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Robert Gipe Shasta drove the sharpened broomstick into the ground with the back of a shovel. It flattened the stick’s rounded end where the orange paint had worn away. Shasta tied the yellow police tape to the broomstick and let the tape roll out as she walked. The roof bolt was one of a couple dozen her uncle brought her grandmother to stake her beans. Shasta hammered the bolt in same as the stick to make the second corner. The third corner was a little boy. The boy’s coat was heavy for the weather and he smelled like Karo syrup. Shasta told him to stand straight and wrapped the yellow tape around his waist, told him not to move or she would run him over with the car. She twisted the tape around a branch of a spindly crepe myrtle and came back to the broomstick to finish the square. Shasta ducked under the tape and shoved the edge of the shovel in at the center of the bounded space. She rode it with both feet and turned out a grass-headed clod. She turned out ten more before the little boy began to cry. Shasta told him to stop it. The little boy said Shasta was digging his grave. Shasta told him he was too fat to bury. And to hush. The little boy settled down. Shasta dug until the boy began to cry again. The shovel stood where she stuck it in the soft sod, and she sprawled on the dirt pile. She leaned back on her elbows as the boy’s cries turned to wailing and fished her lighter from her jeans. She put two cigarettes in her mouth, lit them both. She took one to the boy, showed him how to draw, and lay back on the dirt pile. When the Tahoe pulled in out front, Shasta dabbed spit on the end of her half-smoked cigarette, and put it in her shirt. She snapped the police tape between the broomstick and the roof bolt, tracked yellow clay through the house and walked out the front door. After that they believed her when she told them she had no business babysitting.
Appalachian Review – University of North Carolina Press
Published: May 31, 2009
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