Grass Clippings and Fried Mushrooms- a short piece written to my sister

Summer; doesn’t the word bring a twinge to the corners of your mouth?  It always does to mine, because I know what summer smells like.  And the summer when the accident happened was the epitome of all summers.

 I was nine and you were four, too little to remember what that summer was like.  That summer smelled of freshly cut grass and mushrooms frying on the barbecue.  That’s the way Daddy liked his mushrooms, all brown and crunchy looking on the outside.  The scent of them frying came wafting into my nostrils as we lay in our backyard. You rested your head on my stomach and together we closed our eyes and felt the ends of the blades of grass with our fingertips.  Don’t you remember?  They were so soft and so quiet, it was like we could hear them whispering, telling secrets in our ears. 

The harsh buzzing of the bee’s wings beating together broke the silence, and broke our sense of tranquillity.  You were always afraid of bees.  I was too, but being the oldest, I had to pretend that I wasn’t, not matter how much terror might have been swelling inside my nine-year-old heart, and I could not emit any fear.  I had to make you believe that there was nothing to worry about, despite the growing panic I felt as the bee came closer and closer.  It landed on your knee and I told you not to move, that everything would be fine, but not to move, just the same.  You stared at me in alarm, as though I was watching you drown and just standing there, doing nothing.  Your eyes grew glossy, but they kept looking at me, you didn’t blink, not even once.  I glanced over at your knee, and to my surprise, the bee was nowhere to be seen.  With a sigh of relief, I said that we should get up, and go inside.  And so we did.

 We ate our supper without a second though towards the bee incident, and afterwards Mum told us to go outside to play because Daddy wasn’t feeling well.  We played our game; ‘crocodile’ and I let you win.  I always had to let you win, so that you wouldn’t feel like a loser at only four-years-old.  Mum didn’t call us to get us to go to bed, and so I ended our game prematurely so that we could go inside again.  You walked behind me into the living room and Daddy was lying on the ground with an ugly floral print pillow under his head.  His neck looked so big compared to the rest of him.  Mum was talking frantically on the phone, telling someone on the other end about what Daddy looked like, but she talked as if he wasn’t even there to talk for himself.  You walked up to him and bent down next to his ear,

“Daddy?” you whispered “Daddy, are you inside there?”

Daddy stiffly nodded his head and then he closed his eyes.  The doorbell rang and it was our neighbour, Chris.  She spoke to Mum quickly, and then she and Mum helped Daddy get up and get into our silver Toyota.  Daddy’s head slumped against the window as Mum drove off and Chris slowly clicked our door locked. 

            “Let’s play a game, girls,” Chris said cheerily.  Her smile looked like those paper dolls that we cut out of magazines.  Too happy, too perfect.  You didn’t want to play a game, and neither did I.  You began to whine and asked if you could go to bed.  Chris took your little rope-burned hands into hers and half walked, half carried you into our bedroom that we shared.  She lay down beside you on the bottom bunk and began to tell you stories about giants who only ate carrots, and princesses with glass slippers.  I sat by the closed door and listened through the crack at the bottom.  Chris’ voice got quieter, and she stopped the story when she knew that you were asleep.  Her footsteps came closer to the door and I stood up abruptly, so that she wouldn’t know I had been sitting there, bewildered at what was going on. 

            “Chris?” I asked her as she slowly closed the door, careful as to not wake you up, “Chris, where have Mum and Daddy gone?”

Chris sat me down on our pink couch and I lay my head on her shoulder as she explained that a bee had flown inside Daddy’s green T-shirt and when it got stuck in there, it got frustrated, and so it stung Daddy so that it could get free.  I didn’t understand why that would make him so sick though, so you told me that Daddy was allergic to the stings, and the allergy made his throat swell up so much that he couldn’t breathe.  Chris said that Mum had to take Daddy to the doctor so that he could help Daddy.  I nodded my head in understanding, but inside, I still was lost. 

 Blurredly, I walked into our room and looked at you lying there, not knowing that somewhere Daddy wasn’t breathing.  I climbed up onto the top bunk and lay with my eyes staring blindly at the Noah’s Ark border around the walls and after some time, I don’t know how long it took, but I finally fell asleep. 

In the morning, your face was right on top of mine, and when you pried my droopy eyelids open I jolted awake. 

“Daddy’s home!  Daddy’s home!” you hollered as soon as I sat up.  We lumbered down the wooden ladder that Daddy had built for us and rushed into the kitchen where Daddy and Mum were sitting at the table, stirring their coffee with a ‘tink, tink, tink.’ 

Everything was right again, and soon we forgot about the whole ordeal.  But for a long time, you wouldn’t wear green T-shirts outside, because you thought that bees only liked the colour green.  And still, every summer, when we can smell the freshly cut grass and frying mushrooms, I remember the terror that infected my dreams that night when I was nine and you were four.