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It struck Pearl as peculiar, how purposefully the boy seemed to have come to a stop in front of her home. How, without so much as a glance in her direction he had dismounted his bicycle, leaned it mindfully against the pickets, opened the gate and let himself into her yard.

A blonde boy, he carried over his shoulder a large canvas bag, ink grayed, with the word TIMES printed where it bellied, bold enough that Pearl did not need her eyeglasses to read.

    Coming up the walk, the boy removed from the bag what looked by the heft of its roll to be a Sunday newspaper, which he offered to Pearl at the foot of the stair.

     His eyes were the bursting blue of cornflowers and Pearl leaned forward in her rocker as much to better see them as to make out what the boy was saying.

It’s free, was what she thought she had heard and so asked the boy, ‘Free?’

‘Yes, maim,’ he replied, and one, two, three, up the stairs he came, placing the rolled newspaper into Pearl’s outstretched and unsteady hands.

‘Just this once,’ the boy said. ‘You see if you like it. And if you do, then you can subscribe.’

Pearl looked away from the boy’s cornflower eyes. She studied the newspaper. Felt its heft. ‘I didn’t think ...’ she began.

Hadn’t her daughter told her that newspapers were a thing of the past. That everything was online now and if she wanted to read the News, she would need to get a computer.

But Pearl didn't want a computer. She didn’t want to read the news either. Any part of the paper for that matter. That was Harold’s joy, and Harold was gone. Pearl only wanted to hear the regular morning thump of it on the porch, to witness on occasion the backhanded toss from the street, the paper’s slow arch and spin, the nearness of it to the doormat.

She smelled the ink now, the warmed canvas of the boy’s carrying bag. She wanted to subscribe. ‘Let me get my coin purse,’ she said, and made to rise.

The boy offered his hand, ‘Don't worry about that now, ’ he said, helping her to her feet. 

Peculiar, she thought, how strong he is, and looking over his shoulder, Pearl could no longer see the bicycle, propped beside the gate.

Quick Sketch of a Tall Reader

Charlie had often heard that shorter humans live longer than taller humans do. Something about the addition work required of the heart to get the blood to those more distant extremities. 

Being six foot five, this sometimes worried Charlie and he would have to remind himself of family members who had lived well into their nineties at heights that, while not freakish, would not be considered normal. 

He was a thin kind of tall, with large hands and large feet, large ears and a hawkish nose that seemed bent on removing his eyeglasses whenever he put them on to read, which Charlie did often.
    He had always been a big reader. His mother used to say that it was words that had made him grow so tall, as Charlie ate no more than she absolutely required, only read and read and read. Even at the dinner table. He would fork in his peas, his roast beef or mashed potatoes, never taking his eyes off the book beside his plate. Read, methodically chew and every third sentence, push his eyeglasses back up into place.  

                                                                                                        

A Tidbit About Walks and Flowers and Signs of Pie

Head down, watching his boots appear and disappear, the puffs of dust in their dropping, Carl had not seen the little road and was startled by its sudden presence, as if it had been a snake he had come upon walking and not merely a jog to the west. 

The road was half again as small as the road he walked, converging at a fair angle to make a tight wedge in which clouds of elderflower hung in a thick of thistle and daylilies, a sort of sunset, Carl mused, of lavender and orange fire. Planted in with the growth there was a sign, a whitewashed clapboard on which black letters had been carefully executed to indicate that fresh eggs and seasonal pies could be found up the little road in less than one mile’s time. 

Carl had no need for eggs at the moment, but had never turned down an invitation of any sort for pie, and curious as to what might be seasonal, veered from his northward course, west in the direction the  well-painted sign had so meticulously suggested.

Journal Sketch

Susie Patterson did not look through the window. She couldn’t. The glass was what she believed they called frosted, so all that could be seen through it was a softened bluish light and an occasional patch of shadow passing. 

Susie leaned against the door anyway, looking at the single pane of frosted glass, and through a haze of medications, guessed by the speed in which the darker patches moved by, which might be doctors, patients, nurses or visitors. 

