Fragile by Chris Katsaropoulos

Author:Chris Katsaropoulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Luminis Books
Published: 2009-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

I LAY MYSELF down in the garden, the garden will keep me whole. I lay myself down in the garden, the garden will keep me sanctified and whole. And Enrique, God bless him if he ever thought to wake up on a Sunday morning and roust his family to church, might look out from the back kitchen window and see me lying here in this mouldering damp plot of earth and wonder what the crazy old gringo lady has gone and done now. But he never does get them up and out to church, though the bells of St Monica’s are loud enough when they call the early mass to make the sashes rattle. He sleeps right through it, up past midnight, up when I got home last night with his three fat children watching television too loud, and even the bells of the second mass only wake him up and get him to the porch in his t-shirt and baggy sweatpants reading the paper with his hair standing on end. So Enrique will not see me, nor anyone else even if they happen to look out from the second-story windows of the houses on either side. They will see now that I have crouched down bearing my weight on the butt of my hands in the dirt and lain myself, my heavy decrepit body, down in the dirt, still damp, wet with dew.

There is no one left to see me, for I am covered up now in the flowers of my garden, in the tender tall fronds of the snapdragons and cone flowers, tall stalks of their stems lifting all around me, a forest from the red dusk globes of the cone flowers draping over me, a canopy of loose amethyst umbrellas. The snaps on their gabbling stalks, luminous, lavender and bronze, they cover me up, they genuflect and shield me, tired and still empty where I was ever hollow from lack, like a seed, like a grain of wheat falling into the damp earth, fallow, slow. Slow in the weight of me, all encompassed now in this great ungainly husk, still sanctified and whole, the entirety of my burden still sanctified and whole.

Was there ever one moment when I could have let go of my penitence, my impudent idea of showing, always showing him that—no—that is not what I was, that is not what I did. I am instead this: An emblem of forsaken need. When he said to me, well, if you’re not going to get a man, you have to get a job, dry and hollow I became out of spite of him, of them, of you, Tris, yes you. I said, no, I will show you I never was what you thought of me. I never did that, and sure enough here I am with no one left to witness it but the canopy of leaves dumbly filtering the light, only this, Elmer’s garden now mine as well and the great pinoak still here, still

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