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God's Sparrows

By Kathleen Vincenz

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Rose scooped a cup of sugar from the green canister into the last clean measuring cup. She didn’t need to look at the recipe. She knew the correct measurement. She knew the correct measurement for the vanilla too. And for the buttermilk. She knew because she’d made the recipe for the cream filling only 15 minutes ago.

Holding her stomach, Rose knew too how it felt to devour an entire batch of cream filling in 15 minutes. Dumb, that’s how it felt. But she couldn’t resist the filling when it had spun so white and shiny in the mixer. She’d licked the bowl clean and shiny too. Now she had to make another batch before Mom found out.

Seconds later, Mom brushed past Rose in a swirl of perfume that overpowered the smell of the baking cream puffs. Rose dropped the cup of sugar and it spilled onto the counter, disappearing into the beige-and-white design of the fake granite.

Mom opened the refrigerator and stacked trays of caviar appetizers one on top of the other and scurried to the side door. “I’m so late! I’m supposed to be there at seven.”

“Let me help.” Rose moved forward and then remembered the empty mixing bowl and stopped. “Don’t you think you should wrap the appetizers more securely? What about using the plasticware we bought for appetizers?”

“Rose, please, don’t bother me.” Mom swiped at the air like she did when she was nervous. “I ran out of time fixing myself up to present our business in a good light. It won’t matter—the plastic wrap will do.”

Rose practically blinked at Mom’s glamor. She’d fixed herself up like she was starring in a play—thick mascara, big fluffy hair like the 1980s, and dozens of bangles on her arm.

Mom spied the cream puffs arranged all around their dollhouse-like kitchen. “They aren’t filled, and the bowl—it’s empty. Didn’t you even make the filling?”

“Well, yeah, I’m getting it done.” Rose swiped at the air too. “But what if I come and help? Then we could fill them together when we got back.”

“We can? I believe you got us the job.” A tray slipped, and Mom adjusted it back on her pile. “Just stay and finish what you started. And make yourself dinner—something healthy—no junk. Bed by 10.”

Mom slammed the side door to the kitchen shut.

Rose called to the shut door, “So, Mom, do you think cream filling is healthy?”

Rose propped her elbows on the counter and cupped her chin in her hands. She sighed good and loud for no one to hear. Could she really take another night of baking alone in this empty house? But she had to get the cream puffs finished. Like Mom said, they were for Mr. Gross, her Latin teacher. He’d been extra nice to let their catering company make them for his book signing. And the sooner she finished them, the sooner she’d be free.

Rose measured the rest of the ingredients and whipped up a new batch of filling—not even wanting to see it now. She stuffed the pastry bag to bursting with the filling. She’d start with the nicest cream puff—the toastiest and the roundest. She spied one on a tray under the cabinet that had a water stain shaped like a dripping eye. She squirted the filling into the puff. The filling trailed back out. Yuck! The cream puff looked like a mouse.

Rose flung herself on a kitchen chair and dropped the pastry bag. She caught her reflection in the oven door, so small she’d only been able to cook one sheet of puffs at a time. She looked dreary, tired—soaked in fatigue. What a wonderful phrase—soaked in fatigue. Sometimes her brain came up with the best words, but probably she’d heard it in a movie.

She pulled down on her left eye. See—she already had bags under her eyes at fifteen. She stuck out her tongue. People in old movies always examined their tongues to know if they were well. Hers was an all-white horror.

Rose glanced out the tiny window of the kitchen side door. The trees in the backyard whipped in the wind like the filling for the puffs had in the mixer, only the trees were dark and furious, bursting to escape from their roots. A perfect setting to match her life. But unlike the trees that were still rooted to the ground, she’d formulated a good plan of escape—six weeks at the U of W summer high school theater camp.

To spend a summer at theater camp relaxing and not baking or cooking. Glorious!

To be, not in theater, but in Theater!—as Mom had been. Fantastic!

To watch Mom in the audience when she, Rose, starred in a play, applauding, cheering, happy again, turning to the people next to her and blurting out in joy, “That’s my daughter. She takes after me.” It would all be heaven.

Yes, it was a totally wonderful plan—her gateway to freedom and the auditions for a scholarship to the camp were tomorrow.

The clock in the hall sounded the time. Dong! Dong! That horrid ancient clock. She hated its creaky sound. It continued to chime to 10. 10? How had it gotten so late? That meant she had to choose to finish the cream puffs or practice her audition one more time. Decision made! Escaping her lonely dreariness was more important than finishing the puffs. If she stayed up even later, ignoring Mom’s decree of a bedtime, she could practice and fill them. She’d start with her introduction to the scene she would recite. She breathed in to slow her heart. Nice and calm.

“Hello, I’m Rose. I’m going to recite the famous, final scene from the 1937 movie Stage Door starring Katharine Hepburn, the actress, as you know, who won the most Academy Awards ever. I’m sure you are all familiar with Stage Door, as am I.”

