From Summer Porch Stories by Alkeith Walters
Max Slevogt’s impressionist The Magic Flute Scene catches the theatrical shimmer of Mozart’s opera through loose brushwork, glowing colour, and a sense of movement, mystery, and staged enchantment.
This image is in the public domain
Eight little boats, awkward pre-teen origami battleships built from loose-leaf notebook paper, twist in tiny currents of gutter water. The boy, called Little Keith because his neighbor is bigger and named Keith, too, had to sneak a handful of sheets from the bottom drawer of Daddy’s grey metal desk while the others waited outside. Mommy was folding wash towels on her bed. The blue ruled lines on the paper were faded to lavender, the white background too yellowed for any more cursive handwriting lessons
Rain fell during the night and early morning forcing Little Keith and his mom to mop with brown-edged newspaper just inside the porch door. Water seeped across the floor the same way eggnog did from the carton Daddy dropped last Christmas near the basement fridge—he always wobbled about and slept a lot down there during the winter when the snow grew too deep to work on the roads for the city. The boy’s summer-tanned toes had gripped the wet-cracked floor as they pushed the soggy news print further against the bottom of the door—they grip the gutter’s warm cement bank the same way now as he watches the water, listening to its soft gurgles.
The boats list sideways as they float slowly downstream, following the curve of the street. The other kids giggle and push ahead of Little Keith to trail their battleships along the edge of treeless suburban lots. It becomes a game of crossing the boundaries of different countries with each one of them being the king or queen of their own yard.
The boy’s cousin, Linda, who’s two years older and lives three houses down in the middle of the block, hikes her Pentecostal dress up to her gritty playground knees as she straddles the gutter. She spends more time outside since her brother’s funeral last year. He twisted his neck the wrong way after being tackled at the Friday night football game and wouldn’t get up. Linda’s mother, Keith’s aunt, comes over to his house a lot now. She and his mommy wear such crinkled frowns despite their smooth, kitchen-flushed skin. The two of them would often hug each other just out of the blue.
The last lot, a corner one covered with spotted grass, contains a small coveted mound above the metal drainage grate. Being the youngest, Little Keith had to stop the boats before they rushed over the lip into the noisy darkness below. Linda says that if they get past him, the soggy paper would clog the sewer lines underground and he would have to go to the bathroom in the backyard at night, when no one else was around to see. He’s careful to catch them, one by one tossing them up onto the grass, although Linda’s oversized ship slips beyond his reach. But he figures losing just one couldn’t hurt anything. Besides, she had taken his quarter for the ice cream truck and he wouldn’t get an orange pushup later that afternoon.