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creaks like a funhouse. I’m convinced that this is somehow related to the toilet paper walls.
    You can hear the power meter buzzing on the side of the house. You used to be able to hear crickets, too. During the summer sometimes you can’t tell what’s the power meter and what’s crickets.
    Considering the hail I think it’s pretty gutsy for the bugs to be out.
    I walk around to the back of the house. There’s a bunch of weeds growing near the hose hookup. Once I found a dead bird there. Its leg was twisted and something had bitten its head off.
    A few days later I had a dream that the bird had my head and I could fly.
    The moon looks small and sewn to the sky.
    The backyard grass looks like hair. When I get strong enough Ma wants me to start using the hand mower.
    Till then we’ll just let it go, she says.
    Till my body grows I will be thin and wimpish.
    Sometimes I think I must have cancer cause I have very few muscles. Ma says I get that from my dad. He was small when he was little, too, she says.
    But then he grew big enough so he could break stuff.
    Including Ma’s hand, which happened twice.
    Once he did it by smashing it in the silverware drawer. Ma had to wear a cast and Cheedle and Shay and me signed it a hundred million times.
    The leaves on the poplar tree are almost all gone now. I wonder if the hail has anything to do with this fact. I look for the cat from this morning but he’s not there.
    The swing set was put up when we were kids. It’s orange with patches of rust. The swings are missing and now Ma uses it to beat the rugs. We have one rug in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. Currently the rug from the bathroom is hanging over it. It looks droopy and sad. It’s supposed to be yellow but it’s sort of green now.
    Ma uses my old Wiffle ball bat to beat them. Whenever she comes back in the house she seems lost and out of breath.
    Once after beating the rug from the kitchen she went straight down to the basement and didn’t come up for the rest of the night. When I checked on her she was sitting on the floor, holding her wedding dress. I think she pulled it out of a box.
    Hey, I said.
    It was like she was sitting in a puddle.
    She said, Hi, honey.
    You okay? I asked.
    I’m fine, she said. Go back upstairs, okay?
    There are all sorts of things in those boxes in the basement. Once I found some pills in a little orange bottle. I showed Shay and she said they were Ma’s and that they were for depression and mental illness but that Ma stopped taking them cause they were making her butt big. Shay said, Vain bitch should keep takin em.
    I’m in front of Ma’s window now and the breeze is making her curtains flutter.
    Ma, I say to her, everything’s gonna be okay, okay?
    It surprises me how loud your voice can get when no one’s listening.
    We’ll go bowling and stuff, I say.
    The house next door is even smaller than ours. Mrs. Bunton lives there and she’s got a poodle named Pierce that she talks to like it’s human. She’s so old I sometimes think she’s a walking dead person.
    You can see little bits of hail on Ma’s windowsill.
    Her bed is so huge it makes her look small like Cheedle. Her creams are still on her stomach and I worry that she’ll roll over and squish them.
    Ma, I say again, but she can’t hear me cause she’s asleep.
    She forgot to take her clothes off and she’s still wearing her shoes.

5
    In school I feel like people can see inside me. Like all my veins and tissues.
    In Life Science I sit behind Anne Meadows. Her hair is so blond it makes you wonder about stuff. In Art I have tried to paint this hair several times but I never get it right.
    I always make the hair without a head cause I don’t know how to paint faces yet. Al Johnson taught me how to draw them with charcoal pencils but using a brush is much more difficult.
    Soon you’ll do faces, Miss Haze told me after class