The Day the Table Took a Breath

Johanna (Hana) Foulk

The day the table took a breath, all the world was silent but for the sun, who was not known to care for such trivial things. (Last night there had been all that business with the sunset, vain enough to refuse to set on schedule; and then today a terrible fog had descended, like muddy water, through which the greenery looked like nothing more than tricks of the eye. A terrible week, so forgive the sun for being tired.)

It is said that this can happen when a place is silent for too long. Things start to come alive that shouldn’t. Doors, floors, clouds untangling themselves from the sky. Perhaps this is to instate a sort of balance—so when the vines encroach upon the concrete world, the leaves and flowers here to take back what they have been waiting for, the gravel has the power to run away. A space can only hold so much consciousness. Too many people, and there’s nothing left. Everyone’s grasping to be the smartest, the funniest, the something-est. Trying to find a way to reach above the rest, but it’s like one of those forests where the branches are all knotted together, so old you cannot tell what belongs to what tree: when the light can no longer reach the ground, and the soil shrinks and crumbles, where else can their roots go?

If there is anywhere for these forgotten things to live, it’s here. The leaves of the trees that hang over the streets look like folded paper, like notecards to write wishes upon, discarded when the cold rolls in from the nearby mountains in the autumn. If the forest has not consumed the houses yet, well, it will soon. All the memories have untied themselves. The echoes will no longer haunt these hallways; they are not still or static but drifting, past the skeletal, peeling walls, the shuttered window-eyes, the roof sunken by rain. The world has been like this for a very long time, but it is the first this table has seen of it, and in this way, it is new.