Water Steps by A. LaFaye

film.”
    â€œMaybe I could sell a comic book. I have a few double copies I could part with. Do you like Spiderman?”
    He followed me into the woods and we made plans to buy the film and take pictures of silkies or flopping fish or whatever showed up.

TEA
    I came home to find my Aunt Rosien sitting at our kitchen table, petting Kippers and sipping tea. “Afternoon to ya.” She held her cup up to me, her hair as red and curly as Mem’s was gray and straight. Didn’t look like Mem’s sister to me.
    â€œAfternoon.” I stood by the door, waiting to see what she’d do.
    â€œYour pep’s on the horn with his editor and Itha’s getting all that paint off her hands. Stuff’s toxic, you know. Kills the fish when they dump the cans in the water. Hate the stuff, myself.”
    â€œMem wouldn’t dump it in the water.” Mem mixed her own paints to use as many natural things as she could.

    â€œRight.” She sighed. Great, I’d annoyed her already. I figured I’d be better off leaving her alone, so I turned to go.
    â€œWhat you got there?” She pointed at my hand.
    I twirled the leaf I held. “Just something I picked with a friend.”
    â€œIf you were a fish, how’d you feel if I pulled off a scale?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSame thing as taking a leaf, you know? It’s a living thing, that tree. You couldn’t wait until the leaf fell?”
    Pep’s comment about Aunt Rosien being an Earth Mother popped into my head. And she was really protective of her “child,” all right. I thought Mem and Pep were nature nuts. If so, then Aunt Rosien had to be a nature freak. I’d heard of people getting mad when you nailed a sign to a tree. And I do, too. Nails poison trees when they rust, but a leaf? Every tree has thousands. Like they’d miss one. But I bet a fish has that many scales, too. Would it hurt when you took one off? Like having your hair pulled out? I shuddered to think about it.
    â€œWhat are you telling her?” Mem asked as she came in just in time to see me shudder. She rubbed my back.
    â€œFish are dying from paint cans thrown in the water
and trees don’t appreciate it when you pluck off their leaves.” Rosien took a sip. An honest one, that aunt of mine. Maybe she would tell me true stories about Mem.
    â€œLovely. Nice to meet you too, Auntie.” Mem went to the stove for a cup of her own. “Don’t mind her, Kyna. She’d tell the sun it shined too hot on turtles. Gave them tough skin.”
    They both laughed. Rosien nodded. “Aye, I did say that when I was a girl.”
    Seeing her laugh made me imagine she’d opened a small door. I might be able to sneak through if I was careful. Maybe even learn what kind of things Mem said when she was little.
    Sitting down, I prepared for a trade—a story for a story. I’d tell her about me, then maybe she’d tell me about Mem. “When we lived in an apartment, the landlord knocked a bird nest out of the air conditioner unit by our balcony. So Pep and I made a tree out of a coat rack and fabric-covered coat hangers for leaves and left all of the fixings for a new nest.”
    Rosien leaned over the table to have a close listen in. “Did it work?”
    â€œYep, four babies.” I held up my fingers. “One of them had three brown spots on its head when it flew away. We had a pep bird with three spots on its head the
very next year.” Those little birdie families made it easier to wait to move back into my grandma’s house. After the sea took my family, I had to live in a foster home for the six months it took Mem and Pep to get licensed as foster parents. Then came the long, drawn-out wait for the adoption to become final. With no will, it took nearly two years for the courts to decide Gram’s little house could belong to Mem and Pep until I was old enough to claim it. After all, no one else