groove in her memory.
One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good than all the sages can.
And oh, how she hated that damned vernal wood.
The courtyard couldn’t keep it at bay. No one mowed the yard, and the grass grew tall, tangled, and nasty. Raccoons and possums prowled at night; cicadas shrieked. Once, Nia thought she saw a great cat—a huge beige panther that moved through the grass more quietly than an owl sweeping through the air.
Our Father,
she tried to pray, but eventually she could not remember the rest of the words. So she told herself stories instead.
I was born in the middle of the night. A thunderstorm—or it might have been a hurricane—was tearing through the Gulf and smashing into Tallahassee, where I was busy being born.
Windows broke, wind blew through the halls, and my mother was lying in a cast-iron bathtub screaming at Aunt Marjorie, who was telling her to push.
Later that night, the clouds lifted and they wrapped me in a cotton blanket, and my aunt Marjorie, she held me close in what had once been my grandparents’ living room, and they stared at the sky, watching the stars fall.
They fell by the thousands; Aunt Marjorie swears by it.
I’ve never seen a star fall since.
For a long time, she watched the leaves and moss and animals encroach on the courtyard with interest, since there was nothing else present to entertain her. She gave the small things names and placed them in the plots of penny dreadfuls, or concocted fantastic impossibilities of romance between the frogs and the mice.
But in time she gave up. She quit those ramblings and left herself alone in silence, unable or unwilling to keep herself companyanymore. The boredom numbed her mind, and she came to something like peace with her unchanging surroundings.
The scenery didn’t change much.
Winter and fall meant it was cooler sometimes, and for maybe a week or two it actually got cold. Nia would have shivered if she could, but at least it never snowed.
She’d only seen snow once before, back in Tallahassee, when it floated down in sparse waves of small flakes that died as soon as they hit the ground. It was unbelievable even that far north, but her grandmother said there’d been a terrible freeze a few years before, and all the world must be turning colder. Soon they wouldn’t be able to grow oranges there at all.
Times were changing and the world was changing, and farms were dying. An orchard could die, too, just as easy.
Summer and spring meant bombastic thunderstorms every afternoon for ten minutes, a wet break that took the edge off the stifling heat.
Nia’s spot was surrounded and shaded by several large trees—a banyan, a magnolia, and a mimosa. The sun never beat her directly, and the rain was deflected as well.
Eventually the island’s population grew.
Two mad boys with paint sometimes assaulted the back porch, splashing obscenities in red and white. Nia hated them deeply; the sour smell of the paint overwhelmed the flowers, and she, of course, could not escape the stench.
Indeed, her senses were uncomfortably heightened despite the immobility. Strictly regimented carpenter ants tickled her ribs until she would’ve sold her soul to scratch them away, and she could almost count each raindrop that pelted her body during a storm. Even the slight shifting in the concrete beneath her caught her attention, the way the bricks adjusted as grass grew into the cracksand forced them apart with knotty tangles. During the spring while the vandals were away, the huge, leathery magnolia leaves held soft white flowers, so sweet and close in her nostrils that she could tell which individual trees had produced the drifting petals. Her ears became so sharp that she could hear termites across the yard, slowly turning the vineyard frame into pulp. Their grinding jaws worked day and night until the wood dropped to the grass and rotted where it lay.
In time, the porch fell in
One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good than all the sages can.
And oh, how she hated that damned vernal wood.
The courtyard couldn’t keep it at bay. No one mowed the yard, and the grass grew tall, tangled, and nasty. Raccoons and possums prowled at night; cicadas shrieked. Once, Nia thought she saw a great cat—a huge beige panther that moved through the grass more quietly than an owl sweeping through the air.
Our Father,
she tried to pray, but eventually she could not remember the rest of the words. So she told herself stories instead.
I was born in the middle of the night. A thunderstorm—or it might have been a hurricane—was tearing through the Gulf and smashing into Tallahassee, where I was busy being born.
Windows broke, wind blew through the halls, and my mother was lying in a cast-iron bathtub screaming at Aunt Marjorie, who was telling her to push.
Later that night, the clouds lifted and they wrapped me in a cotton blanket, and my aunt Marjorie, she held me close in what had once been my grandparents’ living room, and they stared at the sky, watching the stars fall.
They fell by the thousands; Aunt Marjorie swears by it.
I’ve never seen a star fall since.
For a long time, she watched the leaves and moss and animals encroach on the courtyard with interest, since there was nothing else present to entertain her. She gave the small things names and placed them in the plots of penny dreadfuls, or concocted fantastic impossibilities of romance between the frogs and the mice.
But in time she gave up. She quit those ramblings and left herself alone in silence, unable or unwilling to keep herself companyanymore. The boredom numbed her mind, and she came to something like peace with her unchanging surroundings.
The scenery didn’t change much.
Winter and fall meant it was cooler sometimes, and for maybe a week or two it actually got cold. Nia would have shivered if she could, but at least it never snowed.
She’d only seen snow once before, back in Tallahassee, when it floated down in sparse waves of small flakes that died as soon as they hit the ground. It was unbelievable even that far north, but her grandmother said there’d been a terrible freeze a few years before, and all the world must be turning colder. Soon they wouldn’t be able to grow oranges there at all.
Times were changing and the world was changing, and farms were dying. An orchard could die, too, just as easy.
Summer and spring meant bombastic thunderstorms every afternoon for ten minutes, a wet break that took the edge off the stifling heat.
Nia’s spot was surrounded and shaded by several large trees—a banyan, a magnolia, and a mimosa. The sun never beat her directly, and the rain was deflected as well.
Eventually the island’s population grew.
Two mad boys with paint sometimes assaulted the back porch, splashing obscenities in red and white. Nia hated them deeply; the sour smell of the paint overwhelmed the flowers, and she, of course, could not escape the stench.
Indeed, her senses were uncomfortably heightened despite the immobility. Strictly regimented carpenter ants tickled her ribs until she would’ve sold her soul to scratch them away, and she could almost count each raindrop that pelted her body during a storm. Even the slight shifting in the concrete beneath her caught her attention, the way the bricks adjusted as grass grew into the cracksand forced them apart with knotty tangles. During the spring while the vandals were away, the huge, leathery magnolia leaves held soft white flowers, so sweet and close in her nostrils that she could tell which individual trees had produced the drifting petals. Her ears became so sharp that she could hear termites across the yard, slowly turning the vineyard frame into pulp. Their grinding jaws worked day and night until the wood dropped to the grass and rotted where it lay.
In time, the porch fell in
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