Popsicles on the Porch

Anyone who says they aren’t a morning person never spent a day in my tattered overalls. Mornings were easy. Almost comfortable. We’d play for a while, crashing broken toy cars against each another wordlessly, or shooting marbles across the slanted floor. My favourite thing to do, though, was just sit at Ma’s calloused feet. She’d move to’ and fro’ in her rocker, knitting or darning our socks, while we’d count our baseball cards. Sometimes, on mornings like that, I swore I’d even see a small smile illuminating her face, lighting up the room with its warm glow. As bright as these mornings were, the later it got in the day, the darker the cloud upstairs became and finally, around noon, the storm surged downstairs. We were always warned by a familiar low grumble as he’d clamber out of bed. 

Although we knew the weather would be turning, it didn’t give us a lot of time to prepare. Instead, she’d find a way to usher us out of the house. This time, she told us that popsicles were a treat better enjoyed in the heat of the summer sun. As I took them from the freezer and handed one to my brother, I held a shaky finger to my lips and pointed at the door. The lead feet on the stairs sounded made my stomach drop and I looked at Ma, who had forgotten our existence completely. She stood, staring at the dimly lit staircase, bracing herself for the descending tempest. She smoothed her dress, adjusted the pins in her hair, and straightened her back. To me, she could’ve been an oil painting hanging in the finest art gallery in all the world. His final step fell just as the screen door slammed shut behind us.

           We sat on the heaving steps of our house and I looked down at my brother, his lips already wrapped around his distraction, eyes crossed as he looked down at it.

           “Can we talk yet?” A squeak and a pop came from his mouth as he pulled the juicy orange treat out sloppily.

           I kicked a stone with the toe of my shoe. “Quietly.” I hadn’t even started my popsicle before the first drip slid down my hand like sticky syrup, but I didn’t notice.

           Inside it was already storming. His thunderous voice broke the silence of our morning. I don’t remember what she had done this time. Maybe she had bought 2% milk instead of 1%. She could have put too much starch in his blue-collar shirt. Most likely, though, she just looked at him the wrong way. Whatever it was, she certainly should have known better. Dad was always repeating that “a smarter woman would have learned her lesson the first thousand times”. After thunder crashed, I heard the clouds break and the rain starts to fall. Ma was crying.

           I looked at my hand; it was bleeding orange. But I could neither bring myself to eat it, nor clean it up, I was frozen in the stifling summer heat. Instead, I turned my attention back to my brother. His popsicle was long gone, and he was drawing in the dirt with a stick. I was fixated on his spine. It stuck out through his threadbare tank top and, if I had wanted, I could have counted each knobby vertebrae. His skin was bronzed from spending most days outside, but it was just as purple as it was brown. He was always falling out of a tree, off his bike, or, somehow, down the stairs. I heard a crash and was brought from my daze. I listened as the tornado tore the dishes from the shelves again. I crossed the fingers on my right hand, hoping that she could avoid their flightpath this time. I looked back at my waiflike brother, he had drawn himself a hopscotch court and was hopping on one spindly leg, wobbly ankles hanging out of his tattered jeans.

My eyes travelled to the dog. He was digging a hole beneath our porch. He never stopped digging there. One day I swore I’d wake up and there’d be a tunnel to China. If he wanted to escape so badly, why didn’t he just run away? We barely even fed him. What kind of stupid animal would hang around when it got treated like garbage anyway? I shook my head and spat on the ground, shaking my head as I glared at the dog. I despised it.

The storm seemed to calm as the dog stopped digging. I turned back towards my brother who had given up on his hopscotch and was instead laying on his back in the dirt, following a cotton ball cloud with his finger. It was then that the screen door opened, and he lurched out of the house. I shrunk to the side of the steps, invisible again. He stumbled past and tripped over my brother, grunting profanities that were drowned out by creaks as he opened the door to his rusty truck. I finally breathed as it sputtered to life. He pulled away, only leaving a sandstorm in his wake.

After, I sat in silence for ten years. I listened to the electric hum of the cicadas, the dehydrated panting of our feckless dog, my brother whispering a rhyme to himself. I turned my ears up and could hear a faint whimper from inside the house, the scraping of the broom bristles against the floor, and shards of porcelain colliding with the dustpan. I could hear her, sweeping it all under the rug.

My brother propped himself up on toothpicks and turned to me, “Can we go inside? I’m bored.”

“In a few minutes.”

He eyed what was left of my popsicle and licked his chapped lips, still decorated with orange from his own. “If you aren’t gon’ eat it, can I?”

I stuck my hand out and passed it to him, quickly wiping the sticky juice off my arm onto my jeans. He popped it into his mouth; it slid off the stick in one bite, already nearly finished before he got to it, and a big grin spread his face. “They really are better to eat outside, huh?” He said.