Sarah Dravec

Absolution, Resolution

She wondered, really, how many stars there must have been in the patch of sky above the four houses that bordered the end of the street. From the screened-in porch, she wondered and gazed up into the space above the house next door. Twelve, thirteen maybe—there was too much goddamn light in a suburb to be sure—and she spent a moment wanting to step onto the thin ledge along the screen like a tabby to walk the perimeter of the room and count the rest of them. Goddamnit, she may have said aloud. The cane that always grazed her right hand when she sat ruined everything.

So, how many more angles could there be from this room with twelve or thirteen stars at the end of them? Four seemed safe to assume. There were four cardinal directions, eight if you counted the in-betweens, but why did it matter? Fifty, she guessed. Fifty visible in the night sky, but better yet, she thought, there were really fifty-two. Two more came from the other side of the wicker couch; two goddamn stupid tattoos the boy had gotten the moment he was eighteen, she remembered. They were patterned different colors in alternating sections—nautical, he had proudly called them—and one rested an inch above either elbow. Goddamn stupid, she thought of them. Fifty-two, then; fifty real stars, two nautical ones, how goddamn stupid could a person be—

“Grandma,” Seth said, timid once she turned to him, “take this.” He tugged at his long sleeves. “Please take this,” he said, and he pulled off his hooded sweatshirt and stood beside her, draping it over her shoulders so she could pull the sleeves over herself. She had been noticeably shaking in the cool air, but she refused to go inside. She couldn’t stand to think of the scent that still lurked in her home, clinging to her possessions. She leaned forward, extending a wavering hand toward the cup of tea that rested on the table in front of them. The grip of her fingers was weak; the delicate glass fell to the ground, spilling as it went and shattering when it landed.

“Goddamnit,” she said too loudly, and Seth winced.

“It’s okay,” he said. He couldn’t comfort her. “It’s okay,” he said again. “Hold on a minute, Grandma, I’ll get you another…” and his voice faded as he reentered the house and busied himself with another teabag, another cup of boiling water.

She stood, taking several seconds, clutching her cane as tightly as her hand would allow. “Goddamnit,” she said when it hurt her back to stand up straight. Her legs wobbled. She regripped her cane and took slow steps toward the outer door of the porch.

The walk to the backyard cost what little energy she had and took more time than it would have even a few weeks ago. She barely lifted each foot, swearing as she went, but she remained diligent as she rounded the house. The energy it took to walk, the chill it brought her to navigate through the dark. She thought of bones, the chill to her bones; she thought of how weak her own must have been. A bird, perhaps away from its nest mistakenly, flew just above the trees that divided her property from the homeowner’s beside it, a person she had never met, maybe some goddamn idiot with ink in their skin—bird bones! she thought. Hollow, extraordinarily light, and able to move without the complications of an elderly woman’s age. Birds flew, she thought, and humans, smarter, never got off the ground. Birds shit on the ground. Men and women stayed in a single place if they were unlucky, and she was, and they still, more or less, shit on the ground. Birds, then—smarter?

She stopped in front of the largest bush that bordered the house. There were several buds poking out of the leaves, but only a single rose had opened its petals. She looked at the flower, iconic, frail, and red, and let out a sigh of relief, but the bush had not been hers. It had come from someone and somewhere else, surely a cramped store that sold plants for sales and never for plants. The bush had come from a bit of stem purchased because of the darkness that awaited them all—everyone on the street, in the suburb—beneath the fifty stars.

“Grandma?” came his voice between the shutting of the porch doors as he emerged, looking for her. There were children, she thought, the ones who belonged to her and the ones who didn’t, stems and the hands that buried them in the ground, and did gardeners garden in hopes that their hands would touch other hands that had once been in that ground?—and grass slowly grew, and the children still grew in a slower manner that was much too fast. They would fail each other, goddamnit. She knew it. She always did.

“Here, Grandma,” Seth said as he moved closer behind her. She turned and saw his sweatshirt in one hand and a new cup of tea in the other. He stretched his arm, placing it just in front of her free hand, and she took the handle of the cup slowly. The teaspoon in it made a tiny clink, and the sound held onto her, and her eyes were heavier than perhaps they had ever been.

“Thank you, Son,” she said.