Step, Step. Tap, Tap.

There is a girl: narrow hips, long fingers, brown hair, named Sophie. And she is breathing in and out with smooth regularity, and she is walking over sidewalks and lawns, up front steps, to front doors with mailboxes on the left (sometimes the right) and slipping in small town newspapers stuffed with advertisements for the hardware store. She taps out the rhythm of her steps with her teeth, improvising as she goes: step, tap, step, tap, step, tap, tap, tap. And if the steps fall out of sync with the tap, her feet stumble in a shuffle to keep the rhythm.
And she thinks,
in beats,
to her step,
and her teeth
and their tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

She is twelve, and so she thinks of boys she would like to kiss and her cheeks burn, even alone, on an autumn night with the streetlights just beginning to glow pink, like salmon swimming suspended in a bowl full of sky. And she thinks of the words she would say, if she were brave, and for a moment her teeth stop tapping and her lips say, “You are so beautiful. I would like to eat you up,” as she slips a paper in the box and catches her reflection in the window that runs the length of the ceiling to the floor at the side of the door she has paused at.
She blushes, and her eyes dart while she makes a mental note to:
Stop.
Being.
Crazy.

Because she is curious, she thinks about the people behind the walls of the houses, and without realizing that she does, pictures them all sitting on the edges of their beds, putting on their pants, one leg at a time. She has been in some of these houses, but most of them are unknown and she imagines them all as varied versions of her own home. When she climbs the stairs to one house (pink mailbox, on the left, painted like a cottage) the door opens and she looks up to see a middle-aged woman with soft brown curls and blue dress, smile and reach for the paper. Sophie's teeth pause. There is: the smell of coffee, sounds of music, orange light, warm air, smiling photos, supper dishes, her perfume, a chocolate cake, green walls, large couch.
“Thank you,” says the woman.
The door closes. The warm world is sealed off.
Sophie turns and walks down the steps. As her feet hit the ground and her teeth begin to tap she thinks about: home (tap), her cooling cheeks (step, step), cake (tap, tap, tap, tap). She climbs the stairs to the next house and imagines inside a version of her own home with a woman in a blue dress, sitting on a large couch.

And, she thinks about God, because she sits in a pew on Sunday mornings: stockings itching, feet twitching, heart pounding at the spots when the choir sings of love and those nails and the blood and the stripes that have healed her. She is in love with God but she is twelve and her faith is carved with a plastic knife of uncontested ease, like a soap figurine: shavings dropping, faces forming, hands smooth and sweet.
When she thinks about God, she knows she is good, though she's been taught her soul is ugly with sin. On nights when the lights are swimming in clouds, and a V of geese call from waves of cooling air, she rounds a corner into the scent of smoke and knows, without a doubt, that:
She is beautiful.
God loves her.
And she does not care which flowed from what.

Her bag is almost empty and she climbs stairs that are closer to home with the line in her head singing around tapping teeth and moving feet, forming the words: do do do, God is love. Do do do do, I am good.
She reaches her house as the streetlights flicker from pink to yellow and she can see inside where the African Violet sits on the kitchen table and her grade one picture hangs on the wall. She can tell now, from the light pouring out of the windows, that night has set. She climbs the stairs and places her hand on the knob, breathing in the damp dark aloneness, before walking into the yellow light of home.