Bounced Check

The little girl stirs in her dark room.

She listens, the house is quiet.

She rolls her face into her pillow and

smells the grassy sweat

of the afternoon spent bike riding in the cement drainage ditch across the street,

and walking barefoot to 7-11 to buy her mom cigarettes.

Merit Ultra Lights, the yellow package, not the blue ones, don’t forget.

Sometimes she comes with a check, signed by her mom.

And she buys herself a mixed cherry + Coke Icy to suck as she walks home.

It’s her payment

for the errand she dreads.

But she can’t carry the cold cup and ride her bike at the same time, so she has to walk.

The blacktop sidewalk-less streets burn her feet,

she occasionally runs into the lawns along the way to cool her feet.

And sometimes she stops and mashes her toes

into the gooey tar, warm and oozing out of the cracks in the pavement.

Then her mom’s name ended up on an index card in the little plastic box by the register, and the cashier says he can’t accept the check because they’ve “bounced too many already” and the little girl doesn’t know what that means, but she knows it’s bad and that She’ll add this to the bundle of shame she already carries with her, layers of camisoles she can never take off.

She walked all the way home, empty-handed in the hot Oklahoma summer day.

Back in bed, in the dark, she thinks of her dirty feet, cool under the sheet

and smells her oily hair imprinted on the pillow.

She feels dumb about the store,

she feels bad and she

wants her mommy.

She slips out of her sheets,

Out of her little yellow bed, with the ugly black & red & white KISS stickers

her sister stuck to the headboard, just because she wanted to.

and as she tiptoes downstairs to crawl in bed

with her mom,

she hears sounds coming from her mothers’s room.

Sounds she doesn’t understand, but has heard before,

sounds that mean Marlin is there,

back from the gulf oil rig.

Which means for the next two weeks she is going to get even less of her mother’s strained attention,

and for the next two weeks she’ll tiptoe not just down the stairs in the middle of the night,

but all the time,

wearing more t-shirts of shame

as she navigates Marlin’s drunkenness and her

mother’s self-pity.

So she sits her little body down on the bottom stair,

next to her mother’s door,

and cries.