Mud Puddle
He stands in front of the mirror in the men’s room, smoothing the wax onto his hair. Campground toilets always stink of piss, and this one is no different. He wrinkles his nose. Bad smells bother him, he’s sensitive that way, and this stench is ruining his sense of occasion. It should be different just before, it should be sacred. He dips his fingers into the jar and brings them to his nose. Resinous, and a little bit religious, like sitting in a church pew as a child. He smiles as he runs his fingers through his hair. He likes this sense of anointing himself. His hands stroke again and again, slippery smooth, and his eyes close in pleasure.
He washes his hands when he is finished, for he is a fastidious man. He checks his reflection before he leaves and smiles at what he sees there. Glossy black hair, perfectly sculpted and shined, and dark as midnight oil.
Forwards and back, with the trailers and trees upside down, and the blue sky stuck between the toes of my new white sneakers. Funny, this. I open my mouth for the ha-ha to fall out.
One last swing. Then I’ll jump off, and run all the way back to the campsite. Dougie’s gone and he said they’ll leave without me if I didn’t come. Dougie buggie big brother bossy. Nice to lift me onto swing, but mean to say that, about the leaving. No. They won’t leave without me. Will they?
I let my arms and legs hang. The swing slows and slows and stops. There’s a mud puddle underneath it, dark and oily, right underneath my brand new sneakers with the white white toes. It looks like the danger ditch at the end of our road. Dougie says it’ll drown me deep with dead crows and dog poo if I fall in.
I think on this. I think so hard the swing begins to twist. This way, that way, the only way to get off is to jump hop skip, and maybe I’ll land safe. I stretch one toe down towards a dry patch of dirt. Can’t reach. Stretch a little more, and a little more, twisting and turning and holding on tight, so tippy but nearly, so nearly and Oh! Oweee ouch ouch.
One foot’s hooked up over the swing, trapped, the other hops round and round the mud. My white toe’s spattered dark now, and the swing twists tighter, pulling me towards puddle. My foot slides, and I hop and hop but I’m up to the ankle in mud. The cold water seeps in at my clean white laces. I start to cry.
Footsteps over the gravel. Mommy?
“Hey kid,” a man says from behind and his shadow is blacker than mud. “Hey, you need help, kid?”
I say nothing. He laughs. Mean.
“That’s right, you keep quiet,” he says, “or the bad man’s gonna hear you.”
He laughs and my white shoe’s ruined and I’m too tired to hop anymore, so I say swears. Out loud and right at his laughing mean face.
“Go to hell, farthead.”
“You want to keep quiet, kid,” he says but he backs off and goes to stand by the fence. Watching. He’s not laughing now.
We stand, me in the mud and him by the fence. Sometimes he kicks at the chain-links and the sound of this makes me hop and twist. I can’t feel my swing-foot.
Beep, beep-beep. Our car with the trailer tacked on, sliding past slow and slow and stop. Mommy opens the door and hollers out. “C’mon now. Count of three, we’re leaving. One…..”
I hop and twist.
Two. I push and pull and wrench.
Three and free and running full tilt, mud-foot strong and pulling the other, towards Mommy and the open door and leaving this place.
I think of the man as we drive away, I think I’m gonna stick out my tongue. Ha ha go to hell. But he’s gone and the swing and the fence stand empty.
“Mommy!”
Oh for God’s sake, what now? She thinks this as she stands with one hand on the small of her back. Six months along and still queasy, with the weight of it felt in all her joints now.
The small blond head barrels into her belly and she winces, then strokes the baby soft hair.
“She won’t come,” he glowers, “and I told her we were leaving.” He looks up, and she sees worry amongst the belligerence; have I been a good big brother, have I done my job?
“Never mind, Dougie,” she says, “you can carry the lunch-basket to the car.”She watches him go with his thin shoulders straining and his tongue poking out in concentration, then she lumbers around the trailer to peer through the chain-link fence.
There’s her little girl, her stubborn one, feet pumping towards blue sky and not a care in the world. Too far away to see her expression, but probably intent on some private want and oblivious to all and sundry. Ah well. In a few months, she’ll have a baby brother to grow up to, and she won’t be the little one anymore. The swing drifts forwards and back, hypnotic. Yes, leave her be a little longer. They’ll pick her up when they pass the playground.
Something stabs through her belly, what? Worry? Fear? And then she is cold and gasping for breath, panicked, with her hands clawing chain-link and her vision blackening. Oh but how stupid, this feeling, so out of place on this sunny blue day!
“Are we nearly ready to go?” she calls to her husband, trying to hide the jitters in her voice. Preggers and paranoid. Good God.
Her hands don’t uncurl until both her children are strapped into the back seat. They pass under the campground’s wooden sign and through the dark pines, they roll onto the open road and she finally breathes out. Her husband grins at her.
“Hey kids,” he says, “how about a sing-song? Ten Green Bottles, that’ll cheer up Mommy.”
They run over a skunk on the seventh green bottle. The oily black stench expands in the heat until they all sputter and choke. There is pretend gagging and the real kind, and her husband stops the car so she can throw up on the roadside daisies.
And this is the story told at barbecues and Christmas dinners, told with her family tucked around her and her youngest settled on his big sister’s knee. The hot day on the way home from Port Angeles, with a carload of kids and tuna-fish sandwiches and no air conditioning, and her six months pregnant with her hand pressed to mouth. The bump of the skunk and the sudden sharp stench, and the way this rose with every turn of the tire for the next hundred miles. Oh how it stunk, of ditches and dead things and God-knows-what, how it strangled you half to death with its stench! And they laugh, because no-one ever really dies from a smell.
She forgets about the other thing, that dark panic, although she senses it in her dreams sometimes. She wakes with a sense of danger passing close, her nostrils clogged with an oily black stink and her hands clutching for her children.
Darci Bysouth was born and raised in the ranchlands of British Columbia, but has made Edinburgh her home for the last fifteen years. She teaches literacy skills to primary school children who experience difficulties, and finds their creative and unique ways of looking at the world a constant source of inspiration. Her writing has appeared in the Bristol Anthology and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and will appear in Bridge House’s World Stopping Events anthology, out in September. She studies creative writing through evening classes at the University of Edinburgh and has just finished her first novel.
