Work Text:
The front room had settled into the soft, untidy hush of a Saturday afternoon, the kind that came after lunch but before anyone had yet decided what the rest of the day was supposed to become. The curtains were half-drawn against the Alabama brightness, not enough to make the room dark, only enough to turn the sunlight gold and slow where it came through in strips across the carpet. Dust floated in it. The old sofa sat with its cushions slightly sunken from years of children, cousins, mothers, neighbors, and dogs pressing themselves into it without asking permission. A laundry basket waited near the hallway with folded dish towels rising from it like small white flags of surrender. Somewhere deeper in the house, the refrigerator clicked and hummed, and outside a lawn mower coughed from three houses down, began, stopped, began again, then gave up.
Toyah and Jess had claimed the coffee table as though it were a great studio desk.
They sat on the carpet side by side, both serious, a pair of artists who understood that paper had to be respected. Toyah sat with one leg folded beneath her and the other stretched out, toes flexing whenever she concentrated. Her curls had loosened from their earlier neatness and were beginning to make a soft golden halo around her head.
Jess sat closer to the table, knees tucked under her, her mouth held slightly open while she chose colors with grave care from the small plastic tub between them. They had crayons, blunt pencils, a few washable markers with caps already mixed up beyond adult recovery, and copious sheets of paper.
It was not a coloring page, not exactly. Addison had drawn it herself in blue pencil and careful lines because Toyah had about where they came from, and because Toyah’s questions, when they arrived, tended to arrive with both hands out, expecting something to hold. The sketch was of a flag: a clean cross reaching side to side and top to bottom, blue against a white field. Addison had explained it gently, with a little patience and a little pride, giving Toyah more than a toddler needed and less than a lecture. She had pointed to the white, then the blue, and said words that Toyah had carried away without fully sorting them.
Jess watched her watching it, then grasped and held out her little hand.
“Here. Boo.”
Toyah looked up then shook her head.
The white only sat around the blue, empty and large and, to Toyah, a little bit rude. It made the whole flag seem like it had forgotten to get dressed. There was too much of it. Too much blankness looking back at her.
She leaned closer, frowning in the manner of a very small critic confronting a disappointing museum.
“It like snow, Jess.”
Jess craned her neck, gaze turning over the page then cooing in agreement.
Glenda was in the armchair near the window, one ankle crossed over the other, a magazine open but mostly unread in her lap. She had been pretending not to watch them too closely, which was a way of giving children room without actually withdrawing her attention. Her hair was pulled back, her sleeves pushed up, her face softened by the afternoon light. She had the listening posture of a mother who knew.
Toyah pressed a red crayon to one of the white squares.
She did not color the whole square. Instead, she began drawing a person. The head was a circle, the body a dress-like triangle because Toyah had not yet decided whether bodies needed shapes beyond that, and the hair was a set of wild loops all around the head. The person had two long arms, five dramatic fingers on each hand, and a smile that curved nearly from ear to ear. She gave the figure shoes shaped like beans.
“Dat me.”
Jess leaned in until her forehead nearly touched the paper. “You got big hands.”
“I need ’em,” Toyah said. “For holdin’ stuff.”
“I doin’ you now.” In the opposite white square, Toyah drew Jess. She made Jess’s hair slightly different, with smaller lines and a bow that was more of a lump but meant kindly. Jess’s smile was smaller than Toyah’s but carefully pressed in, and Toyah gave her arms too, though not quite as long.
“I hold too,” Jess said, watching.
“You hold mine hand,” Toyah said.
Toyah drew a long line from her own stick-hand to Jess’s stick-hand. Then another, because the first line looked too thin to do the work of friendship. Then a third, because three was a good number and because her hand slipped. The girls on the paper were now connected by a thick band of color across the white, standing inside the Finnish flag as though they had moved in and declared it theirs.
Glenda lowered her magazine a fraction.
The room gave a soft little creak as the house shifted in the heat. Toyah sat back on her heels to admire the improvement. The flag no longer looked empty. It had Toyah and Jess in it. This seemed obvious, necessary, probably what the flag had been waiting for all along.
Jess picked up the yellow crayon and began shading the air around their heads.
“Sun,” Jess said.
Toyah considered then decided sunshine could go anywhere it liked. She reached for green next, then orange, then red again, not using them yet, simply lining them along the edge of the table in readiness. The blank white squares had awoken something in her. They were no longer blankness. They were places. And places, she was beginning to understand, needed people, colors, animals, flags, stories, and occasionally a very large monkey.
Then, Glenda turned her head slightly and lifted her voice into a stage whisper broad enough for any theatre balcony.
“Texas.”
Toyah’s head snapped up.
It was not a command. It was not even a suggestion, exactly. It had the tone of a sacred password passed through enemy territory under cover of casual conversation. Glenda’s eyes were wide with mock innocence, her magazine still resting in her lap as though she had said nothing at all.
Toyah picked up the blue crayon, then the red, then stopped.
Her hand hovered over the paper. Her face went blank with the sudden horror of not having the picture exactly right.
“Umm.”
Glenda did not move too quickly. She only lifted her arm and turned her shoulder toward the girls, shifting the loose edge of her shirt just enough to reveal the small tattoo there. It was playful rather than ceremonial in the way she showed it, an adult’s wink dressed up as evidence. The flag on her shoulder sat bright and familiar against her skin, the blue and white and red arranged with the confidence of something remembered from belonging.
