Chapter 13 "At First Glance"

The days began to run into each other the second month the sisters were in the Sandbox. The hours began to blend together. Days of the week no longer had individual names but rather strung together and became one long day only being separated by the light switch in the sky. The dust from the arrival month had settled and the sisters had gotten into a routine, which none of them minded.

Part of May’s and Red’s routine involved workouts in the yellow room where the sisters could be seen lifting weights to random music mixes and jumping over invisible lines to keep beat with May’s, long forgotten, basketball agility routine. May, who swore she would never do another basketball workout again after the hundreds she did in college, thought if only her coaches could see her now. A quick wave of homesickness broke over her as she remembered some of her favorite days consisted of the cooler mornings in Florida. The ones that aloud her to arise early, place her ipod around her neck, and jog the slightly hilly path, while inhaling the citrus aroma on the service road of her old university.

May’s thoughts quickly subsided as she went to the kitchen for a drink between sets of lounges. She glanced out the rusty brown barred window and saw the little girl below, the same one that slept on the metal frames. On this day the shirtless little girl played in, what at first glance seemed to be, a fort her family had built. She danced under a cardboard ceiling held up by thicker sheets of cardboard. May saw through the gapping hole in the front side, the side that could be opened by a severely dented refrigerator door whose broken handle murmured tinks to the rhythm of the cars passing along the road.

May was curious to see what else the little girl was playing with on the soil floor. Did she have a companion dolly friend? A stuffed animal bear? Was the fort her secret place during the hiding part of Hide and Seek? May, still out of breath, took another sip of water and looked a little closer. The space contained by cardboard was not part of any game for the little girl’s amusement. It was a ten foot by ten foot bedroom the family had made. The cushion-less metal chair held up the right side of the cardboard and the family’s wardrobe hang over the back wall on the barbwire fence. It appeared the little girl was picking handfuls of loose dirt off the ground in her room. After a few minutes May understood the little girl was cleaning her room, the only room in the garbage field. Her mother sat outside the cardboard walls, ringing out the laundry she had pulled from the foggy water in the plastic basin that sat to the left of her. May contemplated, sometimes things were easier to accept at first glance.