Half Metal

Pollen speckles my muckers, and my imagination rushes into the Dust Bowl. Some memory flickers behind my eyes, plastered there by words in a book. Floating dirt settles on a slab of steak, and yellow fog clouds canopy a sheer sky.

The dog tugs on the end of his leash, sucking me back to my green, sticky summer reality. Brush rustles behind the chain link, and we lunge up the hill that is our backyard towards the dying bark and vines we call woods.

A grey fluff bounces through overgrown grass. A cat! It stops, safe beyond the fence, to peer at the dog. It blinks at me, not a hint of malice in its eyes or aura. It doesn’t belong here. Its smooth, marbled fur clashes with caked mud.

The dog forfeits the staring match and we clomp, void of all feline grace, back down the hill to the house. One glance at the roof and anxiety stiffens my tongue, which fills my throat. Just for a moment, I’m gone again as another memory flickers, this one from a childhood film. A fairy panics in an attic, tracking leaks and drips, plugging holes with knick-knacks.

We’re at the front door. Canine saliva wafts through the screen as it swings. It’s time to light a candle. And my boyfriend will say to vacuum.

I’d say it’s a nice little house, but that would be a lie. I love its charm to death. But it breaks. Often. Yesterday, the sewer clogged. Last week, the sink started to drip. A few months prior, the water didn’t run hot. The dishwasher doesn’t work, the floors are uneven, not a single wall is level…

And the roof, built, I’m sure, in an earlier century, is half cheap shingles and half crumbling metal.

I understand metal roofs are all the rage. Magnolia homesteads with mud rooms the size of public bath houses are every white, married woman’s dream. Panoramic sparkling white kitchen counters and original wooden staircase rails would make any young lady swoon.

But this spongy linoleum floor, rats no doubt nesting beneath its baseboards, will do for now. This faux marble countertop hosts my crockpot just fine, though its slant permits the machine to slide slightly southeast with the clunk of frozen chicken breast and the plop of jarred salsa.

An afternoon sun glow flickers through my lashes. I blink, and I’m four, tiptoeing atop a red footstool in my mother’s kitchen. Sprinkled flour puffs as it collides with gingerbread, and doughy off-cuts coat my baby teeth.

With two dialed clicks dinner is on, so across the squishy subfloor I meander. I long for a woven rug, thick but flat, soft and quite pink, to mask all these cringey creaks.

But that’s the problem with meager wages. There’s no hiding from adult anxieties. I wince at the thought of a hurricane, the sound of a thunder clap, the warning of a flood. Heaven help me if this lottery gifts us sickness, or a baby.

We don’t want children. Not in this stuck way. But time fasts forward with a deep breath, and I picture the crib there, near the foot of the bed, and a changing table there, along the wall. And little socks and shoes and giggles and sputter and dewy fingers tugging on my curls…

No.

Not here. Not in this underconsumption core. Rats will not nest beneath my child’s giggles. Floors will not give with her first steps.

Well, let’s be real. I could live with the floors. We could kill the rats. And it’ll be good for her, the hill out back.

But if rain ate through rust, broke on her brow, and dripped past her chin to her navel?

No, I couldn’t bear it, not for a second, to raise her under a roof that’s half metal.