Her feet, those elephantine, calloused, dry, mop-water-dirtied appendages, lifted from the ground, raising that bloated, overworked, undersexed, unappreciated body into the air where she momentarily hovered like a bewildered wounded butterfly unable to flutter its wings. Pushed by a foul-smelling breeze that came in through the open kitchen window from the garbage dump next door, Amelia floated through her dilapidated ranch style house, bouncing and bumping against the door frames sending chips of wood from the broken moldings onto the piles of used, dust-filled vacuum cleaner bags kept by her doors in hopes that one day her oldest boy, Wynken, would do the one chore assigned him and throw them over the fence onto the of hills of refuse in the dump.

            She came to rest against the living room wall that was decorated with a magic marker rendering of the Battle of Gettysburg, and was flattened against a cannon like a half-griddled, gooey pancake. Cursing gravity she slid to the floor like an amoeba clinging to a petri dish, landing on the warped floorboards on the side of her body that was numb from sleeping on it because her three-legged cat wouldn't let her sleep the night before any other way. Rising with all fours holding her up like a wobbly coffee table, she crawled over to the sofa that had almost spit out the last of its stuffing and pulled herself up on the nearly flattened cushions and stretched out flat on her Quasimodo-like humped back and turned her bulbous head toward the television that was always on because once turned off there was no proof it would ever be turned on again, and stared at The Price is Right, and hoped for better days to come.

*

            Dragging the swamp-scented snapping turtle into the house by a leash made from Amelia's last faux gold chain necklace, Blynken would have gotten all the way to his room with it had the sound of its claws carving scars in the floor not alerted Amelia who was perched on top of a leaning ladder trying to put scotch tape on a crack in the hall ceiling that leaked every time it rained.

            Parachuting like a falling boulder down from the top step of the ladder in her fifty pounds of pink bathrobe, she landed on her kneecaps needing to be drained of built up fluid, and told him, “You're not bringing that in the house.”

            Of course he had already brought it in the house which he pointed out and continued making turtle tracks to his room where he promptly slammed the door.

            Looking up and seeing the tape peeling from the ceiling, Amelia resigned herself to being a failure when it came to doing home repairs and somersaulted down the hallway loosing her hair curlers along the way like a ball of unraveling yarn, and arrived at the front door just in time to see through the flapless mail slot at the bottom of the door two Mormon missionaries coming up the cracked walkway overgrown with crabgrass. When they knocked on the door she flattened herself on her stomach like roadkill and stayed there until they left with the sun glinting off their starched white shirts.

            “Damn you, Blynken,” she muttered as she started to rise and found herself glued to the floor by turtle shit, and laid there until dinner time hoping someone would pry her up like a burnt egg stuck to a pan needing to be scooped up with a spatula.  

*

            A bowl of gray lumpy mashed potatoes embellished with a single black olive that Amelia thumb-pushed into the center at the top stared at her like the mushy dead eye of a one-eyed zombie. Watching an undercooked meatball hurtle in front of her face, a comet propelled by Nod's spoon, and crashing onto the scabby landscape of their mange-ridden dachshund’s back, Amelia said to her youngest child and only girl, “You're worse than the little girl in The Bad Seed.”

            The dog quickly scooped up the ball of pink meat with its blistered tongue and carried it to the refrigerator and let it drop on the floor, apparently wanting an opt-out on the whole table scraps plan.

            Amelia passed on taking any of the potatoes and scooped on to her plate a pile of canned cream corn that spread across her plate like her cat's diarrhea, and pushed aside her plate and watched Wynken, Blynken and Nod shoot spit balls made of overcooked broccoli at each other shot through toilet roll tubes acquired from a large plastic bag thrown into their back yard from someone digging around in the trash in the dump. Amelia spread her arms and with the wind being caught in the flaps of skin hanging under each arm, she flew into her bedroom and landed on the raggedy mattress of her bed with her head at the wrong end and stared at a Playboy playmate calendar from 1972 tacked by her husband to the wall above the headboard. The calendar was flipped to the month of August, which was meaningless other than that it had always been flipped to the month of August. 

*

            Waking in the middle of the night to the sounds of water drops playing ping pong on the metal pan underneath the accordion-like steam radiator beneath her bedroom window, Amelia rose up on her arthritic elbows and counted the drops per minute to determine if the leaking radiator was an emergency. Satisfied it wasn't she started to lay her head back on the edge of the foot board and choked on a glob of phlegm that had abruptly risen in her throat and coagulated there like one of her cat's slimy hairballs. Coughing the ball of mucus to the front of her mouth she propelled it out with the force of a bazooka hitting Miss August right on the ass. For once she was glad she had fallen asleep with the lights on, because she had always wanted to spit on Miss August but out of respect for her husband, she had never done it. But seeing the wad of throat-snot slide over Miss August's derriere was more fun than she had had in a long time. As her double chins jiggled with mirth, Amelia looked down at the toes of her fuzzy blue slippers seeing that one or more of her children had crept into her room at some point and cut off the ends, leaving her swollen toes sticking out like pale Vienna sausages.

