80
CIRQUE
Ann Sihler
Cynthia Lee Sims
In the Orchard
Nothing, Good, Click
On the way home from the hospital you want to pick Comice pears at the farm stand, so I drive us around to the back orchard, with its short, scraggly trees. Yellow leaves hang loose on the branches, and a few twigs reach feebly for the gentle gray sky. Almost before I stop the car you are out and headed down the rows, picking your way over clods with your shiny bronze cane, like the Queen Mother. I hurry behind, carrying our two white buckets. Somewhere nearby the river is meandering—I can feel it. “Here’s one. And here’s one,” you say, pulling at the full green fruit. I think about how we’ll let the pears ripen, then lean over the kitchen sink, bite into their buttery flesh, let the juice drip down our chins. The lower branches have been picked over, so I scramble up the trunk and pass pears down to you. Somehow I can’t shake the feeling that it’s really you in this tree, climbing high up into the branches, to fragile twigs even I can’t reach. You’ll take one last step into the soft clouds and leave me on the ground with a bucket of pears that I’ll carry back home, saying “Here, this is what we gathered, in the orchard.”
Jim Thiele
You couldn’t know that at age 70 he didn’t have anything left to live for. That an eviction notice was a death sentence That his sister’s suicide stung, and his best friend was gone. That his landlord was his only friend. That he’d never met some of his grandchildren or any of nine great-grand-children. You couldn’t know that a court hearing cocked a gun That his remains would be scrubbed up by a cleaning service before his daughters could view his belongings, some of which were still spattered with deep crimson. The cleaning service would use common words: Contaminated. Matter. Compromised. Never blood. You couldn’t know that he was already dead, his mind and body barely hanging on. A spinal tap led to meningitis, meds led to addiction. Diabetes had also leached on him, His nose, discolored, his skin, blotchy. I knew this eight years ago, when I last saw him in jail. But I knew little else, always, very little. Pieces of paper later he wrote his life philosophies on — Those would discolor in my purse later as I kept reading them. The 6’5” man had cowered, in an orange jumpsuit. His eyes, normally wide and prideful, were penitent, lowered. “We are all depressed in here,” he had said. “You all?” I asked. “Yes, in here, all of us.” The collective “we” of jail cell comrades. Never occurred to me: the forced socialization. No one had been allowed in his basement apartment. A broom handle imprinted the ceiling. Noise. He couldn’t tolerate it. Later, he walled me off. I thought it was personal. “Hi, Dad.” “What do you want?” “Nothing.” Then I heard: Click. I had told his wife about the others. What I knew: There was a danger in loving him, of getting too close. My fingers had once circled his pinky with a dangling plush animal he won for me from a fair—a spotted dog. I lay beside him and watched war movies, westerns, boxed now. There were only us two: my sister and I. The night before that day I’d slept more fitfully than ever. Moments crept back to me, snippets of fear without teeth. “You think you can wear the right hat to coffee with me?” It had stopped me decades ago. “What do you mean, Daddy.” “Act right. You think you got that hat?” My chest hurt. “Why do you do this? I don’t know, I don’t think so.” Tears, hot.