MindSpinner

Why there have to be six wooden swords in the living room every afternoon when I come home, crafted from wood I meant for bean towers, I don’t know. They come out every morning after I leave for school as if reveille were sounded as soon as my back tires roll out of the driveway and onto the street. The couch sulks askew, its broad green back to the front door, its pillows disheveled, oblivious to everything except the TV that squats atop my grandmother’s cherry lowboy like a boxy household gargoyle.

How dirty dishes in the kitchen sprout faster than mushrooms after a week of rain, I do not know. How I have as much laundry to fold tonight as Rapunzel has straw to weave into gold, I’m not sure. I only took my eyes off the house long enough to wade into the paper pile. It’s not my fault I fell into its paperclipped stacks for a whole day, like an Alice swimming about in her pool of tears. It was deep.

But when this evening softened into long lavender light on soft greens, I scooped the white rabbit out of his cage in the house, nestled him into the crook of my arm, and took him outside to meet grass and clover and sky. We sat together until papers, kitchens and unfolded jeans faded like dreams you wake from, and there was only the new world, and wonder.