Free The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson

listening to polka music. It was the happiest part of Poot, and Laurel couldn’t blame it; it had escaped him. For months after that first visit, the sour smell of Poot and his cot and the dirty sock with no foot in it, the ghost foot bobbing cheerfully in the corner of her eye, woke her up screaming.
    From then on, Christmas by Christmas, up until the year she turned ten, Mother smiled and nodded and passed out presents, unseeing, while Laurel and Thalia watched their uncle Poot get eaten.
    The next year, when Daddy pulled up in front of Poot’s house and shut off the engine, Laurel hung back in the car with him. Daddy was more than willing to drive them all over DeLop, but he never went inside.
    Laurel whispered, “Can I stay here with you, Daddy? For this one house?”
    He didn’t hear her. His bird eyes had already focused sharply on something invisible floating three feet above the solid roof of the car. “Visiting sprites in Daddy-land,” Thalia called it.
    Mother, arms already full of bags, bumped at the window with her elbow and called, “Laurel, come on now,” through the glass.
    The three of them picked a path through Poot’s rocky yard, toe-stepping from one tip-tilty slide of gravel to the next: Mother, then Thalia, Laurel trailing behind. Aunt Enid had the door open before Mother knocked. Once inside, Laurel saw that the whole lower half of Poot’s leg was gone, even the knee. Uncle Poot had his new, higher stump right there in plain sight, as if he were giving it an airing. It was a knob-shaped object with dry skin webbing the tip and curling off in little peels. Underneath the skin he was sloughing, the flesh looked waxy and wattled.
    The stump had a long, curved scar on the end, and Thalia whispered, “Holy goats. It’s
smiling
at us.”
    It was. Laurel couldn’t look away. Part of her didn’t want to, because she didn’t want to see if the ghost foot had been joined by a ghost calf. Would it be attached? Or a separate entity? It was all she could do to keep her eyes from squinching shut entirely, but Mother looked Poot right in his face and said, “Merry Christmas, Uncle,” in a firm voice, unmindful that another goodly chunk of Poot had left the building.
    Laurel turned her back and found herself facing the broken end table with Poot’s glass Christmas tree on it. The tree was hollow, and it had an electrical cord, so the cheap bulbs dotting its surface had probably worked at one time. An undisturbed layer of grime coated its green glass spikes, testifying that no one had moved it in years. Laurel snaked one hand out and pulled a red bulb from its socket, curling her fist around it, tight, tight, not looking.
    The next year, Poot’s other foot was gone, too, and the following year, the remaining leg joined it. A scant year later, Poot, his phantom foot, and even his sour cot had been taken away.
    Mother told Enid, “I was sorry to hear of your loss.”
    Aunt Enid answered, “Yeah. I tol’ Poot that the sugar diabetes would get him in the end if he didn’t stop with the drinkin’. But he kept him a bottle of—”
    “Please pass on my condolences to Doodle,” Mother interrupted. Doodle was the no-account brother.
    Nothing more was said.
    Back at home, Laurel asked Thalia, “Do you think Mother’s sad that Uncle Poot is gone?”
    Laurel was plaiting a hundred tiny braids all over Thalia’s head. When she finished, Thalia would wet her hair down in the sink and sleep on it, and in the morning, she’d take out the braids and have the Pace, Florida, girl’s version of a hundred-dollar spiral perm.
    “Are
you
sad?” Thalia asked, incredulous.
    “No,” said Laurel. “But Mother might be.” Poot had let Mother sleep on his couch and had fed her some after her mama passed out holding a cigarette and burned herself up.
    Thalia snorted. “Mother doesn’t even know he’s dead.”
    “Oh, come on, Thalia. She can’t say condolences and not know Uncle Poot’s dead.”
    “Sure she