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not.
     
    ***
     
    I don’t know why they call it a mill pond because there is no mill. Maybe there was one there back in the 1800s or something, but now there is not. I sometimes walk around in the brush around the mill pond looking for, like, relics of a mill. Ruins, I guess, pieces of something that used to be whole. Like old concrete slabs or stones or a broken turny-wheel for energy making, the ones on riverboats like they have on the Mississippi. Maybe some sort of old chutes that look like playground slides, but rusted. Big wooden beams with iron spikes sticking out of them. Big chunky things that look like they were put together with strong hands that knew how to make things that would last forever. They’d be broken but still strong. They would still look dignified, even though they were just old pieces of something bigger.
     
    The brush is high in places and where there is no brush, there are weeds. I have looked as much as I can even though I might get bit by ticks or snakes. I just feel like I want to find proof of something that I feel is true.
     
    I never do.
     
    ***
     
    We drank the Kool-Aid out of jelly jars that were always dirty, but I never said anything. We’d sit on his porch and drink the Kool-Aid until it was gone. We would talk about things that people talk about when they don’t really have much to say to each other, water-treading things. I looked at my Kool-Aid a lot; some days pink, some days red, some days purple or blue. Sometimes he’d ask me how old I was even though I had already told him before. Sometimes he’d look at me for a long while and then say, “Tinkerbell…” like he was rolling my name around in his mouth, and then he’d shake his head and laugh a little. He mostly looked at me and did little nods. And breathe.
     
    I must’ve said something about Suzy Q’s once and one day he brought me one with my Kool-Aid. I told him, “No, that’s all right.” And he said, “No, girl, you go on. Eat it.” And I said, “No, I’d better not. My mom…” and he said, “Your mom, what?” And I didn’t want to tell him about how my mom won’t let me eat sweets and how she hides all her cookies even though I always find them and how I heard her on the phone telling her best friend Avery how “Tinker’s just gettin’ so goddamn big.” And, so, I just set that Suzy Q down on my thigh for as long as I could, like it wasn’t delicious, like it was a turd or a dead thing, like I wasn’t sitting there wanting with every part of me to shove it right into my mouth. But after a while, I did. I ate it. I ate the Suzy Q. I couldn’t help it.
     
    Mister Dean watched me eat the Suzy Q. How I unwrapped it and shook it out into my fist like it was a squeezed out pup. How I let the wrapper fall. How it blew across the dirty porch wood and fell off the side. He watched how I took it with both my hands and pulled it apart, slowly. How I listened to the quiet wet split of the cream pulling away. How I smelled at it, the sweet chocolate scent erasing the faint cherry smell of Kool-Aid and the wet dirt smell from his just watered garden. He watched as I placed one half down on my thigh, cream side up, and ate the other half with my eyes partly closed like when I was alone. Shoving and chewing and swallowing until its length was gone and then licking each of my fingers clean of its guts. Mister Dean watched me eat each half like he’d never seen anyone eat anything before.
     
    “You really like them things, don’t you?” His breath, for once, sounded gone.
     
    And I didn’t answer because he already knew the answer.
     
    “You want another one?” He asked me this in a voice meant for church.
     
    And I didn’t answer that question either and he didn’t wait for it. He got up from the stairs and disappeared into the house. When he came out he had the box. He leaned himself against the porch railing, opened the box, got one of the little chocolate cream cakes, and reached it out