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Wendy Fontaine

Badge


          When my mother finally gives me permission to go to the neighbor’s house to sell Girl Scout cookies, I grab the illustrated order form and throw on my sash. The fabric loops heavy around my torso, weighted by the pins and badges I’ve earned so far this year. My troopmates and I meet once a week in the basement of the Methodist church. We learn to draw maps and sew. We make first aid kits. At one meeting, when the troop leader isn’t listening, an older Scout uses the word “pussy.” For too long, I think she’s talking about her cat.
          Order form in hand, I march across the front yard and through our small trailer park, past discarded toys and soggy sod. Springtime mud sucks at my shoes, but I don’t mind. It’s the dry weather I don’t like. That’s when the garden spiders come out - black and yellow, as big as Easter eggs. They gather in the tall grass by the driveway. They spread their legs wide between the reeds. They spin their webs, white and wispy, like a dead man’s hair.
          Sometimes at night, the spiders venture all the way to the door of our trailer. They make their nets and wait for prey. I dream about them, about what they will do if they get inside. I imagine them on the carpet, on the curtains. I feel them crawling on my skin.
          One hot summer day, my father slipped on his fishing waders and started the lawn mower. He pushed the mower into the grass and made the spiders disappear. Their webs, destroyed. Their bodies, mulched. I watched from the living room window, horrified and delighted all at once.
          I knock on the neighbor’s door. He invites me inside, then asks about each type of cookie. Trefoils are shortbread, I answer. Tagalongs have peanut butter. As he looks over the order form, I peek at his kitchen, at his couch, at his trailer that looks a lot like mine. Aluminum siding, wood-paneled walls, brown carpet. In a trailer park, everything is brown. The houses. The dirt. The dirt we track into the house and sweep under the rugs. Even the cookies are brown.
          He says he’ll take two boxes of each, plus some Thin Mints. He buys a lot of cookies, probably because he’s stoned, although I don’t know that yet. I don’t know a lot of things. Like how many beers my dad drinks on his drive home from work, or how many more he has after we all go to bed. Or that he drinks because he is anxious, because he is overwhelmed, because he is sad and misses his mother, who died on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know yet what addiction means. Or depression. These are things I will learn in time, and there will be no badges for any of it.
          A few weeks after my father mowed the spiders, more came back. Black and yellow, bigger than ever. They stretched their legs. They built their webs. They came to me in dreams, crawling and crawling.
          Cookies are two dollars a box. Let me get my wallet, the neighbor says. Then he disappears down a long, dark hallway. My trailer has a hallway too, with the light switch at the far end. You have to walk all the way down, fumbling through blackness, before you can turn it on, before you can see what’s in front of you, or what’s behind.
          I wonder if the neighbor has the same light. I wonder if he’s really getting his wallet. He’s a big man, with dark hair and eyes, and for a moment, I think maybe I should leave. Take my order form and go, back over the soggy yard, to my mother who is waiting at home. To the spiders and the darkness. To my father, asleep in his chair in front of the TV. Instead I stay. I stay because my troop is counting on me. Because there’s a cookie badge on the line. Because there’s nothing here at my neighbor’s house any scarier than the things at my own.
          He comes back, a wad of bills in hand. I put tiny pen marks next to his name, next to the things he’s ordered. I take the money and say goodbye, promise to return when the cookies are in. I cross his yard and then my own, straightening my sash, which is about to get a little heavier. 






--
Wendy Fontaine is a multi-genre writer whose work has appeared in Full Grown People, Hippocampus Magazine, Mud Season Review, River Teeth and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart, awarded the Tiferet Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and featured as a speaker at literary conferences around the country. A New England native, she currently resides in southern California, where she is at work on a novel, a memoir and a collection of flash essays.

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  • Home
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    • Our Story
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025