The Language of Sparrows by Rachel Phifer Page B

heat had given way to the first cool front of the year. People opened their windows. Kids came outside to play on the playground. Adults hung flower boxes on their balconies.
    Mr. Krishnamurthy and his wife paced around the parking lot. It was their afternoon ritual. It didn’t matter what the weather was like. Across the way, a woman had a tub of soapy water on the porch. She stood on her tiptoes, washing her windows, the railing, the door, the porch, everything. Her little girl sat on the porch, cooing at a terrier in her arms. How was it that life went on as if nothing had happened?
    On the playground, a boy pushed his brother on the swings. Their mother looked away, so she didn’t see her older son hit the younger one hard in the middle of his back or the way the little one refused to cry.
    Sierra stared over the fence.
    Later, Mom brought in a plate of sliced apples and mozzarella. Sierra pretended to be busy doing homework, but the blank notebook paper gave her away.
    She pulled up her legs and curled up on the chair in front of the window. She remembered a big red sketchbook her father had given her. He told her to record everything while he was away at his conference in Italy. A nature book, he said, to show him what he missed during her summer walks. She had sketched the dogwoods losing their blooms and the creeks receding from their banks, the hot July sky and Argie, their Labrador, sleeping under a tree. But when Dad didn’t come home, she’d put the sketchbook away. And they’d had to leave Argie with neighbors when they’d moved.
    She kneeled at her dresser, looking through the book without taking it from the bottom drawer. She flipped through the pages. It was still three-quarters empty. Finally, she carried it to her desk, tore out the sketches, and put her pen to the paper.
    A haiku came to her whole and already formed. She mouthed the words. “Standing on tiptoes / brown arms slick with soap-water / she scrubs the door clean.” There were a dozen more tumbling behind it. All she had to do was scroll her pen across the paper. There would be no egrets. She would tell about the Krishnamurthys taking their walk and about the little boy holding back his tears and his mom, though she pretended like she didn’t see what was going on, growing mottled with worry. She would tell about the wind swallowing the sounds of traffic and playing children and the crisp light outlining her neighbors outdoors.
    “Standing on tiptoes,” Sierra wrote. But she couldn’t make herself finish the haiku. Who wanted to know about the things she saw around her in the October world anyway? Only one, and she couldn’t take her poems to him.
    What she really wanted to tell him was about the day they told her she was no longer allowed to visit him. She wouldn’t be able to write about the horrible things they’d implied about him, of course. But maybe he would understand how the world had turned into a strange faraway place and how she felt she was drifting away from everyone. She would write and write to him until her fingers cramped and the pen bled dry.
    She flipped through the empty pages one by one as if she might find one that was so clean and inviting that she would be able to write on it. It was when she got to the last page that the idea occurred to her.
    She found her drawing pencils, also shoved into the bottom drawer, and drew a portrait of him, sitting in his armchair, his hair mussed, his eyes penetrating, his head tilted, the way she remembered him. Using a heavy pencil, she shaded his eyelids to show their heaviness, and then she used a softer pencil to hint at the lightness of his eyes. With the edge of her graphite, she showed the sunlight pouring in on his bookshelves. She was no Rembrandt, but anyone could look at it and say, “Yes, this is Mr. Prodan, inside and out.” And he was not the kind of man they thought he was.
    She tied the book up with a piece of Christmas ribbon and shoved it in her backpack.