This was not Susie Patterson’s first visit to this wing of the hospital. The Mental Wing, a coworker, Diane Billings had called it once. Diane’s father had been brought here, when his mind could no longer restrain the urges of his body and he was found one too many times walking the town square, naked but for his shoes, socks and oddly enough garters, held in place by his still impressive calve muscles.

Susie’s first visit—that’s what they called these trips, ‘visits’, although she had little say in her coming—her first visit had been when she was fourteen. Her mother had brought her, telling the doctors only that Susie had been extremely agitated lately, that she was having difficulty sleeping. Asking if maybe they could, ‘give her a little something’. 

In truth, her mother had found Susie several nights, sound asleep. Only not in her bedroom. Susie had been found in the back yard, curled into a sort of burrow she had dug out in the lawn, near to the tool shed, with her bare hands. 

Journal Sketch

The Sugar Maple his father planted for his mother, years ago, had been cut down, and without its mass out front as a landmark, Charlie Parker nearly drove by his old family home. Even now, parked at the curb across the street, he did not recognize the place and repeated the address in full, several times in his head, matching it to that of the now, stone-clad mailbox at the end of the drive.   

The Maple’s stump had been removed, the yard leveled where the earth once rose to the tree’s heavily knuckled roots, the scar seeded and healed over a slightly darker green than the rest of the lawn’s grass. 

1241Primrose Lane, Charlie found himself repeating against the doubt that lingered in his head. 

If Charlie Parker understood one thing about himself, it was that he knew he was capable of convincing himself that a thing was true, even though it was not. Once, as a boy, he had convinced himself that he had been born on Christmas Day, had argued the point with his best friend until his friend settled the issue by calling his mother. 

‘September twenty-fifth, Charlie,’ his mother had said. 

    Charlie saw the address repeated on the front porch, the numbers descending from a white coach lamp there. He had helped install that lamp, handing up screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, wire nuts, black electrical tape, to his father, three steps above him on a paint spattered wooden ladder. 

He remembered thinking, when he and his father had finished and stood beneath the shade of the now-removed Maple, admiring the lamp, that when his friends saw its cut glass and diamond-shaped elegance, they would wish his father was their father. He remembered, too, how the light, left on at times after he had gone to bed, shone a soft amber at the frame of his curtained windows, and how he would fall asleep those nights with thoughts of cars, slowing as they passed to approve of the lamp, the drivers in a whisper saying how the Parkers must be doing all right.        

Sketch of Weeping Crabapple

With the swarms of buttercups, peach blossoms and hawthorn, vibrant, he would forget each spring the quieted beauty of the weeping crab until she bloomed in her bustles at the head of the drive, hunter and dusty rose, stunning, the glance from beneath the tilt of her parasol.

Sketch of William and a Fern

Poured into a thimble, William’s knowledge of plant life would fill so very little of the thumb cap, it could be placed onto the back of an anxious mule and carried over the roughest of terrains without a single droplet lost to spillage, such would be the headroom. 

     All flowers, William classified by their shape, as a sort of Daisy, Lilly or Rose, depending on which the blossom most closely resembled. Evergreen or deciduous, trees were simply trees. Whatever crept was ivy and whatever sprung from pasture or lawn was grass, be it clover or Timothy. 

     It was a deliberate thing, William’s lack of plant knowledge. Oh, he would have liked to spout off in Latin the names of each and every bit of flora he encountered. He would also like to be able to verbally show his appreciation for a good wine as well, and point out by name even the more minor constellations. But according to William, there was only so much time in the day and space in one’s head. He had to work for a living. ‘Let’s see how much a botanist knows about the transmission of a ’76 MG,’ he would say to himself when the discussion arose, which it quite frequently did. 

     William was a mechanic. Vehicles were what he knew, were what the space in his brain was reserved for. Perhaps when he retired he’d be able to carry with him a plants-at-a glance book, know-your-stars, your wine. Until then, everything was a sort of Daisy a Lilly or a Rose; a Port or Sherry, the Big Dipper. And William, for the more part, was good with that. 

     What he was not so ‘good’ with, were the papers referring to him as a mechanic and amateur plant enthusiasts, after his discovery of a fern thought to have been extinct since before the dinosaurs roamed. It wasn’t true. And while William was fine with being ignorant of some things, a deliberate lie, he was not.

