Rachel Hale Drew
rdrew2@austincc.edu

Rachel Hale Drew grew up in a small town in Kentucky where the hills were green and the stories were big. She holds a bachelor of arts in English from the University of Kentucky and a master of fine arts in creative writing from Colorado State University. Rachel has taught writing at Colorado State University, Front Range Community College, Eastern Kentucky University, and the Dougherty School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, and she is still working on her first book. She lives in Austin with her husband and far too many cats.

Quare Girl

At the bottom of the stairs the adults swarm like bees or rodents. Pests, Dolly would say, but Darcey can’t hear her from down here. She looks up and sees Dolly’s soft body looking broken and discarded, hanging over the top step, white-blonde hair wild and falling.

Mommy bends down, wraps her arms around Darcey’s waist, and spins her into the air. The ceiling fan is close to her long wisps of gnarled, angel hair. Zirrrrr. Mommy’s skin is moist and tart, perfumey and supple, like model skin is supposed to be. Music is thumping and bumping, swirling with the girl and Mommy and Mommy’s wobble-knee, peanut-smelling boyfriend, Bremer. He throws out his thick arms, stretches his sweaty hands open. Mommy bumps Darcey into the air for a second, then lets her fall onto Peanut Man’s shoulder.

“Whooh, Honey,” he says, his breath musty and nutty, his voice closing in, a naughty telephoned call in the noise, “you’re no bigger than a minute.” He kneads her skinny legs with his wet palms, rubbing one finger under the fuzzy white strings on her cut-offs. Darcey looks nervously over his shoulder for Mommy, but she is off already, whirling into the small, tacky crowd on long, cowboy-booted legs. Bremer’s fat bird breast plops repeatedly into her nubby chest.

“Whooh,” he says again. Mommy has left and taken her attention and now no one really cares about anything. Even Aunt Frita is silent with no one to insult. She sticks her purple-tipped pinky finger into her mouth and pries her molars. The hairs on the back of Peanut Man’s neck are long and black, wiry like spider legs, and only about two inches from Darcey’s face. One of them is bent and plastered down to his lumpy, sweaty neck by a bit of something white and chunky. The fat woman with the big legs and bright lips is spinning sullenly, apparently determined not to stop until the song does. Or Mommy comes back.

Darcey doesn’t really remember the last time Mommy left her with Bremer, but there’s a feeling in her belly that tells her it was bad for some reason. A cramped up, falling feeling like the feeling she used to get at the sight of her own face in Granny Myrtle’s mirror. She would stare in the mirror, her face contorting before her eyes, now pretty, now ugly. And Granny Myrtle said, “You are a quare child, never going to be normal. Your Aunt Jean was just like you. Never married. Chased the neighbor kids with a mop. Finally killed herself at 52.” Her memory is so sharp about some things, which Dolly says is bad. “Remember all of it or none of it,” Dolly always says. But Bremer she can’t remember, though his smell is so familiar.

“Bremer,” Mommy yells, stepping into the living room.

“What Honey?”

Everyone turns to look at Mommy, smiles and laughs and hoots. This is her party, the one with short skirts and long legs.

“Put Darcey down, Bremer. She’s tired.”

“She’s not tired,” he says. Then he looks down at Darcey, still rubbing his hand over her child chest.

“You’re not tired, are you, Whistle-Britches?”

Darcey looks at him and says nothing. Upstairs Dolly is literally screaming, her tiny body rocking back and forth over the edge of the top step. No one can hear her. Darcey looks up at Mommy and furrows her brow.

Mommy reaches down and grabs Darcey from Bremer’s lap. She pulls her close to her soft Mama breast. Darcey wraps her legs around Mommy’s waist and buries her cold nose in her slick shampoo hair. Snot in Mommy’s hair, she thinks, and she is only a little sorry.

Darcey believes that once upon a time, long ago, when her father lived in this house she was happy. She mainly believes this because Dolly tells her so. Dolly frowns deeply and says things like, “If only your father could see the way your mother lives. He would come back for us in an instant.” Honestly, Darcey can’t remember her father. She can’t remember when Dolly came to live with her either, and Dolly says that’s because she has always been here.

She does remember the canary Granny Myrtle had. Sugar Babe could say “mama,” “no,” and “pretty bird”. Granny Myrtle allowed Sugar Babe to roam free in her house, but mostly he sat on top of a mirror that was propped up against a wall and said “pretty bird” and pooped on the mirror. He was the only one in the house the time Darcey fell down Granny’s stairs and had to go to the emergency room. The nurse with the green eyelids was the one who asked her where all the bruises came from even though Mommy had already told her where.

Mommy carries Darcey up the stairs, hugging her small, bony body against her own. “Don’t ever let him touch you,” she says into Darcey’s smelly scalp, “ever. Grown men should not touch little girls.”

“I won’t,” says Darcey. Dolly cannot be contained. She throws her limp body into the air, tries to bite Mommy’s ankles, but fails. Mommy stays with Darcey for a few minutes, rubbing her gnarly hair and singing “Mocking Bird” like Granny Myrtle did before she died. Then she goes back to the noise. Dolly rests, upside down and neck bent until Darcey sneaks out to retrieve her in the middle of the night after the thumping and the shrieking downstairs stops.