Photo by Philip Arambula on Unsplash
by Lisa Alletson
We mambo home, swishing and flicking our hips and wrists, sharing a pink cigarette, Daisy smelling of apple shampoo and the Bailey’s we snuck into the theatre. Daisy pauses outside her house, balanced on one leg, holding her other ankle behind her, admiring our sidewalk chalk drawings of green sunflowers.
Her stepmother waits inside, high on coke as she was this morning when she taunted Daisy by hiding her passport, forbidding her trip to New Zealand tomorrow to visit her aunt. Daisy’s father ignored their yelling, cracked an egg into a hot pan with one hand––the egg whitening instantly, the yolk quivering––a kitchen knife in his other, camel between his lips.
I pick up a piece of chalk and write a green story on the sidewalk, a story in which Daisy gets her passport back, goes to New Zealand, gets a job as a waitress, gets a scholarship to university, becomes a famous movie director.
Daisy, laughing, pirouettes over the chalky story, smudging the words with her shoes.
Lisa Alletson’s writing is published in The Cincinnati Review miCRo, New Ohio Review, Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, among others.