  

‘The Parkinson’s brain,’ the woman on the radio explained, ‘wants to make everything smaller and slower and more quiet,’ which was so very odd, he thought, because so did he.

Where I Found Rachel Joyce

Fruit trees stud the long, narrow yard in a sort of zigzag pattern, goal stabs of some long forgotten game, nourished by the rot of mallets, wickets and wooden balls, left in hast for cake and ice cream, branched now and rooted.

She sits beneath a young and budding plumb, drawn to herself as if the day were chilled and her limbs a shawl, hair gathered like a careless June wind in combs of tortoise shell.   

‘He did not want to die,’ she says of her late father, turning her gaze then down and away to where a clutch of plump hens, white and golden and speckled grey, rake and prattle over their findings. 

‘And we did not want him to die, as well.’ 

   

He would be a buzzard, if made to choose from the birds. Flight to them seemed such a lazy task, relished, as if their mass on the ground made them forget of their ability, and each time they caught the warm upward drafts, tipping and circling into near oblivion, was the first, a marvel of joy. 

On Cold Fingers and the Death of Jay

Despite gloves, in the woodshed the cold found its way to his fingertips, the pain flaring like the dull blow of a hammer to each. 

     There was dry beneath the green, seasoned, and he hurried to dig for it at the back of the shed where the rick was lowest, wishing again that he hadn’t buried the better burning wood last fall beneath the new. 

     Mindful of the rise he had created picking through this way, the towered end of a rick nearly his own height, held upright, surely, by a single split he could remove at any time and bring the whole of it down on him, he remembered Old Jay, as he often did when the chance of death by suffocation arose. 

     He cupped his gloved hands, exhaled moist warmth from his lungs into the hole of the pocket they made, flexed his fingers. 

     Jay had always stood at the back of the little church his parents took him to as a child. He couldn’t sit. Jay's skeleton had grown faster than his skin, his father once told him, when he had asked why Jay would never come join them in the pews.
     Inside, the bones of Jay’s spine had been crushed in their struggle against the unyielding, ungrowing, tissue that bound them. In lieu of bones, beneath his suit jacket, Jay wore a brace of steel ribs attached to a steel backbone cinched and held into position by black leather straps, stainless and polished buckles.
     If he were to take the brace off, his father had told him, Jay would collapse, something like an accordion. The air would be forced from his lungs and unable to fill them again, Jay would soon die. 

     Jay did suffocate to death. Nothing to do with his brace, however. Too proud to take money from the State, Jay worked the brick plant down by the river, a custodian of sorts. 

     Several times, as a boy, his father had driven him by the plant. He'd always marveled at the enormous hive-like brick dome, in which, he was told, was kept dry a mountain of red clay dust, waiting to be transformed by water and fire into building materials.
     It was this mountain that fell upon Jay. Collapsed. And despite his armor, his brace, drove the wind from his lungs, and like the hand of God, squeezed the life from Jay's wrongly-grown and permanently upright body. 

     Having filled the wheelbarrow with wood, he blew again into the cup of his hands. He closed back the shed’s doors, took up the work-polished handles and turned the barrow toward the house. His fingers ached and in his walking, he heard the collapse of the precarious rick in the shed behind him, saw Jay again at the rear of the church, standing safely as the promises of God poured down, mountainous, around him.

   

The Sweetest Little Thing

He did not doubt that the cigarette had some sway in his seeing the little dog as a tumor, some sort of cancer, growing from the man’s arm. 

Its enormous, black and weepy eyes, bulging from the rolls of its overfed blonde body, the snarl of its pink and opened mouth. Not much of a leap, with the cigarette trailing smoke so near to its head.

Midway up the parking aisle, grocery list in hand, he had heard the dog, yapping. As always, he slowed to scan the car-filled lot, thinking he’d find a perked ear face pressed against nose printed glass, warning barks escaping like frightened birds through windows left cracked for ventilation. 

Instead, he found the dog leaning, paws and all, out of the opened driver’s side window of a vehicle approaching almost immediately behind him. 

