I. Last week Tommy was down to the hardware store wearing his mother’s flowered, (floured?) dress and carrying a taxidermied goat that he said told him that Christ wasn’t coming back.
They sent the patrol car down to deal with the disruption and Chief Johnson tried to make him see sense but you know Tommy.
His Momma’s gone to Memphis with an insurance salesman; they’re looking for a retirement plan.
II. Grover Mains Street is covered in bunting but what with Gus Atherton dying just three days ago and the VFW in such chaos what with the wake and all that the ladies auxiliary never got the lemonade stand set up.
III. The color guard looks good this year. Not like the time Shorty Pinker’s youngest, Tina? Tanya? Tammy? doesn’t matter she left town two years ago, hasn’t even called her mother once. Anyway, not like the time Shorty Pinker’s youngest ran into the street and the color guard had to detour though the floral display to avoid trampling the tot.
How did we come to share this meal? When did you arrive? I wish there was no echo in here. I wish you echoed less in my memory. We’ve made no progress. There is only one door, so we’ll have to use it if we want to exit. If we want to enter instead, we’ll have to find another window.
I want to… crack open your earlobes your earholes your eye holes to see you with my fingertips to feel your breathing (berating?) pulse under the heel of my hand the derive the sum of ourselves yes to be one two or even three parts of the universal disharmony. to bring us into the same patch of chaos.
I want to scrawl in chalk on your sidewalk to protest to plead to remember that we you and me make up the small army of our dreams.
mine is a martial art hand to hand combat. I use the weight of your (in)experience place my hip under your expectations reach over your apology and grasp your smallest secrets. I will twist, leverage you up into the air—into the ether—into your own self. a self that you no longer recognize as I have turned it 90? to its usual orientation and while you are slightly dizzy I offer you a new way of looking in a funhouse mirror. if this trick works you will never see true north again. I will have disarmed you and provided you with a new weapon a changed weapon a sonic grenade pull the pin crack open your head.
I should clean up the freesias in that vase. The blossoms are falling off the stems. They don’t smell as strongly this year as they did last year. But at least I have them. I searched in the market Sunday. There was only one woman with a few tattered bunches. No gardenias this year, though. Might be the drought. Only four rains last summer. Not nearly enough. The wells in the hills are running slow. Jane’s is only seeping and Raphael’s is entirely dry. The Casa buys water from the water truck. 500 gallons every three days for laundry and showers. It comes late at night, after the other guests have gone to bed. I am awake. I hear the howl of the transfer pump starting up and the splash of water falling into the empty tank.
I think of home and my own well and always full water tank. I think of the rain that never seems to stop.
Alders ring the pasture, unfurl trembling new-green leaves above pink salmon berry flowers.
I stand with my arms folded on the half door of the stall. At my back, stored hay that smells like last summer’s heat remembered.
The sheep arrange themselves at the mangers. Everyone shoving except for the old ram whose stiff knees counsel patience. One ewe scrambles up to stand in the manger. The others eat calmly from underneath her grass fat belly.
Fluttering in front of a mess of twigs and mud and spit glued to the top of a post, two barn swallows bicker over who will get the best nest above the hay loft and who will have to settle for second best in the feed room.
My oldest ewe leaves off eating and shambles toward me, head thrust forward, asking for a scratch on the chin and the chance to nibble on my gloved hand.
The swallows flicker in and out of the stall door. Warm buff bellies and blue-black heads, tails fletched like arrows. darts that throw themselves through the air, they circle the pasture above the robins that hop awkwardly, searching for grubs in the new grass.
The sheep settle into the business of eating their figure-8 chewing a soft, round motion that grinds the hay against their molars.