*

            Rolling out of her bedroom just before noon like a ball of tumbleweed, Amelia was wind-swept into the living room where Wynken, Blynken and Nod sat on the sofa imitating the three monkeys who neither saw, heard or spoke evil.

            “Whatever you've done along with cutting the tips off of my slippers you're not getting away with it,” she said before being caught by a gust of wind and sent rolling into the kitchen.  She came to rest like a deflated balloon against the table and stared into the eye-potatoes and threw up in her mouth. Setting about to put the kitchen in order to fix breakfast she tossed the used paper plates and green plastic utensils into the trash, then scraped the mounds of leftover food into the dog's bowl. She got a box of strawberry pop tarts that had been hidden from Wynken and Blynken on the top shelf of the cupboard and put it in the middle of the table and yelled, “Breakfast is ready you little monsters.”

            She then stood at the window and inhaled the ambrosia of trash that had been cooking in the morning sun.

*

            After mopping the kitchen floor with yesterday's mop water, Amelia sat her cellulite-ridden buttocks on a lumpy pillow of air and floated around the room with the telephone to her ear, speaking to her mother.

            “The children go back to school next week. They have been such angels all summer,” Amelia said.

            Inaudible.

            “You were right about the joys of motherhood. I feel so fulfilled.”

            Inaudible.

            “Stu will be home tomorrow. I spent all morning cleaning so that the place will be extra nice when he comes through the door.”

            Inaudible.

            “Yes mother, he respects me in every way a woman can be respected.”

            Inaudible.

            “I'll call you next week after Stu and I have had some time together. He must get so lonely for me and the kids being on the road driving that big rig for weeks at a time. Goodbye.”

            Click.

*

            Standing on the front porch that tilted like the deck of the Titanic just before it went under, Amelia clung to the railing like the last passenger on the deck of that same doomed ship and held her breath as toxic clouds of trash fragrances washed over her. Her body was extended outward, horizontal to the splintered wood of the porch floor, as if raised to that position by a magician performing an act of levitating. The dachshund was doing his business in the hip-high grass, straining out the morning's meal of cold pasty mashed potatoes, creamed corn and an olive. She watched as Blynken dragged the upside-down turtle back and forth across the street while dodging cars.

            “Blynken, let that turtle go,” she yelled.

            “It'll get hit by a car,” he yelled back stopping in the middle of the street.

            “I meant let it go where you found it,” she yelled, her feet drifting further upward toward the ceiling of the porch.

*

            In the evening and flat on her back on the sofa with Nod riding her stomach like a demented jockey riding a watermelon, Amelia felt the pressure on her intestines being released in a steady flow of flatulence. The brush she had tried to comb through Nod's hair was stuck in a mass of tangles with the handle sticking out the side of her head like a plastic horn. The television had pre-empted the night's programs with a continuous optics test of squiggly lines. Wynken and Blynken sat cross-legged on vacuum bags full of dirt and dust, glued to what they were watching. “Your dad is going to be home in the morning,” Amelia said to all three of them. “Are you excited?”

            Inaudible.

*

            Amelia cartwheeled into the bed nearly squashing the cat who hissed and jumped off the bed and limped out of the room. With her head encased in a pillow that had lost most of its filling she gripped onto the mattress not wanting to be sucked out the open window. Looking down at the yellow nail polish on her exposed toenails she wondered if the color was just a bit too jaundiced. She became aware of her own sweating under her freshly shaved underarms and decided she would have to apply more baking soda before Stu got home. The sound of Wynken tacking waterbugs to his bedroom wall echoed through the house. “Leave those bugs alone,” she yelled and to her surprise the thumping stopped. Keeping her grip on the mattress she rolled onto her side and curled her body into a fetal position as the cat leaped back onto the bed and curled up against her bouncy breasts. She fell asleep and spent the night dreaming of clouds.

*

            Staring at the phlegm-smeared butt of Miss August Stu humped Amelia and when finished rolled over onto his back and said, “I heard on talk radio one night while on the road a really interesting theory about why no one has ever found Amelia Earhart. The guy on the radio said everyone was looking for her out at sea when in reality she had just turned around and flew home and lived out her life as a wife and mother.”

Steve Carr, who lives in Richmond, Va., began his writing career as a military journalist and has had over a hundred short stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals and anthologies. His plays have been produced in several states. He was a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. He is on Facebook and Twitter @carrsteven960.