The vehicle was that sort of grey-blue sedan that one immediately recognizes as ‘American Made’, if not by the fact that you cannot recall its being manufactured, then simply by its four doors and mass. The kind of vehicle that will slow shark about a parking lot for hours, propelled by the most minimal use of its dull witted muscle, searching for that nearest spot, that next opened handicap space in which to come to rest, motor idling thickly as one passenger stays behind, waiting for the other's return, a prescription filled.

The driver’s arm was cocked out of the sedan’s opened window, and in the crook of it, lay the dog, semi-contained and barking angrily with no apparent intent or direction. Holding between his fingers a newly lit cigarette, the driver had somehow managed to bring the smoking hand around the fat little dog so that the cigarette hung now beside the yapping dog’s left ear.

It looked like an open wound, the seep of its eyes, wet black stains beneath its blue glossed eyes, the grey-pink flesh of its snarled gums. The driver, the passenger, oblivious to the dog, searched for an opened place to park. 

‘How adorable,’ he heard the voice of some passerby say, two girls who had spotted the cancerous dog. 

‘Just the sweetest little thing.’
   
     The sweetest little thing. 

'Sorry Annie'

At times the lush green, the waterfalls, the black volcanic soil would find its way into his mind. Someone would say, ‘We just got back from Hawaii,’ as if they had driven into town for groceries, and he would think it possible again, almost necessary, that he go to visit the Islands.
    But then his mind would slowly populate the lush green, the volcanic cliffs from whose fractured edges water spouted crystalline, rainbows hung in the mist of its decent. Pale and newly burned Midwesterners, his parents, the sound of their honest fascination somehow cutting through the roar of the water’s leap, persistent as the dim clatter of some newly loosened item in an otherwise silent car ride.
     He would envision in terror the flight, calculate costs, feel the fine crush of coral in everything that he ate, every towel with which he dried, smell that sick-sweet smell of ocean, sun block and bug spray, and always the eyes of locals in passing, filled with distrust, unwant.
     It was nice, he’d admit that, those first few moments when he imagined dipping backpack laden into the density of some semi-rain forest, snakeless, Mount Kila something or other in the offset, poking its dormant head up out of leaves as large as car hoods. A hop skip and a jump, his father said once, of the trip over. Close your eyes and you’ll be there in no time. His father had gone to Pearl Harbor, showed him pictures of the Arizona in her ocean grave. He’d forgotten about that. God, the ghosts. The place had to be swarming with them. Swarming. 

On Grass

He woke up obsessed with grass. Perhaps not an obsession, but rather a thought bobbing in the distance, that he would see and then not see when it sank behind the roll of his morning routine. He saw it again when he sat down to the quiet of his Journal. Grass, he wrote. And the word had seemed oddly green on the page. He saw himself a boy, low in the thick of a lawn grown high between weekend cuttings, parting the blades and searching for beetles and the continued march of ants having left the sidewalk. The shoots are pale where they enter the earth, moist and littered with an odd fuzz of something like bits of string. It makes him think of ferns, the floor of a forest, and he imagines the ants he has yet to find, how they see the grass, like the towering redwood trees he has seen in magazines, beside which even automobiles appear themselves like ants. And beneath the stars, he sees the redwood trees like ants and wonders what beyond that is larger still. He scratches at the earth. His nails fill with the black of it. Would grass grow there, he wonders, and green fire bursts from his fingertips. He lays on his back, closes his eyes. He itches. The sun is better than any blanket he can remember, and he has known many wonderful blankets. The grass grows taller in the space between his arms and body, between the V of his legs, alongside his ears. Taller and taller until he is lost like a coin in its height, a penknife. At his back, roots grow, pale and searching for purchase. He is dirt, pierced by blades of grass, like a man dropped onto a bed of nails. And then, it is Saturday. He hears the whir of the mower. Sees his father’s long strides and in the air, smells all that is summer and what is best of a boy. 

The Breathing of Wood

It was as if a master stonemason had packed the wood into the shed, each pie-shaped split seated into a near perfectly corresponding V, chinked with tinder wherever the slightest gap remained. The old man doubted he could wedge the blade of his penknife into the neatly ricked seams. 

     “She’s got to breathe a little, son,” he said to the boy of the pile, though in the still of his thinking he felt the well of pride, knowing that it was his own blood’s doing, a generation leaped, that had given the boy this keen eye. “Be ten years drying, racked up that pretty.”