Do not walk across the lawn.
Next to the infirmary in the village is a small lawn. Seldom-watered, isolated from brethren lawns by pavement, and not very pleasant to look at, the lawn existed unremarkably for the majority of its life. Now, thirty years since its origination, the lawn looks the same, its brown grass poking up in hairy patches between pools of dirt.
A woman enters the infirmary carrying a parcel awkwardly in one arm. The door closes, quiet murmuring carries through the open window. After a while, she exits. Standing on the step, she leans against the post next to her, resting from the sun and heat. She breathes quietly, her mind turning over the ideas and plots of her quiet life in the country, impossibly small from the outside but desperately important to her and each of her neighbors. One of the store-owner’s children passes across the lane, her eyes vacantly follow him, unregistering. Still in a daze, she walks off the step towards the next house, lightly treading on the grass. Each step crunches a little with the weight of her sandals. “Oi, you’d best not be walking on there, and I’m serious about it!”. She snaps out of her funk and whirls around. The voice comes from a mustachioed man in his 60s or 70s, wobbling towards her with the help of his cane. Not much for conflict or sociality, she finds her face burning and turns it to the ground, as she replies, “Well no one’s ever said nothin’ before, so…”, and her voice trails off.
Cider Season
In the museum down on Main Street, past the entrances with the wand-waving officers, around the skeletons of dinosaurs who roam the Earth in a comatose state, past the Mayans and the Egyptians and the Romans and the kids who feel between them and their parents a rope which holds them back from having any real fun and a friend of theirs who’s allowed candy and happily sucks on a blue lollipop in front of the others as if to say, “look what I’ve got that you haven’t”, is a little gallery with modern paintings and ceramics that wobble in the intentional way and signs that warn against violence in countries far away and at the very end in the corner is a little watercolor called “Apples”, which just arrived and will leave again soon, with a bunch of apples sitting in the frame in different stages of ripeness, probably MacIntire, and seeing it and all its fine little lines and spots of color and broad strokes and warmth makes it feel like cider season for just a moment.
