Machine Dreams

sometime in the dark when they were all asleep. Billy squinted harder, his eyes nearly shut, his vision an approximate blur through his lashes. All the shapes were slanted shadows with colors now, and lights shot through them.
    “Billy, turn around and finish eating,” Mitch said.
    At last their father lit the sparklers, held them away in midair just as the flame burst into sprays and stuttered white fire. The sound of the burning was a high-pitched crackling, filling the entire dusk. Danner had grabbed one slender, flaming stick and was down the hill in front of Billy, her white shorts ghostly pale against her skin and the sparkler flaring in one upstretched hand. She always wrote her own name over and over, tracing letters that trailed into one another as they fell away. Billy made ever-widening circles, and slashes that crossed his vision with firey lines. Danner and Billy ran first down the slope of the hill, jumping and screaming, then ran the boundary of the acre lawn, racing along the wire fence and past the square of lumpy ground they called the garden. Just when they were behind the pine trees, hidden from sight of the house, they stopped abruptly and held the sparklers above their heads like lanterns. Billy could feel sparks in his hair, a flare of heat near his face as burning ash fell past his shoulders. “Look,” Danner breathed, and he did: the field was darkening in the yellowish dusk. All the way to the fence down by the creek, fireflies were lighting.
    The lights were brief and bright and random along the stalks of the grasses and field stubble. Lights were in the briars and the milkweed plants. Then the lights flashed upward, glowing faintly, barely perceptible against whiter sky so they seemed an echo or reflection of those on darker ground. The sparklers began to spit and hiss.
    Gladys was sitting on the toilet with the lid down like it was a chair, which made Danner laugh until their mother signaled hernothing was funny. Gladys went on smoking her cigarette and looked at a copy of
Upper Room
, a magazine the church gave out. “I don’t know what’s so funny about a commode,” Gladys said. “No one can have a conversation with your mother unless they follow her from room to room.”
    “I’m not getting out another washcloth. Danner, get through with that one and let Billy wash.” Their mother rested her arms on the edge of the porcelain tub, then sat back on her haunches and wiped her wet hands on her skirt. She pushed her sleeves farther up.
    “A person would think two kids six and seven years old could bathe themselves,” Gladys said. She put her cigarette down and blew the smoke so it made a cloud around her face; in the big mirror over the sink the smoke looked even bigger and cloudier, furling into a shape. Billy wanted it to grow even larger and fill the small room like a fog, like steam did when someone took a shower. But Gladys had smoked the cigarette to its butt and she put it out, grinding it hard into the ash tray so the leftover tobacco would spill out and the filter show. “Right, kids?” Gladys said now, “and you’d like to, especially if she’d give you back those water pistols she took away.”
    “If I did, they’d take forever, and we’ve got all those patterns to cut out tonight.” Jean rubbed her eyes and frowned, and Billy saw the part in her dark hair when she bent her head. She wore her hair long; she kept it pulled back and fastened with a clip, then folded her hair all around the clip so nothing showed but a thick, dark, spiral knot.
    Gladys’ reddish hair was tightly curled all over her head. She’d been to the beauty parlor that day and told how Mabel had got her permanent too hard again. Their father had said from his chair when Gladys first arrived that she didn’t look any different than she ever did.
Mitch Hampson, what would you know about permanents, I doubt you’ve ever had one
, Gladys had folded her pink chiffon head scarf into a square then and touched her head all over, lightly, as Billy and Danner watched.
    Now she squinted over the magazine. “It’s a mystery the Methodists bother to print this thing,” she said. “Who reads it?”
    “You’re reading it, aren’t you? Here, Billy, rinse off.” Hismother gave him the wet cloth and opened her arms wide with a towel for Danner. Danner stood up streaming water.
    “That Danner is getting long and stringy. She’s tall for her age.” Gladys put the magazine down and sat