by Tawnysha Greene
…..On Saturdays, we pull out big white poster boards, magic markers, and draw babies. Heads with black eyes, bodies curled, hands in mouths, a blue cord running from their bellies to somewhere off the page. Momma does the writing, block letters in red, coloring them in with diagonal stripes, pen squeaking with each stroke. She sings worship songs the way she does when she irons Daddy’s clothes. She lets me outline the letters in black and we pack them in the car, driving to the big road where the brick building is with the green sign, the outline of a woman. Underneath her, it says hope. Momma’s friends are there and we stand by the road and hold up our signs in the rain. On these days, Daddy and the younger ones stay home and it’s just Momma, her friends, me. I feel like a big girl. We call it special time.
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Tawnysha Greene received her M.A. from Auburn University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in fiction writing at the University of Tennessee. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including The Foundling Review and Wigleaf and is forthcoming in The Southern Humanities Review.
