A Short From a Child's Window

A sun traces edges of eucalyptus on rippling sleeves. And so, today she moves ideally among golden and auburn blades, in a sacred dance, a motion uniform to the undulation of her greying hair and the river passing.

Taking the stem of an apple, she casts its death into the slipstream. Stumbling in the water, it looks like an answer to a question that cannot be answered aloud.

She focuses on a point in space, and as if clarity was to smooth out a quilt, she sees once invisible particles emerge from the folds of the ether. It is here in the eucalyptus that windblown leaves make water of shadows, swirling air smells of turpentine, quails stir under blackberry bushes, and she loses form.

Profound silence is a hum, a cursive for forgiveness, it hears a long sigh as phantom violins softly play the river. She hears piccolos in the robins, stellar jays, and ravens sounding. She hears wind bow in eucalyptus, silent thunder of a sun beating on pines, and mad chuckling of the stream laughing its way through river rock and on down to a sand shore, politely suggesting the river.

She walks back to her porch. Sits on a bench, all the paint is fading, chipping, as the days that have passed. A migration of geese pass in the distance, approaching an instinct, a lake nearly dry, Cameron Park lake, where they will bite at young naked children misbehaving before their negligent fathers who spend their weekends from construction work drinking Miller High Life and equally ignoring scabs and their indifferent wives. The bench, with its mystery of spiders beneath, its society of arachnids within the framework, creaks and moans as she sits, but it sounds with her sighs and that all blends together in a terrible reticence born in thunderous resolution, in nascent absence.

A cigarette burns on her lips right between the words she wished she said years ago. She lets them take form of the smoke as it plays into the day. The church to her left no longer tolls for its survivors, the father stares bored out the window at her as she passes in half piteous remorse, half misunderstanding. Just as his thoughts slip to a love that never met him on the shores of the Monterey Bay, he sees the old lady on the porch look up and he designs God is passing through her.

The cigarette extinguishes in the glass ash tray with its Pythagorean symbols, and the comedy of long history runs its theater. Leaning back onto the house, it trembles, weak from the weight of its punishment, quivering like a muscle on Atlas's back. To a lawn well maintained, she wonders what children would have looked like there. She wonders what it could have meant to have that measurement. Cursing the new boat parked in front of the bedizen house, with its white fences, white columns, corrugates eaves, its banisters of silver vines climbing to the master bedroom across the street, the neighbor looks but never waves, since three years ago.

And as everything gathers there before her, the travels she's had, the partners and education she's kept all to herself, a telephone rings behind the wall and ends. Between the punctuation of that call and the one arriving in her jeans, she picks it up and places the phone to her ear.

“Hello is this Mrs. Callahan?”

“Ms...”

“Hi Ms. Callahan, my name is Gola and I am calling to check in on the development of your manuscript. We have, for a limited time, a discount on publishing...”

She places the phone back in her pocket and listens to the violin of the river accompany the piccolo sectional of the seasonal birds.

Approaching the porch is the pastor who nods before sitting on the bench beside her. The sun embalms the streets and illuminates the nature of that silence. She hands him a cigarette and lights her own. They sit watching things pass in their own accord as a child watches poetically from a room that is just waking.