IMAGINATION PLANTATION
“This is where the slaves used to live!” said a girl with a red and pink striped shirt with spaghetti straps. I can draw my picture in there!” Sweat beaded on the ball of her shoulders and she squinted with her bright blue eyes as the sun glared at her through a thick moss covered canopy of zigzagged snarled old oak limbs that stretched to the sky.
“It’s easy to get in here Samantha!” said a girl with greasy looking blonde hair. She wore a red, white and blue cheerleader uniform and marched along with a walking stick taller than her. She also wore scattered patches of BBQ sauce on her cheeks.
“Megan! Be careful honey!” called her mother from a white van with black trim. “Let me wipe your face!”
Samantha clicked and scratched her long, chipped and beaten cherry red press on nails with flaked off paint, against rough random patterns of jagged, sharp looking shells and solid concrete, on the outside of the slave quarters’ tabby walls. There was a small puff of loose dirt as one of the toes of her oversized worn blue flip flops bit the dirt. Her next foot slowly made it in the structure. The Muddy stagnant smell of the marsh at low tide hung heavy in the room. “It stinks in here like someone went to the bathroom.” Dirt dobbers with pipe flute looking mud houses clung to beams in rows like organ pipes and circular cobwebs hung in corners.
Samantha let out a piercing shrill scream that didn’t match her voice. Then a broad and sticky smile slowly drifted over her glittered and glossy lips exposing the gaps between her large teeth. “It’s a dried up snake on the wall! It looks like an oak root!” She reached out with a careful and steady hand to touch its rough surface. “Is it alive? Megan?”
She held a tattered dirt covered pink book tight to her chest and removed a pencil stuck in its gray spine. The books yellow pages rustled as she opened it revealing a cleanly lined drawing of a girl in a triangle shaped dress. She quickly drew a long line and then stopped. “It doesn’t have a head. I’ll make one up!” She quickly drew a happy face and a smile.
*
DRIVING IS FUN, BUT I’D RATHER FLY
I’m using the car mirror on the windshield to fix my hair. I’m trying to put my hair in a clip. I want it to look nice, not really any other reason. I have a skirt on and a long sleeve shirt for fall, but it’s yellow so that’s spring and summer colors. I don’t want to trade head bands because I like the white one. I’m wearing the white headband, because white matches anything and black does to.
We were driving in bad rain and I thought we were going to bust in to the river because my dad was driving. The river was all along side of us and its gator water for tons of miles. That’s when we were in Louisiana.
There’s cactus out here now. We stopped at a hotel and I wanted to go swimming so bad. The pool was closed. I touched a cactus on accident on my arm and a thorn stuck in me. My dad said it wasn’t the kind with the barb, so it came out real easy. Mom cleaned it up and gave me a Band-Aid for it. There are tumbleweeds out here that aren’t rolling. My mom says whenever they get dry they fall off and start rolling.
I don’t know. This trip is long and boring. The rain was cool, and the boulders on rocks that looked like if someone pushed them from behind, they would fall. I’m looking at the map and we’re in New Mexico, and heading to Arizona, but I don’t know if we’re going to make it. My dad’s driving is scary. I stuck the window up on the map to hold it there. I thought the map said national park stadium map and guide, but I read it harder and it says national park system map and guide.
I thought we were going to get on the highway. This doesn’t look like a highway. This isn’t a highway, cause it’s not high. Like when we’re up high in New Orleans. There you can see down and the houses are all messed up with holes in the roofs from a flood or something and all the animals and dogs and children and people got sucked in to the ocean or something. Driving is fun, but I’d rather fly.
