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Julia Elliott

The Wilds

FOR MY PARENTS

Rapture

Brunell Hair lived in a lopsided mill house with her mama and her uncle and her little withered-up critter of a grandmaw. In honor of her eleventh birthday, she was having a slumber party, but so far, only my best friend, Bonnie, and I had showed. Our mothers had had some kind of powwow, during which they’d smoked cigarettes and worked themselves into a tizzy over how vain and selfish we were getting, finally declaring that sleeping over at Brunell’s house would be just the thing to “teach us a lesson” about how fortunate and spoiled we were. Truth told, we wanted to see Brunell in her natural habitat. We wanted to see the creepy troll-child’s lair, witness the antics of her Jesus-freak mother, spy on her uncle, who’d appeared in several television commercials, and see her Meemaw speak in tongues.

Brunell’s mother, who wore hideous dresses and sported an old-fashioned mushroom cloud of hair, was making hamburger patties. The other two family members were holed up in their rooms, Meemaw praying for the soul of her gay son, the uncle just sitting up there enduring the prayers she threw at him, sighing every five minutes over the man in California who’d broken his heart. According to Brunell, ever since Meemaw’s husband died, the woman did nothing but pray and eat candy and watch the TV she’d won at a church raffle. According to Brunell, although her mother could spit her share of prayers at the sins of the world, she stayed busy while doing it. She kept a spotless house, vacuuming their pink wall-to-wall carpet three times a week and scrubbing their kitchen until it gleamed.

Huddled out back behind a clapboard shed, smoking the cigarette butts that Bonnie and I had stolen from our mothers, we tried to teach Brunell to French inhale. Scrunching her angelic frog-face, Brunell blew out a smoke cloud that’d definitely not laced her lungs.

“You’re not really smoking,” said Bonnie.

“Smoking is a sin. ” Brunell tried another puff.

“Whatever,” said Bonnie. “Where’s your uncle?”

“He’s in Mama’s room. Mama’s bunking with Meemaw.

“What does she talk about?” asked Bonnie.

“The Rapture,” said Brunell.

“The Blondie song?” I said.

“The end of the world, stupid. ”

Though I knew about the book of Revelation, I’d never heard the end times referred to as the Rapture before. Now I couldn’t help but picture Jesus cruising down to Earth on a glittery gold escalator, his white robes spattered with disco light. Two angels hovered above him, twirling a mirrored ball. Down in the pulsing city, Debbie Harry waited in a red convertible Corvette. All decked out in ruby spandex, she winked and blew Jesus a kiss. The Son of God hopped into her car and they drove off toward the beach, the wind mussing his hippie hair into a wild, Mötley Crüe mane.

While her mother slaved over a skillet of french fries, Brunell played her uncle’s commercials on the VCR he’d brought from California. We watched Uncle Mike, named for the archangel Michael, make out with a cheerleader in a Big Red commercial. We watched him carve into a bar of Irish Spring soap while perched on the back of a black stallion. We sighed as Brunell’s handsome uncle portrayed the dangerously masculine essence of Oleg Cassini cologne: he drove a Rolls-Royce, played polo, flew his private jet to an exotic beach, where he dallied on a yacht with a chick in a French-cut bikini.