PUDDLES / WENDY DINWIDDIE

Momma put a note in the bulletin that we were looking for clothes youth size four for the boy with the split lip who came up out of the French Broad. His skin was green, not golf course green or lawn mower green, not state-highway green, but like he’d been down in the river so long he’d algaed, he looked like copper turning.

I hate the green French Broad boy. He wasn’t out of the river two weeks before he went in my closet and ripped all of the buttons off my favorite Sunday dress. There were nine of them, little yellow flowers, and he ate all nine, and we had to load up in the van and go to the hospital and do x-rays and blood tests and the doctors all had to look at the webbed skin between his fingers and toes, which is papery and veined like dragonfly wings.

All of this, for them to say we have to go home and wait for the buttons to pass. We can’t flush the commodes. There are seven of us—eight with the boy from the French Broad, and we have to go behind him with the cat scoop and put his poop in Ziploc bags so that Momma can count the buttons. We are still missing two.

The boy leaks when he’s sad, big puddles loud with the smell of dead carp. The carpet is all soggy in places, and we can’t yell at him or make fun of his webbed toes or take back the remote even though he’s made us watch Finding Nemo fifteen times and puddles all over the floor when Nemo gets put in the tank at the dentist’s.

I finally had to go over to the Light of Nehemiah thrift store where Momma works, taking pictures of two hundred dollar couches for the church’s website, to tell her that the green boy with the split lip had to go.

She was in the back sorting pants, and when I told her all of this, told her I was tired of scooping poop into Ziploc bags and squishing it between my fingers to look for pieces of yellow flowers, she said we were keeping the green boy, that Jesus would keep him. She said, “Loneliness turns up the floorboards of boys’ hearts,” and that it was important.

Wendy Dinwiddie is a queer Appalachian writer living in Tuscaloosa with an anxious dog and a button collection. Her writing has appeared in Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @wendy_dinwiddie.