8:15 and 2:02

Red oleander blossoms, Hiroshima’s fruit after devastation burns shadows into stone. Petals eradicate hopelessness amid heaps of charred obliteration. Mercenary fingers pushed down the button sending Little Boy to do the work of playground bullies. Three days later Fat Man would send the message that war isn’t for the squeamish, and children must burn. Today, it is the same. Children die faceless and unknown. Pawns and prey are preyed upon and prayed upon. Babies suckled with blood and tears. Remnants remain forever scarred. Ghostly figures limp. Breathe. Howl. Agonies erupt on blistered skin. A blue hole where a mouth should be begs for soup. Sockets, which once housed eyes, envision untouched landscapes. While ears ring with the echo of Enola Gay as she streaked the cloudless sky.

 

Garden Grow

Blossoms of the living and dying flooded the forest floor threatening to overtake this territory of trees, which had long stood master above everything below. Now, instead she had removed wildflowers, mosses and roots of never-born vegetation to decorate her surroundings as she pleased without knowledge or care of the lives she ended with a yank from her indelicate hands. 

Today and today and today; her raspy voice repeated a chronic repetition of commands, lists, errands, and multitudes of nothings soon to be left unaccomplished in rummage heaps of mental debris. The floorboards squeaked beneath her unsteady steps providing replies to the weight of unheard conversations.

Remembering this or that from when or where would cause sudden smiles to surface on life furrowed skin, providing glimpses of the bright shining hopefulness of possibility which had faded, bit-by-bit, with age. Then, still smiling, she would scratch her head, until the smile and all it had brought with it quickly vanished into obscurity. 

“So much to do and not enough time. So much to do and not enough time,” her words, almost a song while hammering a nail on the grey-faded woodwork of the little house in the woods that was her home. Like its occupant, long overtaken with age, it stood seemingly abandoned and waiting to fall.  Rarely seen cars lost on roads would find it accidentally, with owners assuming they had found some forgotten make shift place soon to be completely enveloped by the landscape. Seeing their headlights floating across her walls like specters jarred her back to the consciousness that there were others in the world besides her with lives to live, things to do and time to waste until it ended.

He had seen her on one of her rare visits to town to buy supplies. He knew she always followed the same pattern of appearing every three months or so, and amid stories of her strange ways and odd appearance. Talk about the crazy old coot who lived in the woods had embellished his childhood with imaginings of who she was, where she had come from and what she would do to any foolish enough to come within her grasp. There was other talk; talk about money hidden in floorboards or secreted away somewhere in the ramshackle walls of her home. He watched her unsteady steps and flicked a foraged booger onto the pavement, and then slicked back his hair, pulled up his collar and smiled, as wicked imaginings trailed and spiraled from a long drag of his cigarette.

She took no note of him as she labored past on the way to the fulfillment of copious misspelled lists of items and inclinations soon to be crossed off in a hurried swirl. Shop owners and children pestered her with insults or offers of sticky-fingered accusations or hugs. She abhorred them all and comforted herself with the knowledge that while necessity had forced her journey here, soon she would return to the comfortable darkness of her home with its walls lined with homages of dead ones now turned to dirt, and ash.

Hours later, he stood behind a tree surveying her movements as she traveled back and forth from the corroded car parked nearby. Waiting, waiting, waiting for the ever-present darkness to pale from grey to black, he blamed her for the sunset’s slowness, vowing to take it out on her after its surrender.

This would be an easy job. Soon he would have everything he had always wanted, and more. Soon he could stare directly in the eye of every snooty girl who had ever turned him down. He would make them beg, and then kick them away like so much trash. Every wish, every dream lay just a few feet away, teasing him, forging hatred upon hate from every person who had ever wronged him to hover, and land squarely on her shoulders.  By the time he came up behind her, he had thoroughly convinced himself of her guilt in all the hurts that had culminated with him being here in this moment, about to strike. 

It happened so quickly; at least that’s how it seemed, until now, too weakened and unable to move he became aware that she was dragging him very slowly across the ground to a freshly cleared place covered in flowers not usually found in forests. What had happened? How had it happened? Memory, his memory, which had always been keen, failed him.

“Very pretty, isn’t it?” she said noticing the jagged back and forth movement of his eyes. “Did it m’self. All of it. I love that patch over there of clamshell pink flowers you’re lying on…” Then, trailing off forgetting herself and then remembering, “I had absolutely no idea I’d have c’mpany so soon. You’ll like it here. All the others do. Have a good sleep, I’ll be back out in the morning to take your picture and sow the lime. I used to slake, but it doesn’t do anything for the slugs, don’t ya know? Read that somewhere in a science book.”

He wanted to scream, but blood had sealed his lips into a tight red smile; besides, he knew there was no one but her who would hear him. In time, exhaustion overtook his all thoughts of escape, even as crows came to feast on his neighbors in the wood. There was nothing now, but the reckoning that some children’s stories do come true and that happily ever after had always been the lie.

Days, weeks, months went by and seasons changed. Time continued to pass as it always had and ever would, as she watched her garden of the living and the dead blossom upon the forest floor.