Mystify
The questions and answers echo across the quiet road. Ripples stiffen on the pond that's become mud and a shiver shakes a seed into a root. The rains will come again. Today the breeze
is the river, running too fast for the clouds to clot and sink. You can see it filling the shadows of the clouds' underbellies. In the dark spots, where the waters gather. Old formulas crumble into their symbols as the Jenny pulls herself from the dirt.
She has feet, hands, a hunger. She is the wild, desiccated ghost of naiad, birthed like a frog, no longer water but not separate from it. The squirrels toss her the bitter, half-fey fruit that grows by the pond the naturalist dug for his fabulist wife. She ignores the fruit.
They've thrown this fruit to others.
Everything meets in the water, dissolves, tangles, dries out, is cut and restained. Paper, old or art paper, can be made from a similar flood, drained to a slurry and threaded with old denim, silk, and cotton memories. Wet thoughts drying at the tips of your fingers.
So windy outside, breath is shoved into your lungs before the thoughts form. The sky is sweeping aside its dust covers. Jenny watches the birds swoop and slice. She follows the wind against the fence, entering the front yard like the shadow of a great shark.
Bury
The woman who called the questions is now kneeling in the front yard. Tiny plants stretch across an open bed. Jenny's hands tighten on the branch she holds, fingers gummy with the thick sap. She scurries like the leaves, like the squirrels.
Wind sweeps words and leaf litter into the yard. The woman turns as the Jenny braces her joints and holds out the slimy rootstock. "We're moving.
They're moving. Can you plant this? Keep it somewhere damp?"
The woman stabs her trowel through the mostly empty bag of potting soil, anchoring it. She stacks up the plastic pots and examines the offered rootstock before asking, "Does it get bigger? Is it poisonous? I have a dog. I've never seen anything like it."
Jenny shakes her head. Watches her root bleed down her forearm, then onto the woman's yard. "No poison."
"I might have a pot in the back You're not one of Geoff's daughters?" The girl looks feral. The woman remembers kids like this from around the block, when her daughter was young. She has a pot by the pool she wants to fill. "Does it bloom?"
The Jenny nods and twists the branch to show a half-crushed bud. The woman stands up and leads the girl around back. Jenny admits she lives behind the fence. The squirrels in this yard yell and race up the branches between the yards.
There's an old plastic pot near the small backyard pool, designed to look like concrete imitating marble. Moss is growing in the volutes. Jenny hands the woman her rootstock and the woman excavates a slim hole, presses the branch in, and then gets the hose and sprays pot and branch until the Jenny relaxes and there is a puddle of city water near both the pool and the spigot.
Sharp, dark reflections catch branches and clouds at their feet.
Spin
The woman's daughter, home from college and from sneaking into the neighbor's backyard, watches from behind a window. She can taste the bitter rinds the squirrels tossed at her, like the ashes of answers.
She's heard rumors of the pond since her freshman year, always thought she'd be invited to see it. When the naturalist and the fabulist moved out, she'd just walked across the street, flipped the lid on the For Sale information window, scrabbled for a flier, and then tried the back gate.
She'd never been that brazen but her sense of home, lately, had felt as if it was drying up, withdrawing from the city, to the neighborhood, to the edges of the lawn, to the walls of her parents' house. Boundaries evaporated.
She watches the girl wipe her hands on her jean shorts. Watches the branches whip around, the spray from the hose fold back towards her mother. Then she feels the tremble under her feet, something like an airplane running underground, stories murmuring in cracks.
In a subdivision across town, Lake Creek sloshes against its banks. Ants pile up from nearby mounds. Roots race themselves to a new upswelling. Bastian Creek tumbles down a ditch beside Lake Creek, running by the newly broken ground of The City. The Jenny's new home soaks up rumor and rainwater and she waits for the daughter to come outside and bring a snack. And a boat.
***
This grew from a Sunday prose exercise that I never finished...just kept writing. I may have filled a small notebook...the Jenny and the Daughter feel like narrators for upcoming stories. Maybe.
-- Chrissa
