The house was so dark during those long winter evenings without electricity. You and I did our homework by the light of a hurricane lamp and the weak beams of setting sun that managed to crawl through the dining room window. The kitchen, with no windows except one over the sink that inexplicably opened into the closed garage like a trap, was hard to navigate. We needed a flashlight, do you remember? I was in fourth grade, which would have put you in seventh. Now, that seems so young.
That week we slept with hard bars under our backs on the plaid fold-out couch in the den. We called it the Red Rug Room because of the fiery shag carpet in licks of scarlet and yellow; the rest of the floors were waves of watery blue carpet or cold linoleum spread on cement. Those nights all four of us laid with feet toward the fireplace, our only source of light and heat while the wind blew across the frost outside. One of those mornings, we awoke to dress for school in a haze of smoke and a fine dusting of charcoal gray soot. Something like sadness had blocked the flue and stained us with the marks of poverty. After rinsing our faces and hands with cold water from 2-liter jugs – the electric well pump didn’t work without power – we went to school where it was furnace-warm and fluorescent-bright.
Later that evening, we had to wash off the streaks of hardship. Dad set an old green Coleman stove atop our dormant range with its cold burners. Momma poured bottled water into a roasting pot and heated it over the blue propane flame until steam reached her lined face. It was your job to ferry the heavy, sloshing pots of steaming water out of the kitchen, across the living room, up and over the raised foyer, down the hall and into the candle-lit bathroom where I was waiting in a mostly-empty tub of tepid bathwater.
But you dropped it.
Navigating the two stairs up the foyer and then back down into the hallway, in the dimly lit late evening, in a home where the power had been shut off, you stumbled and splashed. The steaming water poured out, scalding the top of your bare foot. You screamed and let go of the pot, which crashed to the linoleum floor at the same time you did.
Momma came running to you, as she often did, to soothe and comfort and guide. I was the one you were helping, so I believed your pain was my fault. Burning with guilt and drowning in sadness, already cold and wet, all I could do was sit in the dark bathroom alone and listen to you wail 10 feet and a lifetime away.
Twelve thousand nights have passed since then, some darker than others. Behind my eyes I can still see you, pot in hand, but always as though I’m walking behind you and I’m powerless to stop the fall. I can’t stop any of it – the torn-open disconnect notice, the giving-up fire, the water doing what water does, searching for a way out. The memory clings to me like a film I can’t scrub off.
Megan Hanlon is a podcast producer who sometimes writes. Her words have appeared in The Forge, South Florida Poetry Journal, Variant Literature, Gordon Square Review, and more. Her blog, Sugar Pig, is known for relentlessly honest essays that are equal parts tragedy and comedy.