front door of the house opened and an angry dachshund tumbled outside barking at the top of his lungs.
“Baybeeeeee!” Aunt squealed. “We missed you widdle widdle baybeee! Kids, I want you to meet Cheeto.”
Gnat, safely cradled in Uncle’s arms, shouted, “Incoming! Defensive shields up!”
Uncle joined in laughing, “Take that alien dog!”
Cheeto was long, red, and lean. He took things very seriously and he did not seem happy to see them. He ran around Olivia’s feet sniffing and growling.
Olivia rolled her eyes. Suddenly bored with the newcomers, Cheeto ran off into the forest.
“Come back!” Gnat yelled.
“Cheeto doesn’t trust anybody, not even Uncle. He will be fine,” reassured Aunt.
If the car was full of junk, then their house was completely conquered by it. Bookshelves lined every wall. Piles of old magazines sat on the floor. There were countless artifacts, oddities, specimens, curios, totems, and geegaws sitting or hanging on every possible space.
“It sure is bigger on the inside than it looked outside,” Olivia thought. There was a giant boulder taking up entirely too much room in the corner of the living room. The rock was taller than Olivia and four times wider. It must have weighed a ton.
“Your Uncle found that in the middle of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. He carried that darn thing out of the jungle fifty years ago,” Aunt explained when she saw Olivia touching it. “He won’t put it outside. I’ll probably have to bury him with it.”
Olivia couldn’t imagine how one man could carry such an enormous rock through the jungle. She looked closer. It was filled with smooth chunks of shining multicolored nuggets embedded into the rock.
“Opals,” Aunt whispered, smiling.
“Wait. Fifty years ago? How old is Uncle anyway?” But Aunt had already disappeared into the kitchen.
Olivia looked at the pictures on the wall: jungle waterfalls, a young woman in a bi-plane, exotic cities, and precarious poses on mountaintops. One photograph showed two girls in the foreground with a boy swinging on a rope and dropping into a swimming hole. The two girls looked like they just got out of the beautiful blue water. One looked very familiar to Olivia.
And then it struck her. She hadn’t seen the TV yet.
“Ummmm . . . Excuse me. Where is the TV?” Olivia asked loudly and with enough attitude that there was no doubt about her irritation.
From somewhere several rooms away, Aunt responded, “I’m sorry, dear. We don’t have one. Maybe we can fix one of the ones in the garage.”
“What?? How do you know what is going on in the world? Who doesn’t have a TV? What do you do for fun?”
“We fix TVs.”
“Just great,” Olivia thought, “not only is there no TV, no neighbors, and no lawn, but they have to be smart alecks about it.”
“Well, where’s the phone? You do have one of those, right? I want to call Dad.”
“Why don’t you wait until morning,” Aunt said more as a command than a question. “It’s getting late.”
“Can you at least tell me where my room is?” she said, rolling her eyes. She never wanted to come in the first place and these people didn’t even have a TV. How would she watch movies or find out what was going on in Iraq? She felt her skin turning hot. No TV!
“Haaaarooooooold!” Aunt called out in an uncomfortably loud voice. “Haaaaarooooold! Where are you?”
“I’m coming, just a second.”
“Why don’t you answer?”
“I said I’m coming. Now pipe down.”
“Don’t you tell me to pipe down.” Aunt’s face turned bright red. She slammed the cupboard door. It sounded like something porcelain broke inside. “The kids need their stuff! Don’t you tell me to pipe down!”
Uncle was just walking through with some bags, winked at Olivia, and said, “Follow me, Butterfly.”
“Don’t call me Butterfly,” Olivia ordered.
“Huh?”
“Butterfly. Don’t call me that.”
“Follow me, Kumquat,” Uncle smirked
“And don’t bother bringing them all inside. You can take me home tomorrow,” she mumbled as they walked down a long hallway. “This house keeps getting bigger and bigger inside.”
Down at the end of the hall was a bright blue door. Uncle turned the old glass knob and walked in.
“Here you go! Good as new.”
To Olivia’s surprise, the room was surprisingly clean and bare. “What? No shrunken heads or stacks of magazines or giant boulders?”
Uncle chuckled to himself and walked out.
The bed looked like something an emperor would sleep in, the emperor of mummies. It must be five hundred years old. The large dark bedposts rose all the way to the ceiling. When Olivia jumped onto the mattress she sunk down low. It was like lying in a big pile of fluffy snow. She fell asleep before she even got her shoes off.
Aunt came in later. “Goodnight Olivia. Just knock on the green door down the hall if you need anything. The bathroom is the next room down. The room with a yellow door.” She yanked Olivia’s shoes off and pulled the sheets over her.
“Is that Mom in that picture on the shelf by Uncle’s rock?” Olivia asked, half asleep.
“She was just a little older than you when that was taken.”
“I’m still going home in the morning, you know. I’m not even going to unpack.”
“I know,” Aunt said, kissing her on the forehead. She left the door cracked.
Olivia stared out the window from the bed. The moon was shining brightly on the white sand. The bedroom windows were covered with dripping water on the outside, distorting her view of the forest. The cold, air-conditioned air caused dew to form on the glass as it contacted the hot humid air of the outdoors.
Olivia whispered, “Condensation,” proud of herself for remembering a vocabulary word from school. She reached up and felt the red birthday barrette in her hair and fell back onto the soft mattress.
As her eyelids grew heavy and blurry, she noticed several tree frogs clinging to the wet window. They were walking and hopping along the slick surface. Their circular suction toes spread wide as they stepped gently, leaving intricate tracks in the dew. She could hear them calling to each other in their language of peeps, gargles, and burps.
“There are no frogs like that in Sun Prairie,” she thought. She could hear Aunt
