Florida by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online Page B

dawn.
    The older one thought the snake had gummed thingsup, but nothing was working—no lights, no water pump, no refrigerator—and then she understood that it was the generator. She went out back and kicked it. She found a hole where the gas went in and looked inside with her flashlight.
    We runned out of gas, she told her sister, who was sucking her fingers again, the way she had when she was a baby.
    Fix it, the little sister said, I’m so hot. But they looked and looked, and there was no more fuel. When the older sister tried to flush the toilet, it wouldn’t flush. When the cabin started to smell from the toilet and the dog’s pad, they moved back to the other cabin, where their mother’s stuff was still in the closets and on the dresser. They began going to the bathroom outside.
    There was no food in their cabin, so they took everything they could find from Melanie and Smokey Joe’s. Frozen peas, which they ate like popcorn, one Hungry-Man TV dinner, which they opened and left out for the dog. A block of cheese and yellow mustard. White bread, more cheese in a spray can, a can of beans. Bourbon and cigars that smelled like a spice drawer.
    In the afternoon, they put on their mother’s clothes, her makeup. They looked like tiny versions of her, both of them, though the little sister didn’t need to go in the sun to be tanned.
    The older sister read everything she could to her little sister. There was one fat book, yellow and swollen, onMelanie’s nightstand. It had a man on the cover with an axe over his shoulder but no shirt. She read the cereal box she dug out of the garbage. She read the old magazines on the coffee table.
    The older girl understood that there was no more water only when they were thirsty and she tried to turn on the faucet. She ignored her thirst for a long time, until her throat felt stuffed with cotton and the little girl wouldn’t stop complaining.
    It was going to be dark in a half hour or so. The sun was burning at the edge of the ocean.
    The older sister sighed. I think we have to walk to the pond, she said.
    The little sister started to cry. But the monkeys, she said.
    We’ll make lots of noise. They won’t bother us if we’re together, the older sister said, and they walked very fast, hand in hand, to the pond, and it was twilight when they got back. The girls saw a white flash in the woods, and the little one was so frightened that she dropped her bucket and spilled half her water, and she ran all the way back to the cabin, slamming the door. The older sister cried with rage and carried the buckets back by herself. Out of meanness, she wouldn’t let her little sister drink the water until she’d put it in a saucepan and set it over the charcoal grill to boil, which took a very, very long time, until the moon was fat and bright in the sky.
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    In the morning, the older girl took out her sister’s braids and the little one’s hair fluffed out into a beautiful dark cloud.
    They took the only knife, a steak knife, and whittled points into the ends of sticks, and they went into the chilly shallow water to fish, because they’d have to find food soon. But the water was so nice and the fish were so little that they abandoned the spears and swam all morning.
    They painted their fingernails with polish they found in Melanie’s medicine cabinet. Then they painted their toenails, then tattoos of hearts on their biceps, which made their skin itch until they scratched the hearts off.
    They found a candy bar in a nightstand, then a dirty magazine under Smokey Joe’s bed. A woman was licking a pearl off another woman’s pink private skin.
    Yuck, the older sister said, and threw the magazine, but the younger sister made the noises the mother made when she was in her bedroom with her boyfriends. Then she started crying. At first, she only shook her head when her sister asked her why. Finally she said, I miss the dog.
    Nobody could miss that dog, the older sister thought.
    How could