the coppertop kids

Laura was mean and pugnacious. Not the way most children are. She didn’t play practical jokes on busybody aunts or pull the ears of annoying cousins like I sometimes did. She told families of their father’s indiscretions and then wondered aloud in other people’s company why the children were so ugly and the mothers so dim. She also stole my bike.

Carol was fat. A big lopsided ball of flesh with little beady eyes and bad skin. Laura said too much. Carol didn’t say enough. She kept hush when the former blamed the drowning of a neighbours cat on Dewey, even though she saw her sister put the animal into a plastic bag and throw it in the creek. Carol ate crawdads. Raw.

Alice had red hair. Redder than her siblings. She wore it protruding from either side of her head in imaginative cartoon style pigtails. There was nothing else remarkable about her.

Dewey said if I didn’t have anything else to be thankful for, i ought to be thankful I hadn’t come from that bunch. I’d be a fat, copper-topped, bike thief and wouldn’t that be as bad as it got.

Things being what they were, he said, I was a right attractive kid. Couldn’t help but be….falling from the same tree as he.

I let him say it. Because I reckoned he was right.