Rachel Wolcott, Fact & Fiction

WAG #29 is supposed to be about habits. When I started writing I was thinking about habits. What resulted seems to be about something else.
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Her sister walked the woods adjacent to her parents place when she had the energy. She walked, taking an inventory of last experiences. The way summer felt on her skin. The beauty of an unwinding frond. The perfect roundness of frogspawn and the smoothness of a salamander before it scuttled into the leaf litter. She listened for bird song, the distant rumble of a tractor and her own footfall on the damp ground. The family ate the mushrooms she brought home, then tended to her broken body when at the end of the summer she didn’t want to move. Her mother doled out pills and felt helpless when the hospice nurse administered pain relief. Even her father did his part to give Debbie a quiet death.

The last time Debbie walked in the woods, Kendra went with her kicking at leaves and trying not to cry. The sisters reached the tree that housed the ruins of a tree house. A pair of weathered boards nailed to a branch and the remains of a frayed rope ladder hung from the tree—a reminder of their youth. Debbie leaned on her sister who almost had to carry her back to the house, to her chair by the window overlooking the vegetable garden where the rampant pumpkin vine had taken over. Kendra lifted and steadied her, remembering the fights they had in the tree house. The girls were supposed to share, but Debbie would climb up gathering the rope ladder behind her. Kendra screamed and begged her to let her come up. She smiled and taunted her younger sister and pelted her with crab apples.

“Build your own,” she said. “This one’s mine.” She turned her back on Kendra and used a stick to stir an empty saucepan she’d taken from the kitchen. Kendra tried to climb the tree, but couldn’t pull herself up. She struggled, falling, scraping her legs on the rough bark. She retreated to the loft in the barn, looking for abandoned swallows nests, weaving straw into a rough mat, waiting for her mother to call them for lunch. Kendra hid, ignoring her mother’s shouts and pleas for her to come in and eat. Waiting for Debbie to run by, Kendra slipped out of the barn and headed back to the woods. She pulled at the rope ladder and hacked at it with a sharp piece of stone until it was mangled.

Debbie barely weighed ninety pounds now. It was easy for Kendra to help her along. She could have scooped her up and cradled her. But they stumbled toward the house, Debbie trying to suppress her low moaning and imagining what the pain relief would feel like. At the bottom of the porch steps they stopped. Debbie caught her breath slowly and turned around to look back at the woods, the barn. Kendra started to cry.

“It’s going to be ok,” said Debbie.