When Mama washed the sheets, she stripped beds bare,
toted a basket brimming with linens to the back yard. On
those summer mornings in the Carolina foothills, I watched
from our pecan tree’s shade, grasshoppers flying and fiddling
in air thick as biscuit gravy, as Mama pinned the sheets
to four steel cables strung between two concrete t-posts.

My sisters stayed inside, painting their toenails peony pink
or forget-me-not blue, flipping through magazines revealing
how to pad bras and flirt with boys, whispering secrets. When I,
too young for the bedroom talk of teenaged girls, skulked
outside the window, they hushed, cranked up their radio’s
volume, and screamed the raucous tunes of British boy bands.
Later as Mama tried to fetch the sheets, I raced between them,
flapping the fabric with my elbows. Mama pretended to lose
sight of me, searched up and down the rows of cotton flowers
and stripes, singing where is she? where is she hiding?
all the while knowing her baby girl was there between the sheets
because I giggled and could not quiet my flip-flopping feet.

As daylight faded and lightning bugs rose like steam outside
my open bedroom window, I folded myself into the scent of love
and sunshine, waited for Mama to tuck me in. Sleep tight, don’t
let the bed bugs bite she said every night, her voice a lullaby’s
melody. l giggled, kicked my feet in the sheets as she pulled
the door and left it ajar, a line of light pushing through the dark.

# # #
Daun Daemon’s stories have appeared in Fiction Fix, Southern Women’s Review, The Dead Mule, and other journals. She has published poetry in the Haiku Journal and most recently in Typishly. Her poem “I hear her voice calling” won the Origami Poems 2017 Kindness Contest. She teaches scientific communication at NC State University and lives in Raleigh with her husband and four cats.

Photo: Fancycrave