Colleen Hollister
In the front yard, they are weeding. It's summer. The last two days were hot and now the breeze is cool enough to set the bits of plants going, small relief. Inside the house, a set of fans skate the air in directions on the empty wood floors. There is a hole toward the floor below the cabinets in the kitchen. There is a sticky yellow spot on the ceiling of the living room. She feels the air on the backs of her knees, smells dirt released from dirt. There is a loud bird bringing worms to a nest made of sticks. Strange bugs on the plants, glare that makes a headache.
A new house, she feels her body in the new yard, feels his body close to hers. This place a set of unfamiliar sounds, cars that rattle by on wheels that could fall off. A red pickup trailers a load of yard equipment, a man in the passenger side elbows a cigarette out the window, bright white t-shirt against brown skin. A tiny girl scooters pinkly—pink dress, pink scooter, pink helmet, curly hair escaping—across the street in a three-house stretch before her mother calls her back.
Down the street a group of people wearing khaki shorts huddle and watch the top of an old water tower, its ground ringed first with dirt and vines and then with chicken wire and keepout signs. Camera, tripod, binoculars, long lenses all looking in the heat. She doesn't ask to find out at what. She looks, but can't see anything herself.
At work, mid-morning, women conference over budgets, chocolate cupcakes, fluorescent light. Gray carpeted cubicles pinned with marketing campaigns, fall approaching and lecture and crunch of leaf. Lunch is a hot concrete bench in the shade of a magnolia islanded by mulch. On the front steps of the building, a woman with an eye patch takes a picture with a woman in a salwar kameez. She raises her phone arm out and they smile together.
In the backyard there is a peeling white door on a garage she never goes into. The neighbor's cat is black with green eyes and leaves moles soft and boneless on their back steps. She is forever sweeping things into the hole in the kitchen.
Night. Strawberry ice cream on church steps on street. She chases the melt around the bowl, feels taut at having to share, knows his bites are larger than hers, feels resentment, feels again the connection of all her bones. She tries to watch the line of people at the shop across the street, waiting for their own ice cream. She finds this to be a place where it's hard to pay attention. Teeth-grinding, pink melt, cardboard bowl, plastic spoon that changes color when it's cold. The ice cream is gone too soon and she didn't even watch it go, she spent her whole time on the chase.
Many couches piled on the back of a dark green pickup. Frayed rope holds them in. The street glints, bright and open.
Early evening. Man and woman screaming at each other. They are the man and woman, though it feels like far away, and like she should refer to them unnamed and only titled, distant, strange. Cars stop to watch them fight, she feels her arms gesture, she sees a man about to clap, pale red liver-spotted arms leaning over his open window, brown sedan as old as she is, sees a flash of when she was a child and helped her mother deliver newspapers, rolling them and rubberbanding before her mother's arm tossed them out the window, and she stops. Feels it in her body, a dropping, and she sits down on the cold grass.
On the steps, a four-piece flash brass band performance: kids, their teacher conductor. Tuba shines bright brass in sun. She watches women from her office pass with lunch in plastic bags; they don't even stop their conversation, don't even look. She sits on her concrete bench and it feels like a joyous miracle, and then the music is over and then it's gone.
Waking up at sunrise and lying quiet in a bed that has only her in it. This too feels like a miracle. When he is gone the breeze blows quiet and cool through the house, all the windows open. The house is on a hill and the bedroom at the back is exposed to hill, hill, hill, gas station, green growing thing, hawk. When all the doors and windows are open, nothing obstructs the air or sky. The bed with only her in it feels wide and its corners and unknown spaces promising.
It begins with what the weeds are: tall and fuzzy-headed white, purple that stabs at the ankle. She holds on with her gloves to stem and feels the stab of spine and yanks them out, roots dry-sandy and splaying everywhere. They choke sand up toward her eyeballs, leave crumbling nests in the lawn. Below are things digging: shiny beetle with wheeling legs, fat wet pink worm.
In the front yard they are weeding. She pulls her head up on the thread that is her spine and feels it lift cracking into its places, bright light streaming around her sunglasses. This patch of street is treeless and across the street the houses are stucco: pink, lavender, yellow alternating, with one blessed white one that gives her eye a break. Tomato, tomato. Smell of something familiar, maybe tomato: insistent green leaf. Maybe sand. Maybe, somewhere far below, a search for water, the smell of it, minerals leaching.
The sky flashes clean white behind the tall black trees, and the sky opens with a thunder crack like breaking a bowl. In the flashes, the world becomes clear. The lightning and thunder are very close, just off to the right side, just at the end of the street. And then it moves on, and though the lightning is still visible, still cracking the sky, now someone else is getting the rain. Just like that, immense and immediate. The small white of a car headlight runs the length of the window, in reflection. The cat runs right into the house, drops a soft mouthful under the coffee table, rolls onto his back to swat the body above his head. The world is dark outside the windows, and the mole is dead and soft and gray and looks unreal.