Excerpt:

The Middle Bedroom

Sister loved her bedroom. Mother and father had placed her in the middle room facing the kerosene heater in the hall. That was their gift to her. Over the years, as she heard mother repeat this, sister began to recognize that the old stove-pipe heater was a luxury item and warmth a scarcity.

This chilliness was repeated in every room of the house. Each member within the house was constantly wrapped in their individual blanket. Father used a blanket of sun, leaving the membrane of the structure and flattening himself for hours on a lounge chair, his barrel chest toward the sky. Brother had a peculiar blanket of vulnerability, one that he finally shredded for aberrances like cat-killing and Hitler-worship.

Mother’s blanket was the thinnest. Sister was not sure she owned a blanket. Perhaps she borrowed them. The blonde daughter was her first and when that blanket was taken away, mother never found another the right size. So mother was always slightly cold. She adjusted her thermostat to survive. But anyone touching her knew the warmth was deep deep inside, burrowed in like coal in a mine before it is released.

Sister’s warm blanket was one that she donned and shed numerous times throughout the days and weeks. She was confused about this necessity, assuming that the blanket would be bestowed on her, not realizing that she had to procure a blanket for herself.

Her blankets had many eyes and so were pockmarked and chilly. Or her blanket was the warm fur of a cat, the silken feather of an Easter chick or the spindle tail of a wayward puppy. She found blankets and then she the let them go. Or they ran away or were washed away in a hurricane.

This happened to her bunny blanket, after years of living confined in a wire cage, its imprisonment remedied occasionally by escape and flight to the neighbor’s carport. The bunny blanket was named Smoky and it was a huge grey creature with no manners and no loyalty and intense dislike for its pen. A hurricane forced the family to flee. Several days later, they returned, and sister saw the bunny cage upended in a neighbor’s ditch three houses down. She had slight hope of recovering the bunny and her prediction was accurate. She thought to herself that the bunny was now free and happy and she sacrificed her blanket for the happiness of the animal. She mourned its loss a short time before finding another blanket. But always, the warm blankets left her. Eventually, sister wrapped her blankets tenderly around her and held them with a light grasp. She was learning about departure and how warmth comes and goes.