Rememories

Here’s a short story I started this spring and just finished today.

Enjoy.

Rememories
by Amaryah Armstrong

Fireflies jumped across the creek with reckless laughter, leading the way to a better view of the night sky. Kate and I were right on their tails, following them with large glass jars we said were to catch them in when really we enjoyed the chase more than the capture. I could barely keep up with Kate, though. Her legs were long and slender and I was what my mom liked to call “pleasantly plump”. But I still had fun chasing fireflies across the creek and on through damp spongy grass that splooshed and sunk beneath our sneakers until we reached the base of our favorite hill. It was our favorite hill because of things that had happened on and around that hill and not so much because of anything particularly interesting about the hill, although it was good for rolling down.
Lots of good things happen on this hill. Kate and I have lots of good talks here, for one, mostly about boys we like and how our younger siblings get on our nerves and our older siblings are bossy. We’re both stuck right in the middle of our families so we get each other. My mom says we’re heart sisters, or something like that, but I think Kate’s just my best friend even if I do like her more than my sisters. For two, I always end up watching the best sunsets from the top of the hill. One evening it looked like puffs of clouds were cotton balls that had been dipped in lilacs and burnt oranges with a strip of midnight blue cutting straight through all of them. I liked that. It made me sit still, and I felt warm like someone had draped a blanket over my shoulders.
Then there was the time Kate and I met Atticus on top of the hill. It was noon and nice and toasty so Kate and I decided to lay around on top of our hill. We could lay around because it was Saturday and we had already finished our chores. At first Kate was afraid of Atticus because he was a little dirty, but I thought he had nice eyes. They sparkled and sang like my mom when she’s doing the dishes, except my mom must not know how irritating washing dishes is or else how could she be so happy about it? I don’t know, but I do know that Kate was afraid and I wasn’t. I was brave. Brave enough to walk up to Atticus and ask him what he was doing on our hill. Atticus had dark brown skin that was creased and wrinkled, especially in his forehead and around his eyes, and I wondered how somebody could get so many wrinkles in their face. But then he laughed, and it was the biggest, heartiest laugh I had ever heard. It carried on like a rolling drum, a deep booming expanse of sound that held on to me like my baby sister’s infant hand wrapping around my index finger—with all of its strength. Once he laughed, I knew how he’d gotten his wrinkles, and it just made me like him even more. He looked like he might have been as old as my dad, but I wasn’t sure because he smiled like he was younger. With all his teeth bared, crooked and yellowed as they were, they still gleamed like the sun at noon that day.
Atticus was carrying a purple balloon, the kind of purple that I think is really disgusting because it is so deeply purple. It looks like grape children’s medicine, and I hate children’s medicine. Atticus’ Benadryl flavored balloon kept rippling in the wind beside his head, but he held on to it as if it wasn’t really there. The ribbon attached to the balloon wove around his fingers loosely, his knuckles staring pointedly from the loose fist he made. I wondered how a grown man could not feel self conscious standing there with a purple balloon. I know I feel self conscious when I’m just standing in a group of people who I don’t think really like me, yet here Atticus was, standing in front of two 12-year-old girls he didn’t know, with a purple balloon, a huge grin, and pulsing laughter.
“How’d you get the balloon?” I perked up the courage to ask and he raised an eyebrow, looking at me intensely with his dark brown eyes that shone like pebbles just pulled from a creek. I was tempted to look away for a second, but then that brave feeling in my belly told me to hold his gaze, so I did. I didn’t expect him to talk, I don’t know why, so when he did it caught me off guard. His voice was low and clear. It sounded like the stillness of the nighttime in its clarity and the constant deep rumbling I hear when I’m listening underwater.
“I got it from a birthday party.” He said, slowly and with a gentle nod of his head.
“Was it your party?” I asked. He looked at me and said,
“No, but it should have been.” I didn’t understand what he meant by that.
“Did you steal it?” Kate piped up from beside me. It was the first words she had spoken to Atticus all day. I was a little mad at her that she asked if he stole the balloon. It sounded like something rude my mom would pinch me for saying.
