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Risen

Guests to greet. Mimosas, fruit, frittata to serve. Tulips to vase. And my grandchildren, high on chocolate, lure me down to the basement playroom. A game. They need me. To play. Just for a few minutes, they plead. I cave. Easter Bunny gave them these little plastic light-up thingies to loop onto their fingertips and now they want lights-out and a savage beast (me) they can track with their lit tips and slay. But first we must pretend they’re lost in the woods and the six-year-old lays those lit fingertip thingies along the lip of the pool table. Cameras, he says. We’re being surveilled. That’s awful—my shocked response. No, his little sister says. It just means they’ll find us if we get lost. And I’m torn at that, so I quit the commentary and roar. Send them squealing out of the underworld basement woods, through the monster-miraged garage and into the green afternoon. I’m hot on their heels, mad creature they’ve conjured and lost control of. Then Bam—sun shears clouds, a flash, and we disappear, spring from the lawn into the just-beyond, camera-less forest. Hansel. Gretel. Frothing cannibal. The shadowy garage gapes behind us. April shimmers ahead and all around—skunk cabbage, just-awake snakes, ticks and, Jesus, hallelujah, a hawk, two great blue herons, and even I, dutiful Martha though I be, ditch my tasks, sprint ahead, up the ante, hide-and-seek, and when I find, devour.

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Mary Beth Hines is the author of Winter at a Summer House (Kelsay, 2021). Her poems, reviews, short fiction, and nonfiction appear widely in journals such as Cider Press Review, Presence, RockPaperPoem, and Tar River. When not reading, writing, or swimming, she’s chasing her grandchildren around as in this poem.