October 2024

We, the survivors, spend October waterlogged and waiting.

Overhead are helicopters of public school boys who were good at math and couldn’t pay for college. They’re called in from their day jobs to find flat places to land with barrels of water and MREs. All day, every day, they pass back and forth overhead like a confused migration of birds. 

They make a base at the firestation down the road. Down what used to be the road. Supplies are flown in and people are flown out. It’s not enough. Folks make new paths through the woods, ford the river where it’s low, ATV over landslides, and chainsaw their way out.

People come to me. The neighbors come to secure the hissing gas tank. The self-deputized vigilantes come to salvage. The landlady comes to check on her investment. She brings back her husband and son to dig out the mud. A foot deep over the kitchen floor. The basement is full to the brim with water. They pull down pots and pans and start scooping it away.

A generator is brought in to pump out the water. The surrounding soil is so wet it fills and is drained twice over.  

She sends word to the girl, who she saw fleeing from the inn in town square, first, saying that I’m still standing. That the storm took out bridges and houses and neighbors and powerlines and water and every tree and it will never be the same again. Second, asking if the girl’s paid rent yet. 

And that’s how we get on. October is as loud and busy and haunted as ever. There is lots of noise, and none of it singing. Lots of hands on me, and none that I know. Lots of ghosts, all of them living. 

After the waiting, after the unpicked fruit on the last standing apple tree dries up, a ghost comes early and eager and scared. She’s here two days before the saints on the last golden light, red leafed, warm day of autumn. It could have been lovely. 

The ghost drives over the cracked bridge. Parks in the mud that used to be the cornfield. They’re the same boots she left in, but it’s unfamiliar ground now. Fucking Heraclitus. 

Still, she hikes through her memory of it, crossing over what should have been the rabbits’ den, the blind curve, the patch of lemongrass. She floats past the trees where she buried her eggshells and carrot tops. She ascends over the steps where she left her jar for fireflies. She passes through the door that isn’t there and tired and thirsty and covered in dust the ghost of my girl comes home to me. 

Haunted as ever, 

The apple house