Mar 8, 2009
something i wrote this summer:
The rain pounded down on the patch of dead grass that was a backyard, like tiny meteors leaving craters in the dirt. The wind was busy ripping leaves off the European weeping beech that dominated the tiny yard. It had been a dry summer, a shit summer. But this rain didn’t fall like the nourishment of sun showers she used to love; it attacked, assaulting the yard with each heavy drop.
Aggie was watching the rain drops as they trickled down the window pane. A tense race was occurring between the drops. Aggie picked a favorite and bet on it, the way her dad used to bet on horses. She traced the drop with her finger as it slid down the glass pane toward the window sill. It picked up speed when it collided and combined with another drop. Aggie was winning. But the drop became too bloated and split at the last second into two smaller droplets, which lost. There was a lesson there.
Bored with the race, Aggie reached for a cigarette. She had bet herself she’d quit smoking, but we all know how that goes. She watched as the rain tore apart the petals of an orange poppy flower. If her dad were here he’d say something stupid like “Well when it rains, it pours!” Then he’d tell her chimneys smoked, not ladies. But her dad wasn’t here. That’s why Aggie was here again in Virginia, the worst place to spend a summer.
Thunder clapped and the power flickered, hesitated, then went out c0mpletely. Aggie was pleased because it would put an end to her brothers watching the Maryland-Duke game in the next room. “It’s no way to mourn a father,” she had scolded them earlier, “by watching a basketball game on the eve of his funeral.” But that showed how little Aggie knew about men.
The sky was deeply purpled and lit by lightning. Lightning always made her think of tree branches, which looked like veins to her. That’s when she felt it first, during that summer gale, the sameness of it all. The way the branches of the old weeping beech stretching upwards, the bark barely masking some unknown internal force, resembled the muscles of her own two arms. She recalled being six, when those men came to prune the lower branches of the beech tree. She had run outside to hug the sawn-off limbs, and was surprised not to find blood on the ground, only sawdust. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” her dad had said. That’s when Aggie’s anger was born, newly aware how little her dad meant when he spoke.
When a bolt of lightning struck the beech, the trunk split and half of the tree came crashing to the ground in a frenzy of leaves and sparks. She pressed her eyes shut and couldn’t tell if the silhouette burning in her eyelids was that of the lightning or the tree. Aggie knew there was a lesson there. The noise had roused her brother and he came to the window to survey the damage. For a moment both were quiet, transfixed by the half of the weeping beech that was now lying in the yard. “Of course that tree would die today of all days” her brother said with spite infecting his usually mellow tone. “Nature knows nothing of death.” Aggie replied, her eyes still locked on the fallen limbs. She had read that in a Hurston story earlier that summer. The full passage was “The palms murmured noisily of seasons and centuries, mating and birth and the transplanting of life. Nature knows nothing of death.” “Yeah sure” her brother said as he turned to leave but stopped to pluck the cigarette from Aggie’s hand and snuff it out in an empty mug. “Chimneys smoke, Aggie” he said and left.
posted by sarah 12:33 AM
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"there is within me, and with sadness i have watched it in others, a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love."
Past
current
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