A rust-boned swingset provides no shade on the scrub lawn next to the office. The seats alternate back and forth, even on a breezeless August night.
A24 has been vacant for as long as anyone can remember. A neighbor claims it was lightning what gutted it, the moor wind what cleansed the soil. The property manager looks in a file in his office: eviction/gross negligence. You remember, fleetingly, of a famished man wearing only overalls, looking like a sack filled with antlers. You think you might have had a sweet tea in A24, and that there might have been a wife, or possibly a police line across the driveway, or maybe there had been nothing at all.
Funny, you never see birds, other than the trio of crows huddled atop the transformer. No song of sparrow or swift. Come to think of you, you don’t see many fauna between the double-wides, other than a hare that loped away before you confirmed if it had in fact the face of a forgotten lover, as you’d first suspected. That, and the roiling ball of snakes that forms every summer beneath the porch steps.
Narrow strips of yard strewn with toys like a modest hurricane had come over to play. Gaudy, plastic, Day-Glo baubles and time-wasters, sunfaded and dirty. Yet never is the laughter of children heard, nor their gremlin shadows seen racing between the trees that fence us in.
The trailer rocks when Mother brings home new men, men who look like they might still be boys. They leave, cowboy boots clicking down the porch steps, yet the trailer continues to rock. Hours pass and you wake with seasickness rising up your throat. Mother taps at the bathroom’s accordion door. Asks if you’re knocked up. Demands you get out so she can brush her teeth before work.
Winter comes early and vicious. On the morning after the first snow you wake to a lunar surface, pockmarked by frozen shoots of chaw.
You never signed up for the penny saver but it arrives every Saturday morning in an orange plastic bag. No one signs up for the penny saver. The penny saver finds you.
Happy birthday, you find on a note from Mom taped to a box of macaroni. You eat it from the pot standing up at the sink, staring at the ghost of yourself in the kitchen window. Your milky double also eats macaroni at the sink, as it has for the last 364 nights.
Is the rain going to beat you home from school every single day? It does. Of course it does.
A24 is at it again. Postwar waltzes at 70rpm. You’d yell something through the window, if only you could see A24′s lights. Or, squinting, if you saw any shape at all in the howling, vacant lot.
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
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