Tess Kelly: PLAYHOUSE • Cleaver Magazine

Tess Kelly
PLAYHOUSE

It arrived on a surprise Saturday in the bed of Uncle Tony’s pickup. The wooden playhouse our grandfather built had cedar shakes, a rooster-topped weathervane, and real hinged windows that opened wide like our astonished mouths. Soon enough my sisters and I busied ourselves among the little wooden sink and stove, the little wooden table and chairs, all manufactured in Grandpa’s basement, where mounted tools stood ready to serve and the smell of wood shavings imbued the air. And one day, while we pretended to be grown-ups fixing lunch for invisible children, half a boy’s face appeared through a glass pane, his hair the color of baby chicks, his eyes full of June sky. A boy attached to a name that’s drifted from me, afloat on a raft of lost memories. We unlatched the window to offer cheery greetings. Hello, he whispered in return. Then he ran back to his split-level house, which was just like our house. I could see him through a peephole that someone, maybe me, bore through a playhouse wall. A hole about the size a bullet would make. You could look through that hole and see our apple tree, its green fruit pocked and uneaten, its gray branches worn smooth from climbing. You could see my mother’s garden, lush with vining cucumbers and plumping tomatoes, and the boy’s backyard on the other side of a split-wood fence. Perhaps we’d have made friends with our shy neighbor had his family not left. After they moved away, the music teacher and her husband moved in. Mrs. Brown taught at our school and asked me to perform at an assembly when I was in fifth grade. My fingers raced across the piano faster than the beat of my nervous heart, and who knows if anyone recognized “Claire de Lune” at that speed. Ten years later, while playing Debussy for my mother, I thought of Mrs. Brown. I thought of her house in the neighborhood where we no longer lived and of the little boy who had lived there before her. When I asked my mother whatever happened to that family, she told me they left after the little boy found his father’s gun, pulling the trigger as he played with it. Our almost-friend died the next day. My hands froze on the piano keys and his June sky eyes peered through a real glass window, broken long ago. Then I saw him in the peephole, his back to me, running toward home.

Tess Kelly’s essays have appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, HerStry, Ruminate, and other publications. She’s the First Prize winner of the 2020 Women’s National Book Association Awards in the flash prose category. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.