Toyah leaned forward so far Jess put one hand on her back, either to steady her or to participate.
“Ohhh.”
Toyah added a small smiling face beside the star.
Glenda’s eyebrows rose. “Is Texas smiling?”
Toyah did not look up. “Tex’s happy.”
Jess picked up a marker whose cap claimed it was green but whose ink emerged slightly brown from prior mistreatment. She drew dots around the blue cross.
“Buggies,” she said.
Toyah looked at them. “Lady buggies?”
“Jus’ buggies.”
For a while there was only the sound of crayon moving over paper and the soft little breaths children make when concentrating hard.
Toyah changed crayons again. Green in her left hand, orange in her right, then both swapped because the orange felt better on the side where her thumb had a tiny dent from pressing too hard earlier. Her eyes moved across the page and then up to the room, as if searching the furniture for the next idea.
She saw the folded quilt on the arm of the sofa, green and white and faded orange in one square, though that had nothing to do with what happened next except that children often find memory through color before words.
Her face lit.
“Oh!”
Toyah slapped one hand flat on the table, narrowly missing the Texas star. “Meemaw flag.”
Glenda’s expression changed before she could stop it. Not dramatically, not enough for the girls to notice, but in the soft way her eyes warmed and went distant at once. She knew exactly what Toyah meant.
“It go gween, white, ornge.”
Toyah surveyed the remaining white space with the authority of a city planner. There were still pockets left around the blue cross, though the page was beginning to fill with claims. She chose a lower square, because Meemaw should have a good place and because her hand naturally went there. She drew three vertical stripes, though the first one leaned and the third widened at the bottom. Green. White left blank. Orange pressed in with great care.
Once completed, Toyah sat up straighter.
A new force had entered her mind.
It was visible in the quick widening of her eyes, the stillness of her hands, the way she seemed to listen inwardly before doing anything. Glenda knew that look by now. Toyah’s thoughts did not always arrive one at a time. Sometimes they came in a herd.
Toyah reached for the black crayon.
Jess, sensing importance, whispered, “What you makin’?”
Toyah did not answer at first. She placed the black crayon at the edge of the biggest remaining white patch and drew a round head. Then she drew ears, larger than ordinary ears. Then a big body, too big for the available space, so that it crowded near Texas and leaned slightly toward the Finnish cross. She pressed hard, tongue tucked between her teeth, drawing thick arms that reached nearly to the tricolour. The figure’s legs were short because she ran out of room, but the chest was grand, a proud oval. She added a face: two eyes, a wide curved mouth, and lines around the mouth that might have been teeth or joy or both.
Jess gasped softly.
Glenda’s smile began before she could help it. “King Kong came to the flag?”
Toyah gave Kong another arm line for strength. “He comed.”
“Did he get invited?”
“He nice,” Toyah said, which to her was the same thing.
Jess edged closer, delighted. “He big big.”
Toyah examined her work. Kong’s left arm almost touched the Texas star. His right shoulder leaned toward Meemaw’s flag. His head rose into the white that Addison had originally meant to remain white, perhaps suggesting snow, clouds, or simple Nordic restraint. None of this troubled Toyah. If anything, Kong’s inability to fit made him more himself.
Jess picked up a brown crayon and held it out. “He need furry.”
Toyah considered. The black crayon had made him visible but perhaps not complete. She accepted the brown and added lines across Kong’s belly and arms, small quick strokes that gave him an air of festive motion. She drew a belly button, then laughed at it.
“He got button.”
Jess giggled. “Monkee button.”
Glenda pressed her lips together to keep from laughing too hard and breaking the spell. The Kong on the paper was not frightening. No city mistaking his size for wickedness. He stood among flags and little girls and bugs and sunshine, smiling broadly as though he had finally found a room where no one was afraid of him.
Toyah set the brown crayon down and reached for red again. She gave Kong a tiny heart on his chest.
Toyah pressed the red harder until the heart was bright enough to satisfy her. “He nice.”
Jess leaned her cheek against Toyah’s shoulder for half a second, the brief, unconscious affection of a child who had no need to announce closeness because it was already the air she lived in.
“Kong need more smile,” she said.
“He got smile,” Jess pointed out.
“More.”
She widened the mouth until Kong looked ecstatic.
Glenda put one hand over her own mouth, her eyes crinkling.
Toyah glanced up at her. “Don’ laugh him.”
“I’m no,” Glenda said, and her voice had a tenderness under the amusement. “I’m glad he’s happy.”
Toyah studied her for signs of mockery, found none, and returned to the paper. “He is. He wif us.”
Toyah beamed, then her focus descended upon her again. She picked up the black crayon again and added a crown above Kong’s head. The crown was crooked. One point leaned badly. Toyah fixed it by adding another point, which made it more crooked and more impressive. Then she colored it yellow.
“Kings got yewwow hats,” Jess said.
“Uh huh, it gode.”
Glenda’s eyes narrowed playfully. “Is he king of Finland now?”
Toyah’s hand froze.
This was a large question.
Jess looked concerned on Kong’s behalf.
Toyah studied the page again. There were many flags. If Kong was king of one place, that might make the others feel left out. He did not seem like a selfish king. He was smiling. He had a heart. He was careful not to smush Texas or Meemaw’s flag. His large hands were open. He could not be only one thing.
“No,” Toyah said at last. “He king of nice.”