In the murky world of rules, Alexandra had to let her grandmother watch her brush her teeth, she had to thank the Jesus man before she ate her mashed potatoes and struggled with her brumblespouts and she wasn’t allowed to play past the big dead tree that lay across the path that the men took to the treehouses.
Her grandfather yelled at TVs and her grandmother and sometimes her, and when her eyes got wet Grandmother would nod and she would run outside, straight to the big dead tree.
Sometimes Grandmother came and got her, and brought her back in.
Grandmother never watched Alexandra play, just walked up the path, held out her hand, and said “Come with me dear.”
She told Grandmother she made friends in the tree, and Grandmother smiled like she didn’t believe her.
The friends were opalescent beetles, and ants, and even a snake, which Alexandra was shocked by, but not scared, because it didn’t yell.
Alexandra held an antelope beetle–not so much held as watched it crawl around her wrist. She didn’t know it was an antelope beetle, or a beetle at all. Her name was Coomba, and she had been Alexandra’s friend for ten minutes.
Coomba could move pieces of wood bigger than her body.
Grandmother came up the path.
Alexandra was going to introduce Grandmother to Coomba, but then she saw Grandmother carrying the small blue box of the cold wet wipes, the kind Grandmother smooshed spiders in the house with, and Alexandra jammed her hand deep in the dead tree to let Coomba run away.
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