Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash
by Alex Stolis
The grandmother speaks broken English, Paradise has never seen her in anything but an apron because she is always cooking/baking/canning/cleaning something; the sky is higher here, air smells of freshly washed sheets. The buzz from a hornet’s nest in the eaves mingles with birdsong, and Paradise thinks; this is what loneliness feels like; straight, square, a great blank space with no purpose. A small girl is stung by a hornet, he remembers a first kiss, a spider tattoo on the back of her wrist; the girl is red-faced, crying, the grandmother kneels, dabs away tears with her apron. The clouds are a circus on parade, giraffe, monkey, headless lion, emaciated tiger; there is nothing left to say, nothing inside, and Paradise closes his eyes tight, sees shooting stars, sees the girl with the tattoo, sees his sister drowning; sees the hornet crawl into a crack in the sky and becomes dizzy with remembering. He watches rain tumble to earth, time does not touch him, there are no end dates carved into stone. Clouds spill into rivers flowing into endless oceans, the rumble of a train wakes him; the dead never loved him enough to tell him anything true.
Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis.
