We waited for the trains. The stolen matches we struck burned out across the tracks. Our father packed sleeves of crackers in a plastic bag and told us to come home in the morning. Mother was away again. This time, maybe Memphis. She’d taken the cord to the telephone. She’d taken the hinge pins from the front door and left it lying in the uncut grass. We carried rocks in our pockets and felt with our feet for the rails to shake. We knew our father was smoking Reds in the empty doorframe, too far away to hear the sound of stone against metal as we dropped the rocks and waited for the trains.
Our sleeping bags were rolled tight and tied with shoe string. They were singed with holes from the matches we flicked. It was summer and all around the insects worried loudly from the tree leaves. We balanced crackers on the rails like coins to flatten. We imagined Memphis in the morning. Wet streets and bottle caps popping beneath the tires of tired cars.
She’d been a singer once. We knew that much. And we knew our father was smoking Red’s and would laugh when he found his other matches missing from the kitchen drawer. The evening clouds were the color of ash left in a glass of water. If it started to rain we’d let the unlit matches ruin in our pockets. We should have stolen the cigarettes too. A bottle from beneath the sink where we knew it was hidden. Instead we knelt between the rails and ate the crackers with our hands behind our backs. We took our shirts off and tied them around our heads. We watched the night for some light to promise itself in the distance and for the rails the shake. The clouds kept quiet. The skin of our fingertips smelled of sulfur.
The grass beneath the door in the front lawn was already beginning to die. That’s what our father told us as he tied the neck of our cracker sack shut. And we knew the house would still be wide open in the morning when we came back. The lights on all night, our father lighting cigarettes off the kitchen stove and laughing, walking barefoot out into yard and stepping over the door there. He’d sleep on the couch and leave the bed made. She was somewhere in Memphis with those hinge pins clinking in her pocket as she danced to boogie-woogie piano and flirted free drinks from the bar stool saints.
We imagined a patch of yellow grass in the shape of what our mother left there. We struck the last matches. And they burned and they smoked and we waited for the trains.
~
Andrew Siegrist has published stories in the Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, trampset, Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans and lives with his wife and two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.