TANYA PERKINS
To the MacArthurs Irene Simon was picking green beans when the little shrieks started. She’d heard them before and gone inside because it wasn’t her business. Undo others as you undo yourself. Tom had thought it a great joke when the MacArthur girl said it, but Irene hadn’t laughed. She’d seen all three MacArthur kids riding bikes around the block, a boy about twelve and two smaller girls with long dark blonde hair, like a Condé Nast ad, all golden and light caramel. Not the kind of thing you saw in a small Midwestern town like theirs. The boy, on the other hand, had zits, glasses, and dark hair. Nerdy, Kim would have said. Looks like he belongs in a hick place like this. Then again, she’d itched to leave Indiana since she could walk. This time the cries seemed different, higher pitched, though still faint, or maybe it was how they intruded on her thoughts. Irene was ready to go in anyway. By late August, the leaves on the bean vines were splotchy, battle-worn, the bottom tier yellowing, and even the robust greens were speckled gold along the edges. They were surrendering, she knew, whole fibrous root systems going bust, but what did you expect after such a summer? She sensed them aching down the lengths of their herbaceous stems, loosening at their nodes, even as she stood with the hose, soaking them down—green beans, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, eggplants, and collards. Collards! Tom’s idea. She couldn’t stand them, so he’d made the rounds to all the neighbors lugging plastic bags crammed with the big, crenellated leaves. He’d even left a cardboard box piled with collards just outside the church door, “free” written in leaky red strokes. One of the MacArthur girls asked what they were.
56 | Raleigh Review
