Skeeter Spoonamore
By Reese Alexander
The night before I left for Alabama, Skeeter Spoonamore died. My sister called while I was standing halfway in the closet; choosing between two silk dresses for a friend’s wedding. My mind, busy weighing the merit of the dress I currently held, was startled by the harshness of the phone’s buzz. When I reached down to retrieve it from the floor, the phone scuttled out of my grasp—its vibrations swaying its body from side to side like an insect dying on the freshly mopped wood. My carry-on’s half-zipped grimace mirrored my own frown as I finally brought the phone to my ear, and heard my sister’s voice whisper quickly into the receiver:
“Skeeter Spoonamore is dead.” Then the line clicked, and her voice was gone.
I left the phone pressed to the side of my head for one long minute as I gazed at the now-wrinkled dress clutched tightly in my fist. The rich brown silk resembled mud; my fingers the earthworms residing in its coolness. I dropped the dress into the suitcase’s hungry mouth, and pulled up my phone’s search engine.
It was not impossible for Skeeter Spoonamore to die, I conceded to myself. And yet that felt untrue. So I looked—even though I never knew her. She was just a lab partner.
“Local woman killed on I-65,” the AL.com headline announced. I did not click the link. I did not want to see pictures.
I shut my phone off, and let it fall through my fingers and clatter against the floor below. Across the room, a frightened cockroach scuttled out from under my bookshelf. Its hard body appeared brown in the harshness of the overhead light, but I knew that if I flipped a single switch, it would melt into the black ink of its surroundings.
“Skeeter is dead,” I told it, because I had no one else to tell.
The roach stopped suddenly, inches from the crack under my door, and turned its small, pinprick of a head in my direction.
“Skeeter is dead,” I repeated to the roach. The roach stayed silent.
I closed my eyes then, and walked in that twilight world that paints itself on the backs of eyelids. It used to be that when I retreated into my mind, I found myself on the dusty roads that separated Monroeville from the rest of Alabama. Between wake and sleep, I walked those avenues of the mind; twisting small branches off of pine trees, and waking in my childhood bed with sappy hands. When I moved to the city, I began to notice the roads slowly becoming paved. The pines started to resemble apartment buildings, with dry fire escapes layered in spring pollen and squirrels’ nests.
On this night, my mind’s road almost perfectly resembled Franklin street. In that square, I rested against the entrance to the red line, but though the many intersecting avenues remained silent, I was not alone. Across the street, Skeeter Spoonamore sat outside a bistro. She looked pale, and fidgety, just how she was at sixteen. Though the tables surrounding her appeared small and delicately carved, hers was towering and black—exactly the same as the table in the biology lab at Monroe County. I could not see them, but I knew that if I looked I would find letters carved into the underside of the wood. I did not look.
A single white dish sat in the table’s center, silverware framing its sides. On the plate’s surface, a small, slick body convulsed.
“It’s ok if you don’t want to dissect it,” Skeeter said to me, gently. “I can do it.” She smiled, and, taking the knife and fork into her trembling hands, first speared, then cut into the thing on her plate. The butter knife, though dull, made quick work of peeling back the rubbery flesh in long, thick strips.
The creature jerked once more, then was still.
I opened my eyes. As I drifted away, the cockroach had crept towards me. It stood now only a few inches from my bare big toe, with its head tilted as if in invitation. I folded my body in half, and lay my hand flat against the floor a foot away from the bug. It sidestepped over, caressed the side of my pinky with an open wing, and then crawled fully into the center of my palm.
I brought the roach up to eye level, not cupping it, but allowing its body to exist freely in my open hand. We looked at each other.
“I will pack in the morning,” I told it. It looked like it did not believe me.
I brought the roach to my unmade bed then, and laid it down on the right pillow (because I use the left) before switching off the light, and climbing into bed myself. I could not see the roach in the darkness, but I knew it was there. As I lay awake, scratching two sets of initials into my upper thigh, I heard the quiet, lazy flutter of its outer wings, and then a voice very near my ear.
“I have heard cockroaches are bigger in the South.” The words sounded feminine, and raspy.
“It’s true,” I whispered, and rolled over to go to sleep.
THE END
Author Bio: Reese Alexander is a student at Barnard College, where she studies English and creative writing. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama.