4:10 p.m., Friday, October 7. Stage in the cafeteria.
Dense drapes sway gently as they shut, numbing the air to a black shadow; dull like night. In fact, the entire stage is pitch dark except

a) the triangular crack between emerald panels
of thick velvet curtain, and
b) the lemon haze of a box TV no bigger than
a picnic basket
We watch movies when it rains. I count 11
criss-cross applesauce silhouettes against the screen’s glow before I press my palms onto
the tile to sit. A moat of bare floor circles me,
my ankles a yard from the nearest backpack.
Sticky rain claps the roof like spilled tacks. Gaudy.
I kneel up to fix the volume until I remember the mini DVD remote is lost: the 4-button clicker, truly the size of a walnut, was last seen with David. He quit in August.
Grace turns to me with barbed elbows and coiled fists on her sitting hips. Her inch-thick wrists scull across floor and stop before me, knees tucked outward. She’s six but her head props like she’s 24, marble eyes poking half-a-foot in front of my face with a thin-lipped smile. I smile back. She swings herself to the left of me and rests her toy head on my folded knee. I wish I could pause this, mute the fidgets and whispers and bullets of rain, but that god**** remote.
Her hair spills over my shin like syrup.