Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This
She was screaming bloody murder, wailing and crying. Stomping around the house in a tantrum calling for me. I held my breath as she marched past the bureau I was hiding under. I had a soft white blanket over my head. I picked at the pilling fabric, curling each fray together into a fuzzball. The sun came through the window at a slant and illuminated my little cotton fuzzies, their silhouettes aglow like magic in my small fingers. This blanket was used, traveling from my Grandma’s house in Barnwell all the way out here, deep in the South Carolina woods. At least it felt like that for a little girl. Far and lonely. This blanket sat on my Grandma’s lap through the entire run of the ‘Days of our Lives’ and maybe before. My Grandpa gave it to my Mama when Grandma died last year. Now, here I sat, picking it apart enraged at my Grandma's daughter, weeping chaotically around me in this big ole empty house. The sound of my name being yelled was muffled now as she was three stories up in the finished attic: my de facto doctor’s office.