Atticus looked at Kate with a more interrogating look than he had yet given me, and I think she became a little frightened. But Atticus just turned to face the horizon once more and spoke again in his steady voice, “I reckon I know not to take what doesn’t belong to me.” I wasn’t sure if he was offended, but if he was, he sure didn’t look it. His face was serene and seemed content to let the slight breeze slide across his face. In the breeze I could pick up his scent. He smelled like outdoors, the smell of tree bark mingling with his own natural musk. He smelled like the woods and nature. He smelled like freedom.
I’m not sure why I remember that day so clearly, maybe it is because Atticus was so memorable. Or maybe it was because after Kate and I had met Atticus that day, after we’d finished interrogating him about his balloon, after we’d stopped being afraid of strangers, we walked home and Kate told me she would see me later, and I walked into my house and found my mom sitting at the kitchen table crying. Maybe I remember that day so well because when something good happens before something terrible it always feels better to remember the taste of the good thing instead of the bad thing. So, I remember Atticus and his purple balloon and that weird conversation instead of remembering those three weeks when my daddy went away to “find himself,” because there was lots of crying and yelling during those three weeks and my sister wouldn’t leave me alone, and my mom couldn’t cook dinner, and I was tired of being sad.
During those three weeks when my daddy went away, I tried to spend as much time at Kate’s as I could, ’cause I didn’t want to have to think about his car not being in the driveway or his smell not being in the house or his clothes not being in the baskets of laundry my mom would bring into the living room and tell us kids to fold. During those three weeks Kate and I would sit in her room and paint our nails, but sometimes we did things that weren’t girly, like wrestle or play with her brother’s action figure. Her mom didn’t like it when we did things that boys do so we usually stuck to doing things that girls do. I wish being a girl didn’t make me have to play with toys I don’t like and wear colors that I think are ugly, but it does, and at least I have Kate to play with me.
My favorite thing to do with Kate when my dad left and my mom fell apart and my siblings jumped on my last nerve and wouldn’t get off, was painting. Her oldest sister was 20 and going to school at the community college down the street for art, so sometimes when she was in a good mood she would let us paint on a couple of old canvases she had that were already ridden with failed attempts at being artistic. At first my canvas was terribly muddy and earthy and vomity, all my poor choices of color blended together into a shapeless void. And then I came back one day and painted it black over the top of the ugly bland color and started over. And then I dotted stars in the sky with the white and the gray and the yellow. And then I painted a hill. And then I drew a man at the top with a shopping cart and a purple balloon. And then I was free.
Remembering Atticus, remembering Kate, remembering the day my daddy was gone and my mom left too though not with her body, remembering turning my pillow over because the one side was damp with tears and maybe a little bit of snot too, remembering wanting to hug my sister but not feeling like she would let me, remembering my life back then, when I thought it couldn’t get any worse and thinking my friends couldn’t get any better than Kate, remembering that I didn’t have a clue what would happen the next day, or the one after that, or the one after the one I was already unsure about makes me laugh a little now. Makes me smile a little too. But I can’t pretend it still doesn’t make me cry. I can’t pretend that I can forget to remember homeless men with crooked teeth and colors that I don’t like and piles of clothes in the living room and rummaging through the refrigerator for something I knew how to cook and empty drawers in my parents bedroom and not being able to play in my dad’s shoes and painting at Kate’s and finding out after a little while that I was more good than bad and learning that I was better at speaking through the canvas than I was with words.
Remembering can hurt, but when I dip my brush in my memories swipe it across the canvas, dab it in the corners, rub it down the edges, project it from my eyes, the light behind shining through, when Iremember how much Ineed to remember Ibegin tofeel the bonds of mymemorieswrapping around mybody and over mywounds and Ifeel more healingthanhurt and Ilike the way mybrush moves over myheart and takes the paint and fills up the little spaces that Ithought were biggerthantheyweresmallerthanthey were there when Iwoke up the day my daddy left.

But I can remember the day my daddy came back, too, and that was a good day.