June 2024

June comes about so proud of itself, promising fruit and color and warm memories to carry with us into the cold. It comes like an offering to us, baking heat into my bricks and getting solid legs under the girl after her long lie-down. 

When she’s feeling herself again, when she’s coughed up and out the last of the sick, and her body’s done trying to burn itself better, when she can finally breathe again, she gets jealous watching the incense travel out the window in loose, lovely curls like the peel off the apple. The boys in her bedtime stories smoke cigarettes and it hasn’t hurt them yet. They never die or smell like ash. So we’re both smoking now, her, a cigarette out the dutch door, and me, over the empty writing desk, pretending for eight good minutes that we don’t know it’s bad for us. 

The most effective part of any medicine is pretending it works, so we pretend a good bit. We pretend we’re the boys in our bedtime stories, half a century and half a world away, tripping over how to best love each other, and never reading the end of the story. I even let the girl lie to me, about the place she knew before, that forever June that never broke its heat. We breathe for eight minutes, through lungs and lookouts, believing the forever of it all. 

We’ll stop when the rain starts. When it comes, we perform the ritual forgetting that this mess belongs to us. We clean it up. We dust. Mop. Wash her face and my counters. Find the half smoked cigar on the kitchen shelf that last night her parents passed back and forth between the gulf of harm they’ve done to each other. We pretend we don’t know it’s bad for us. We forget.

We woke up this morning in a home with mother and father and girl and I, but they left in separate cars for separate countries, headed back to watch the slow sure way their own fathers die and take notes on how to do it better. 

It’s hazy now, remembering the kitchen chairs pulled out around the bonfire, trying to listen in over the water cracking in the water-soaked logs. The father asked that night if she was lonely. Well, no. He didn’t ask. He said he worried that she was alone. Not quite that either. What was it? 

“It’s quiet out here. I worry. Aren’t you worried? It’s quiet.” 

He says it over the sound of the crickets and the fire and the neighbor on the mountain, with open windows who is up late playing his brass because, as the woman who is not his wife says, “He still wants to be discovered.” 

He says this over the loud look from the woman who is not his wife, but has held his quiet and his worry, but won’t, like the cigar, pass it back to him. One of them will stub it out, place it in the cupboard like they might come back for it, and I’ll keep it safely there until my girl is ready to throw it away. We know it’s not good to hold on to things. 

But we pretend. We forget. We’re just the boys in our bedtime stories. Our days are perfect, half awake and half asleep. No one is worried. No one is home. No one is seven and a half minutes into a cigarette, asking the empty house if they’re proud of her. 

We’ll stop when the rain starts, 

The apple house