Rose smiled. As am I sounded so sophisticated. She’d have to be sure to use that phrase at her audition.

Rose had watched the movie Stage Door a million times. In the movie, Katharine Hepburn plays a wealthy privileged woman, Terry, who wants to be an actress and lives in a boarding house—slumming—with other want-to-be actresses who really are poor. Rose loved the parts where all the actresses gathered in the living room after dinner like a family and said mean, clever things to each other but deep down liked and helped each other—even Terry. They borrowed each other’s clothes too.

Rose continued:

“The calla lilies are in bloom again.”

She stopped. In the movie, Terry—Katharine Hepburn—had said, “The calla lilies are in bloom,” and not “The calla lilies are in bloom.” Rose wasn’t sure why it made a difference, but the people in the movie had made a great fuss about where Terry placed the emphasis. Maybe when she, Rose, became a great actress she’d understand.

But wait a minute. Which emphasis had been right? It would be a total red-in-the-face moment if she got it wrong. She’d better check. Rose opened the Classic Movie app on her cell phone and selected the movie. Super-intense organ music filled her heart and ears. No beautiful Katharine Hepburn with flowing auburn hair carrying calla lilies, but a creepy silent film. She’d picked the wrong one!

Rose leaned forward as the scene of the silent film unfolded. A man with a shaggy beard and a dark suit with a vest and no tie stood in a bleak swamp. His hair was as shaggy as his beard, and his face was harsh and angular. Heavy eyebrows hung over his eyes that were only slits. Trees covered in Spanish moss haunted the background.

The man pointed his long, crooked finger at a group of kids in tattered and torn clothes, the boys in cutoff pants and overalls, the girls in faded floral dresses. One older girl with curly braids down to her waist stood in their center. She held a baby with fuzzy hair, shielding the baby from the man. The man lunged for the baby. Words appeared on the screen written in swirly letters: Give me the baby!

The words disappeared, and the girl and baby returned to the screen. Rose could read the girl’s lips as the girl cried No! Then, the girl ran to a barn and grabbed a pitchfork. She jabbed the pitchfork at the man. The words came back: You can’t have the baby, Mr. Grimes!

Mr. Grimes! What a horrible name. Rose swiped off the app and dropped her phone as if it were haunted. She shook. It wasn’t real, she told herself, it was only a movie.

A harsh wind blew outside, and then crash! smash! crack! A huge, gnarled tree limb slammed into the side door and the door burst open. A fierce wind blew in and shook the branches of the limb, transforming them into the fingers of a million Mr. Grimes reaching for the baby, reaching for Rose. Startled, Rose fell forward. Her hands pressed against the pastry bag and squirted a stream of cream into the curls of her hair.

Rose stepped to the limb and kicked it. Ow! It didn’t budge, and she only scratched her ankles. She grabbed the limb around its thickest part, so its branches—its fingers—faced away from her, and she dragged it out of her house into her midnight-black backyard high on a hill.

She scurried inside and shut the side door, keeping her back to it for fear a face would appear in its tiny window. The door bounced open. She slammed it again but noticed a deep gash in the door and the doorknob dangled from its hole. The limb had gouged the door and ripped off the doorknob.

She worked the doorknob back in, her fingers freezing and her fear rising. The images of the man and the fingers of the branches haunted her. The graininess of the film and the swamp and the neediness of the kids added to her own sadness and loneliness. She felt like she was one of them. She needed to get away. The door didn’t even stay shut!

She shoved the cream puffs into the fridge. She threw the dirty dishes in the sink and covered them with a dish towel sticky with dried filling. She brushed off the counter with her hand, whisking the crumbs into the garbage can. Most of the crumbs scattered to the floor, and she covered them with the kitchen rug.

Rose stared into the dining room, which led to the hall and the front door, and then to the stairs to her bedroom. An endless darkness always stretched up the stairs, interrupted by more inky blackness that the skylights cast down. She dreaded passing the ancient clock and then climbing the stairs with the images of the silent film haunting her brain.

The broom hung on its hook near the kitchen, mocking her decision to hide the crumbs under the rug and not sweep them. The broom! She grabbed it and flicked on the dining room light with its handle and marched through the hall swinging it.

The ancient clock—done chiming and quiet now—sat on a tall table in the hall. The light illuminated its round yellow-brownish face with a jagged crack running down its center. It was enclosed in a brown wooden case that looked like an ocean wave. Great-grandmother Rose had dragged the horrible thing all the way across the ocean from Germany when she had moved here after World War II. Rose shivered as it stared at her. It sat next to the basement door that she never went down either.

Rose flicked off the dining room light with the broom handle. Carrying the broom as a weapon, she rushed past her two terrors, and sped up the stairs to the bathroom, where she grabbed her toothbrush and ran to her bedroom. She scrambled under the covers, tucked the broom in next to her, and brushed her teeth with a fury. Dry! She’d forgotten toothpaste.

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