slammin’ screen doors

by margaret hines

Little feet, fairy skirts. Pirate hats and foam swords. Plastic crowns fit only for the swashbuckling princess of the royal kitchen. Dancing until you fall like pods from a maple tree, though certainly less graceful. But it’s all fine, and you get up again as soon as the screen door slams because it means your dad is home and you can rock out to Taylor Swift and the Mamma Mia soundtrack like you’re the next pop icon of the decade. Even if the CD player skips when you jump too hard. It’s all fine because dad is home and that means mom is coming soon after, and you love your aunt, but she’s not your parents, and in your opinion it’s time for her to go home. You’ll see her tomorrow anyway.

You can’t wait until your dad starts making pasta with tomato sauce that you don’t even like to eat, but it smells like home and that means everyone else is home too. You’re ready to show your dad the magic you came up with and hopefully the absolutely-edible mud pie waiting in the backyard. It’s spring, and you can tell by the way the scent of rain hangs over everything and the flowers are poking their pillowy pink heads out of the green leaves. The air feels different and it’s your favorite.

Your aunt and your dad are talking in the kitchen like they always do, passing your little brother between them as they tell stories of their days, smiling at the moments adults always find funny but you never quite understand. The patterned kitchen tiles are cooler than the rest of the house, and you’re grateful for it. The kitchen might be your favorite place. It leads to the yard, and has the door that slams loud enough to tell you who’s home and the heater you like to sit on in the winter and pretend it’s a fireplace. It has odd burgundy walls and fading white doors and a sink with a window facing your neighbors’. They have almost as many flowers in their yard as you do, but your yard is a fairyland of legos and lightsaber fights while theirs is only cut by hard asphalt.

You don’t know it yet, but these details stick in your mind like pine sap to your fingers.