Brooke: Variations on a Theme

The summer days felt endless, they blazed up and melted together-sticky and uncomfortable. Elliot hated everything about them. There was too much daylight, too much time, too much of that muggy Southern heat, and far too many bugs. The bushes shook with the constant low buzzing of the jar flies and Elliot always cringed as he scooted past them, averting his gaze from their long wax-paper wings and bulging black eyeballs.

Summer meant too many hours feeling cooped up. Too much time listening to Eliza and Meredith argue over who had the cuter cut-offs or who went to the better pool party, and mom humming idly all the while as she chopped up zucchini–like they weren’t making any racket at all. Too much of Him drinking on the porch, slamming screen doors, starting up the truck with long noisy sputters and driving off for hours at a time.

Elliot much preferred the refuge of Fall. The slight chill in the air, the back-to-school scuttle, the fresh notebooks and clean classrooms. The crispness, the quiet–far from his hot, leaning house. Far from Meredith and Eliza who went to Jackson Creek Junior High now. Far from his mother’s zucchini, or the constant dull buzzing of the vacuum (like the jar flies). She was always cleaning, always humming. And most of all, far from Him.

But the sad truth, Elliot discovered, was that summer was an inevitable, unavoidable season–and he simply had to learn to suck it up and bear it. When he couldn’t escape to a quiet classroom, when he couldn’t find refuge in fall–he found it in the attic.

Father told him not to go up there once. He said the floorboards were weak. He said they weren’t strong enough to support some snot-nosed little boy stomping all over them. But what did He know? He just didn’t want Elliot to find all the old boxes stuffed with those nasty magazines of his. Well, he’d found them. And a lot more. They were lodged in between piles of yellowing bank records and the tottering heap of Grandma Lois’s furniture. Elliot made a hobby of unearthing these ancient family relics–he picked through the mess carefully, counting each item as a mini discovery.