Abe Gaustad
Stars on the Wall Mowing, he recalls his daughter’s friend Muriel before she left for St. Jude’s in Memphis, remembers the bright pink writing on the postcards, “Feeling Fine” in looping, sparkling letters, the way she misspelled Adriana, with two n’s and the last name missing. The cut grass bleeds a green smell, the whir of the motor like gauze packing his ears, keeping all other sounds out. Back and forth for the last time, a pattern so familiar, the lawn divided into sections—first the front yard to the north of the Bradford pear tree, then south of it, the sun slicing through thin clouds and stroking out his shadow as it moves over the uneven ground. Back and forth, leaving straight, pleasant lines behind. He remembers Muriel’s mother’s voice—the memory oozing through the motor’s gauze—her sobbing, the sound of a chair being scraped along the floor in the phone distance, as if he were in the room watching her as she sat, knees together, white crush of tissue in her hand. Muriel died today, Muriel’s mother said, and went peacefully. To him Muriel had long been a shadow, was a shadow before she ever left for St. Jude, maybe even before he had heard the term occult carcinoma and the plan to fight it. Even her mother’s voice seemed braided in shade over the phone, a sound under a parasol as she talked about Muriel’s last days, the peace of it all. Back and forth, the spinning blade cuts the grass and sends it out in a verdant spray. Mowing, the motor straining, he thinks of Adriana packing inside, organizing books and pictures, pausing to cry. Why can’t you tell her? his wife said, I’m no good at this, but he insisted, said the lawn needed mowing before they moved, and wasn’t she the more compassionate parent anyway? He wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it. He could clean up afterwards, bag Adriana’s pain like so much dried grass and leave it by the curb, stacked neatly as they drove away from this house forever and to a new house, a new city and a new job. The mower strains, coughs, dies. He tilts the lawn mower on its side. The grass, long and wet, sticks to the blades, a soft, green mess. He finds a stick and scrapes it from the blades, the underside of the deck. Without the mower, he can
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