger road, though I never made it to wherever he came from. East, though, East linked to the highway much quicker, though no one told me its name. If Momma ever got her job back, she would go north, towards the next town every day for work. We were never allowed to go if she or Steve or Haley ever went out on errands, but I knew it was the closest place, called White. 

I mused to myself as I walked. It was fitting, I decided, a town here so simply named. Just like the roads called by letters, the Trucks without license plates, and the plain rectangle houses. Once, when I was much younger I made a tremendous discovery and hurried to show Momma. 

“See?” I proudly showed her, “you can butter both sides of your toast like this!” I extended my glistening masterpiece into the air, so she could examine my ingenuity, but her face fell, and she admonished me, “You don’t need to be doing that, just fix your bread right.” 

That made sense to me now, too. 

I was coming close to the farthest I’d ever been. I was getting increasingly excited as I dared myself on. Soon I could hear the distant whoosh of cars gliding down a paved road, and then there I was. At the bottom of the steepest hill I had ever encountered, and at the top: A wide, smooth highway. I climbed up through the ditch carefully, nervous a car would make the turn onto my gravel road and I’d be captured in it’s stunning headlights. A little deer, on spindly legs.

Luckily, near the top, the hill was so steep, I don’t think a driver could see down, even if they bothered to glance down the no-name country road. I stopped in ankle-deep, mucky water and let two more cars pass. Finally, I couldn’t wait any longer. In the side of the hill was a cement drain pipe, I hugged the rim and pulled one leg over, then shifted both underneath me, I stood up and was eye level with the inky smooth pitch of the main road. No cars. I closed my eyes, savoring the penultimate step of my achievement. I boosted myself onto the road, and shuffled inch by inch forward, listening carefully for another motor.

When I thought I had made it a quarter of the way across, I turned to face north, parallel with the massive new road, towards White. I breathed again. It smelled like hot tar and exhaust, and the damp, wet weeds. Knowing I was running out of time, I opened my eyes to stare down the highway. It was more beautiful than I imagined. The asphalt cut a slick, winding black line through the plains. My moon beamed proudly in our velvety sky, mixing its brilliant head with the endless line of bright street lamps along the highway. First big then farther apart, getting smaller and cramped in the distance and fading into gentle coronas of gold as the light caught in the thick smoky air. I looked and looked, home long forgotten, at this dappled, glistening snake of lights and pavement twisting towards Town- a glittering diamond as its head.  Morgan is right. The lights aren’t out everywhere.