An Egret By Katie Stimpson

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An Egret

I remember an old green bottle and a little blue glass bird sitting on the kitchen windowsill collecting grease and dust and scattering the light.  Mom sat at the kitchen table chain smoking Virginia Slims, talking to herself, and completing a crossword. The outside air whistled slightly as it threaded through a crack in the window and slithered in the haze.  The sun dove through the tchotchkes, dribbled about the smoke swirled room, and produced a tiny jaundiced yellow beam that came to a rest, like a kiss, breathless on my mother's cheek. "What's for dinner?" I asked, looking between the clock and the cold stove.

In the wake of my presence her cigarette stayed surprisingly still, wedged as it was between her pointer and middle fingers, while she rubbed the tips of her ring finger and thumb together mindlessly, elegantly.  (If you've never rubbed those two fingers, or any fingertips, together in that way, with or without a cigarette, I recommend it.  I know that the tips of the fingers have enzymes on them that aid in digestion and indicate we should not use utensils when eating food and that may be the science behind why this touch feels so like an act of rumination.  But it could just be in my blood to think this way.) So my mother sat there chewing her cud with her cigarette hand and rippling ever so slightly with the smoke now also rippling in my breeze. The room, so keenly disturbed by my hunger, turned to a shapeless and smeary fog, and my mother and her chair and her table settled a little deeper into the floor.  The boards creaked.  The ashtray dragged itself two inches closer to her and glared at me. I think somewhere in the bowels of the basement the washing machine groaned and the wall mounted pencil sharpener cowered in fear.  Behind me, back in the living room, the TV begged me to come back.  But my stomach growled and my long skinny knobby legs planted me like an egret in the linoleum. 

She stopped talking to herself but declined to look up from her crossword when she answered, "Daddy's going to be late tonight."

The house turned slowly away from the sun, bit by bit, until the long shadow of the highway overpass melted into the creek bed. The shy crayfish there scuttled out from beneath their rocks and glinted by the gleam of the one street light now illuminated in front of old Mrs. Collins' yard.  I remember observing from the porch with dulled anxiety as the sky turned pale and the grass blackened and the neighborhood din became muffled behind closed doors and windows and walls. On some nights I might be found on the same porch shucking corn or playing I Spy or eating a bowl of ice cream in a thunder storm.  I might have been calling my mom on the cordless phone to tell her the dog was just hit by a car. I might be hurriedly sopping up baked beans with white bread and yelling at Jacob or Jackie or Renee to "Wait for me!!"  Some winter nights I might have been standing against the door and pushing off, running and leaping into the drifts below, hoping to jump the farthest.  I'd land with a squeal in snow up to my chest and crawl back soaked and frozen and smiling, wrestling whatever kid came between me and getting to the door first.  

Mom was excellent at crossword puzzles. Once again talking to herself, but now in the garish overhead lighting and with a deep glass of white wine beside her, she continued to whittle away at today's.  I came in from the porch, behind her now, and propped myself up between her chair and the doorway, peering over her shoulder and hoping innocently that there was somehow something to eat.  "Hi my little sweetie" she said and reached her left hand behind me and dragged her long nails along the length of my back across my shoulder and down my bare arm.  I purred.  The ashtray wagged its tail. And the bottle of wine winked and smoothed my brow. 

I may have been directed toward the cube steaks in the refrigerator or I may have found them on my own.  I just remember warming up a pan and putting salt all over the flat pink things and cooking and flipping and cooking and flipping until they were crispy on both sides.  And I can't remember if I put the frozen french fries on a plate in the microwave or if I spread them out on a baking sheet in the oven, but they were there.  Maybe they cooked while the steaks cooked or, more likely, maybe the steaks sat in the pan while I finished the fries.  My father would have made me eat a green or orange or yellow vegetable if he had been home and maybe mom too thought it best but held back the suggestion out of guilt or boredom or distraction.  I slid a plate for my mother quietly onto the table and then I retreated happily to the living room where I gathered around my own meal - cross legged on the floor in front of the TV in a room now illuminated only by it.  I'm sure I found something like Mr Ed or Bewitched or MTV or Step by Step or Ren and Stimpy.  I must have liberally salted my whole plate. And then I ate.  I dipped every bite into a heaping pile of ketchup and washed it all down with a cold cream soda.

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Katie Stimpson is an expressive artist currently living a hermitic life deep in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has a BFA in Performance with a minor in Writing from Naropa University and has been acting and writing her entire life in numerous companies, communities, institutions, and locations around the world. 
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