Read Under a Dark Summer Sky for Free Online

calloused. She tore a chunk from the aloe plant beside the kitchen door and rubbed its soothing juice over her skin.
    Her husband, Jerome, had gone fishing with some of his boys, said he would meet her at the beach. He had struggled for years to find an occupation worthy of his talents: bartender, pineapple farmer, bus driver. He had a turtle kraal for a while, but Selma had to do all the killing for him because he couldn’t stand how they screamed. After she witnessed the way he hacked away at the poor creatures’ throats, she could well understand why they did. But meat was life, any meat that didn’t already have maggots in it. Her mother, Grace, had taught her that, during the hungry years.
    None of Jerome’s schemes had lasted for more than a few weeks. He had even tried selling encyclopedias door-to-door for a while. This was one of the strangest things ever to happen in Heron Key, as most of his customers couldn’t read, and neither could he. The only good thing to come out of it was when he gave his entire sample set of the Encyclopedia Britannica to Missy when he quit. He was all for putting it on the fire, figured it would burn real well, but Selma had persuaded him otherwise.
    Now, it seemed, he was a fisherman. Good thing that fish don’t scream.
    She stripped off her blood-spattered apron and dunked it in a bucket of seawater to soak. Leaning against the sink, she kneaded the sore muscles in her neck and wished Jerome had stayed to help. They had been married fifteen years, and every day of it had been a battle of one kind or another—to get Jerome’s lazy ass to work, to raise enough food from their tiny plot…to swallow the sad knowledge that it would only be the two of them, forever. That last was like the taste of bile in her throat.
    And yet, at the beginning, she recalled, it hadn’t been so bad. He could make her laugh, one of the few people with that ability, and she had figured the babies would come fast. When they did not, and he began to drift from one job to another like a leaf on the tide, she realized he would never change and made her peace with that. She didn’t complain. She didn’t run away. (Where to?) She just put one foot in front of the other and kept moving forward.
    The sun had reached the low point of the day when it shone straight into her kitchen window, marked with spatters of grease and dead flies. She scrubbed at the glass. The sounds of bickering chickens drifted in on the breeze that lifted the palm fronds. She and Jerome had built the house together, expanded it out from Grace’s little shack over the years into a modest home. The sitting porch was the best in the neighborhood, her chickens the tastiest around. The secret was plenty of oyster shells for their gizzards to work on and lots of wild herbs in their feed. The hens in the yard were, as always, competing for rooster Elmer’s attention. He preened his russet feathers in the slanting sun, oblivious. Baskets of tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers waited in the shade of a palmetto. The walls of the shed were lined with gleaming rows of jars, relishes, jams, and preserves, all neatly labeled.
    Missy often teased her, as Selma’s idea of a shortage was having only one strawberry shortcake in the house instead of two. But after a childhood so poor that she was sometimes forced to exist on fish bones and grass, Selma treated hunger like an enemy, always waiting to strike. She remained vigilant at all times. Her weapons were grits and corn pone, her defenses made of swamp cabbage and fried fish. Their little house was a fortress of food.
    She stepped over the bucket where her apron soaked to reach the shelf in the corner. In a neat row were laid a rattlesnake’s skull, two dried raccoon paws, a crunchy brown bunch of shallots, and a crab’s shell. A muslin bag held a lock of Missy’s hair and a shred of Henry’s shirt.
    It had not taken long for the magic to