Featured Nonfiction

• Excerpts, Pictures, Lightning And Thunder

  Paul Crenshaw

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  She weighs a hundred pounds shivering wet but calls her biceps Lightning and Thunder. Some days she dresses like a ninja, but in hot pink. Some days I find her so high in the tree in the back yard I can feel where my breath begins and ends, somewhere near the point blood enters and leaves the heart, where the ribcage flutters like the pages of the books she reads while lounging high in the tree, as if this is normal, as if anything our children do is normal.

  She tie-dies her underwear. She wears a shirt with someone else’s name on it. She re-upholstered our couch one rainy weekend and now it looks like a dairy cow. When I asked her why, she said she wasn’t sure but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  She once told me the War of 1812 started because the British were bamboozling America’s trade, so America had to kung fu karate chop them. She once told me George Orwell’s real name was Freddy Krueger. I once asked her why she had on two different-colored socks and she replied that she couldn’t find the matching one. When I asked her why she didn’t simply wear a different pair, she explained that she liked the first sock.

  She is fourteen, her chest thin and frail as a bird’s. Or a kitten, like the one we saw outside the restaurant and she begged to take home. It was in a sorry state—eyes wild as olives, fur matted like my hair in the morning after I fall asleep on the couch. I thought of distemper and rabies and fleas. She thought of clipping out the matted fur, of small bowls of milk on Saturday mornings.

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