Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,20
its stormy path, patio furniture, toys, dead animals.
I found Leaf standing on the bank, leaning against a tree, inches from the muddy swirling rapids, doing the same fucking thing.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, after we’d been there in the pelting rain for a while and had both just watched a red wooden door go floating past, and then a blue bike, and then a pair of black boots, tied together by the shoelaces, and then a little fox, on its back, its dead paws on its belly.
I went to the hayloft a lot after Leaf left on the bus. Sometimes the Bell brats were in there but when they weren’t I climbed the ladder and sat in the sun, hay, quiet.
And now Midnight was living by them, right across the street. I suppose he thought he was moving up in the world, and getting away from me, yeah, as if it would be that easy, as if, as if, why is everyone around me so undeniably dumb? I want to like people, I do, actually, but they’re all just so dumb.
I’d already felt Midnight edging away from me before he moved out to that dumpy farmhouse. And then I found him talking to Feral on the steps and he was just so into her, into the red hair and freckles and weirdness, I felt sick just thinking about it.
Well, if Midnight wanted to be with Wink and her fairy tales and her hayloft and unicorn underwear and overalls, then I’d show him who she was. I’d really, really show him.
MIDNIGHT FOUND ME as I was coaxing little blue eggs out from underneath one of the pretty white Silkies. I brought him inside to the kitchen and made poached yellow-eyes on toast for him and the Orphans. You need a big boiling pot to make poached yellow-eyes, which I like because using a big boiling pot makes me feel like I’m a witchie.
Mim was in her reading room, so I made coffee too. She didn’t like me to drink coffee. She said it would give me dark dreams. I didn’t give any of it to the Orphans, just me and Midnight, sipping from the same blue cup, fresh cream and brown sugar.
The Hero stood closer to me, after the hayloft. And he looked at me different too.
I told him the names of the Orphans, and we picked strawberries from the garden. I showed him how to squish his bare toes in the black dirt. We ate the berries ripe and juicy and hot from the sun, like Laura and Lizzie at the Goblin Market, For your sake I have braved the glen, and had to do with goblin merchant men. Eat me, drink me, love me. Hero, Wolf, make much of me. With clasping arms and cautioning lips, with tingling cheeks and fingertips, cooing all together.
THE DAY SO far:
Gathering eggs, breakfast, playing hide-and-seek, weeding the big square garden between the house and the barn, playing fetch with the dogs, Mim making Caprese salad for lunch with golden olive oil and fresh-picked basil and tomatoes, us all eating it standing at the kitchen table, me drawing up a treasure map for the Orphans, us all following it to the back pasture, digging holes with rusty shovels, looking for treasure.
When the sun got too hot I went home to get my tools. Coins, handkerchief, cards, steel rings. They were in a box in the basement. I’d kept them hidden since Poppy found them several months ago and teased me about it for weeks. I did my magic tricks for Wink and company in the hayloft and the kids sat still and wide-eyed and didn’t even talk. Wink watched me closely and smiled her big, ear-sticking-out smile at the end.
After I put my magic stuff away, Wink pulled The Thing in the Deep out of the pocket of her overalls and started reading. She sat on an old quilt spread over a pile of hay, barefoot, overalls, the Orphans around her, and me. The sun was streaming in the hayloft opening, low and hazy. Which was the only way I could tell how late it was. Time seemed to have stopped entirely. I hadn’t had a day go by so dreamily, so lazily, since I was a little kid. Since before I understood the concept of time.
The tips of Wink’s fingers were still stained from the strawberries, tiny, pink-red little flicks as she turned the pages. Her lips were stained too. I watched them as