Free A Place at the Table by Susan Rebecca White

birds and the tree frogs. I breathe slowly, trying to slow down my heart. I inhale and smell the dirt. Know that it smells loamy, which is one of the words we learned in Wordly Wise and which I immediately matched with this soft place of greens and browns. I make my way down to the creek, sit on a rock beside the running water. I dip my hand in. The water is cold and a little dirty. I think of my mama’s dimming eyes, the crumpled picture she threw on the kitchen table, my secret brought to light. I’d rather be dead than for Mama to have seen that picture.
    Maybe I could die.
    Maybe I could just take off my shoes and walk down the middleof the creek, balancing myself on the rocks until I step on a slippery one. Fall face forward and drown in six inches of water. It could happen. It did happen last year, to a kid from Decatur High. He was on a camping trip with his family, and he left the campsite early in the morning, probably just to hike around, and ended up falling and drowning in shallow water.
    I imagine a boy’s body lying face-first in the water. I try to picture my own body, found by Mama and Daddy. I try to imagine the grief they would feel. But all I can see is Hunter, Hunter drowned.
    Hunter dead.

3
The Firefly Jar
    (Decatur, Georgia, 1975)
    A t night I dream of killing my brother. I dream I choke the life out of him, my thumbs wrapped around his neck. I dream I hold one of Daddy’s rifles, only a few feet away from Hunter’s heart, while he teases me, tells me I am too much of a fag to pull the trigger, until I feel my pointer finger bend at the joint and I see the look of surprise on his face just before his expression shifts from shock to pain. I dream I straddle him, a brick in one hand, bringing it down upon his head until what once was stubborn and hard becomes soft and broken.
    •  •  •
    During the day I ignore him. Try to pretend he doesn’t exist. Summer stretches long and hot. After I finish whatever chores Mama asks me to do, I go to the woods behind the house. The woods are my only place of peace. I stand beneath a white oak and scratch aline on my arm with the point of the pocketknife Daddy gave me on my fourteenth birthday, along with his twice-rehearsed speech (first given to Troy, then to Hunter) about how every man ought to carry a good, sharp knife. The clean sting of the blade distracts me temporarily from the tangled knots that twist in my stomach, knots of shame and fear, guilt and rage. Blood springs to the surface of the cut and I lean against the textured bark of the tree, exhaling.
    It is so green in these woods, the light from the sun cutting through the trees’ leaves, casting speckled shadows all around. The birds call to each other from branch to branch. Overhead I spot a bright blue bird. I lose myself for a moment watching its quick, nervous movements.
    One thing I know: Mama has not told Daddy about the underwear Hunter hid in my drawer, because Daddy continues to act jolly around me as always. But Mama herself treats me with more and more distance, like I’m an injured cat found under the front porch, history unknown, possibly diseased. An animal she feels obligated to feed, though is afraid to pick up.
    A bee buzzes near my ear, and without thinking I capture it, cupping it in my hand. I open my hand quickly, and the bee shoots out without stinging me. Ears alert, I listen. Just a little ways off I hear a low hum, a steady buzz. Energy. I walk toward the hum. It grows louder. Another bee flies by, and I know what I have found even before I see the hive in a hollowed-out space in the trunk of the tree. I am looking at the buzzing hive, but I am seeing Hunter, years before, on the ground at the church picnic, red faced and choking. I am seeing the firefly jar Daddy made for me when I was a kid, nothing more than a Bell canning jar with ventilation holes punched into its metal lid. There was a net, too, with a long pole. I would capture the fireflies and deposit them