The Linwood Twine vignette

A distant falsetto from outside was chirping into Linwood’s motorhome. It repeated his name every few seconds, then came rotated with a soft knocking on the door of his rusting, abused Winnebago – a 1974 Winnie Minnie.

Pammy, his niece, was out early. Out in a howling morning winter wind, rousing her uncle, her face still smudged with sleep. She was calling him, over and over, to a retort of dawngray silence. That’s why she started knocking, despite the bad results of the past.

“Hey, sweatpea,” Linwood rasped, placing one bloodshot eye in the doorcrack. “Whatsup?”

The girl was full of stammers. All hatetobotheryous while scratching the toe of a fuzzy slipper across the dead grass. Linwood’s ex-wife, Monica, had just died. Passed way overnight in the hospital.

He curled his thick, beaten fingers around the edge of the fiberglass door and watched a strange swampbird rise up from behind Pammy’s house, arcing in slow motion through the thin sheet of fog laying against the roof. That’s the craziest bird, he thought.

“Damn,” Linwood coughed, shaking the door uncontrollably for just a second. “Sorry you had to get up for that, sweatpea. But thankya.”

“You can use our phone if you need to,” she offered, her eyes raking the ragged sliver of her uncle showing in the doorway. “When you need to. Dutch don’t mind. For now, anyway.”
She smiled like that had put things right. And maybe it had. For now.
“Thakya.”

Linwood closed the door and went straight for a cigarette from a dented softpack of Doral menthols. He brushed the filter over his lips and counted the seconds before he had another thought of any kind.