Mud Girl by Alison Acheson

enough money for bulk shopping.
    Abi feels foolish and sick, and she’d really like to be alone. She pulls herself up to stand. “I’m feeling a lot better now. Really. You don’t have to be here.”
    Rhodes stares at her with those eyes, green and full of questions.
    â€œReally,” Abi says. “I’m fine. I’ll just lie down, go to sleep.” She ducks her head, put her hands out to the sides –
feel as if I need some balance
 – and makes her way toward her room. She suspects that in the house plans, her room was actually a closet, but someone put a regular door on it. A door that opens into the kitchen. Otherwise you wouldn’t get a thing inside.
    â€œThis is cozy.” Rhodes has followed her.
    â€œYeah.” Abi flops down on the narrow mattress.
Just go.
    But Rhodes has gone to get another cool cloth for her forehead. When she comes back, she kneels on the floor beside the bed, her hand resting on the cloth. Abi has to admit, it feels good, the coolness under her hand, the water running down her temples into her hair.
    Rhodes spies the paper bag in the corner where she’s thrown it. “Oh, have you had a chance to look at the knitting book?” Chirp.
    â€œPink’s not my thing.” Abi pulls the blanket up to her nose; she’s shivering now.
    â€œOh, I have every colour there is,” Rhodes burbles. “I’ll bring something else next time.”
    Happy as a pig in shit, isn’t that what they say?
Abi wants to tell her to go, but it’s too much effort to get the words out,so she turns toward the wall, and Rhodes is quiet, her hand on Abi’s forehead. Abi closes her eyes and sees the fireworks – green and pink and Fourth of July.
    â€œThere’s heat exploding on my eyelids,” she says. “Looks a lot like fireworks.”
    There’s a quiet and appreciative chuckle from Rhodes.
    â€œSo you never miss fireworks, eh?” Abi asks her.
    Rhodes hasn’t said a word about that night.
    â€œWhen I watch fireworks I always feel the exact same wonder I felt as a kid. Exactly the same. Never changes.” Maybe she guesses that Abi feels badly about turning down her invite, and then showing up with Jude, because next she says, “I’m glad you were able to see them.”
    She’s glad?
Abi manages to say,
    â€œYou forgive too easily.” “You think?” is all Rhodes says, and her hand doesn’t move from Abi’s forehead.

Tucked into her Ribs
    T here’s a knock on the door first thing in the morning. It wakens Abi. As she stumbles out of bed, something falls from her head: the cloth, crusty-dry and moulded to a rounded shape. The skin over her joints pulls and burns, and it takes longer than you’d imagine to get to the door.
    There’s an old man just walking away as she opens it. He turns back with a smile. “Food bank,” he says with a wave, then moves on to the small red car half sitting in the roadway.
    â€œPardon?”
    He comes over the wooden walkway with a box in his hands. Abi can see a box of Muffets, her favourite cereal, sticking out. She begins to salivate, realizes she’s eaten nothing since yesterday noon.
    He raises his knee under the box to support it, and frees a hand for her to shake. “You must be Aba,” he says. “My name’s Colm, and that there’s my granddaughter, Fiona. Probably about your age.”
    Abi looks to the passenger window of the car and sees a girl. Or at least, the side of a girl’s face. She’s staring ahead as if the car is moving top speed down a highway. Her hair is pulled straight back and her brows are down over her eyes.
    â€œFiona!” her grandpa calls. He has to call her again before she turns.
    Abi knows that face; she has seen her in English class at school. Fiona never speaks. She only whispers to other girls, and laughs, those
ha
sort of laughs. When she does