the habit of being

I climbed out of the plastic lawn chair I’d flopped into, hitting my head on a short curtain of bent wire clothes-hangers, dangling from a low tree limb above. Two of them fell to the ground, next to a pile of broken glass that might’ve been a table lamp.

The doorway wasn’t quite in line with the three wooden steps I climbed to get through it. Perhaps the same God who dropped down the first trailer we’d passed on the way picked this one up and gave it a little shake, like a snow globe.

“Jus’ call me Lyn,” said the old woman, motioning to three saggy armchairs with cigarette burns and blobs of stuffing sticking out. “Ain’t much, since the vandals got to it, but it’s a roof over yer head. We got five trailers and ‘leven cars on the property, two of ‘em runnin’. Here, have a sandwich. All we have’s buns for bread, but it’s quick, you two mus’ be plum starved.”

In addition to the chairs and a TV set, the living room contained a washing machine (or maybe a dryer) with boxes piled on top of it, a cassette tape that had vomited up a couple feet of ribbon, a hammerhead with no handle, small white feathers of the sort that fill pillows, an alarm clock blinking noon, and two striped dress shirts with buttons. There were curtain rods, folding chairs, dead houseplants. There was an awful student’s painting of water lilies, a box that had once contained frozen State Fair brand corn dogs. A clock on the wall ticked too loudly. Big plastic sheets billowed as the wind came though glassless windows and doorframes. There were holes in the walls.

I could hear the raven squawking squawking from the kitchen. His newspapers hadn’t been changed. He was hidden away in a corner, where the flies plagued him. She didn’t explain where he came from. I stared at the sandwich that had been handed to me, half-wrapped in a wrinkly napkin. Brown and purple mush escaped the gap between two bottom halves of a hamburger bun. Peanut butter and jelly. The sight of it made me feel nauseated again. The old woman was already on her second peanut butter hotdog.