A curl of a woman pouring a curl of water onto a garden patch. A square yard of soil that yields up some tiny shoots. Seed, then plant, then seed again. She tells herself this is the cycle of life. She stands in front of her trailer, and the trailer has windows like eyes that watch and watch. It is some kind of summer, and we know this by her dress, all cotton and flower, the sun shadows on a flap of laundry on the line, a caged-up bird that has forgotten how to fly. A stick of a man sits behind her. He holds up a fishpole, the kind he might have used when he was younger, before old age caged him in.
In a minute, a storm will whisper. The man will say, that figures. It is, he will say, some kind of summer and storms are gonna be. Now he can stop pretending he was going fishing and he and the woman, who has stopped her watering, go in the trailer. Outside the wind is building, and we know this by the punch flap in the sheet still hanging on the line. We know this by the creak of the birdcage swinging back and forth. Once inside, the man and the woman look at one another. Maybe he will love me again, she thinks. She wants to think. But a man is not a garden, a man is not a shoot.
After the storm, which will be much bigger than summer, bigger than firefly and bird chirp and wind coming out of the east, their turned over trailer with its blinded windows will be half a mile down. Rolled over and over, spun and died and died again. No cycle left for them here, the two of them flung onto the ground, fallen laundry. Near them, a birdcage broken, a bird that has flown.
Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte. (Photo credit: Mark Strodl)