Arkansas

Grandma’s car smells like cigarettes as she pulls the Oldsmobile onto the gravel lot in front of the place where grandpa’s staying. Inside, it’s cooler, but smells like disinfectant and wet mops. It looks like my school inside, a shiny grey linoleum floor and a long corridor with doors on either side. Grandpa is in a small room with two beds separated by a shower curtain thing. His belly is huge under a thin dirty blanket. It smells like pee, and his arms are scabby and red. Mom talks to him and he calls her by the wrong name. He doesn’t know who I am and he thinks my sister is my mom. Grandma pretends like she isn’t crying. Then I hear a lady down the hall screaming, over and over. But not like she has a reason, just to do it. Grandma talks to him, pretending like she’s having a conversation, but he just grumbles things that don’t make sense, staring out with his milky grey blind dog eyes. He seems scared. Grandma sends Linda and me outside, and I don’t say goodbye.

I push out through those double metal doors like in my school and walk to the barbed wire fence. It’s hot with the shimmery sound of cicadas and I smell the grass. There are a couple of horses and a brown one comes over and puts his long face over the wire so I can scratch the rough hair on his snout. The horse is gentle and smells earthy. Linda says something, but I’m not listening. I just want to pet the horse