Greenville, 1989

by Patty Scull

On tired Spring afternoons, my mother would pull up to the Trinity United Methodist Church playground my brother and I would occupy after school; it rained a lot in those days. On the way home we would lean our heads against the cold, smooth windows that enclosed us in the back of my mother’s silver Honda Civic. We’d pretend the raindrops were racing, and we’d trace them with our fingertips and take bets as they stalled suddenly in their rain-made tracks. Then, just as fervently they would slide downward on a diagonal until we could no longer see them in the pane of our apocryphal race track. We’d trade sidelong glances, and my brother’s feet would dangle above the carpeted floor, his favorite green and white striped shirt crumpled under a mass of long blonde hair. We’d close our eyes and only when the car’s shaking and slowing reminded us of the worn gravel of our house’s driveway would we open them and all of a sudden, we were home.

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Patty Scull is a New York City based writer. Her work has recently been published in The Scarlet Sound, and she has an essay slated to appear in an upcoming issue of The Other Herald.