1 Evelyn has forgotten how to fold up the lawn chair Push Pull Right One hand on the back press a knee here yank upward and Ouch Evelyn shakes her hand hard as if she can fling out the pain She puts her throbbing finger in her mouth and sucks gazing up It is a bright Tuesday The sky is perfectly clear No popcorn bursts no cottony fistfuls of chair stuffing not a single down feather Only strange patches where the blue is so light that when Evelyn peers into them they lose color completely They’re like windows or tunnels Maybe to outer space Click-click A sparrow scrabbles for a hold on the
birdfeeder’s short peg Two more chairs to fold As always on the last day of summer holidays Evelyn and her parents have spent the morning scrubbing their brown two-bedroom house that stands in a row of other brown two-bedroom houses They’ve coiled the hose They’ve packaged up the badminton net with its rackets and birdies Evelyn’s mother who is Scottish calls them shuttlecocks and stowed everything tidily in the garage Finally Evelyn’s mother pronounces the house neat as a new pin She places three teacups on the table Evelyn’s father Lunch is tomato soup Evelyn’s father breaks his crackers into his bowl so the pieces float like icebergs on a red sea Evelyn thinks it’s rude of her father to dump his crackers in his soup as if he’s lazy and in a hurry at the same time It’s like when he cleans the wax from his ears with the end of his eyeglasses Evelyn’s mother never breaks her crackers She’s never in a hurry She is on top of things One of her habits is to press the last scrap of the old bar of soap onto the new bar Although the soap in Evelyn’s house is humpbacked no soap is ever wasted Let’s get our ducks in a row Evelyn’s mother says now
