At the sculpture park we fail to connect. By connect, I mean recover. And so, we stack rocks. In silence we balance them without great effort but still, they stay, an allegiance or maybe obedience to an effort we lack. It’s in the fit. I like the precarious ones, she, the uniform. Our creation — it tickles us. We have surpassed the other stacks and, look: we are still stacking. When the leaning begins, we abandon it, this bowed spine, which, hey, call it a benediction.
Above, honey bees. They fly and fly and —
I tell her I envy insects. How capable they are, how sturdy the things they make. Me? I’d be a spider, my home spun in the yawn of a boot, a constellation against the sole of a sky.
We carry on over the dry-stone ramp and toward the garden. In the shade of a tree the teeth of a scar wink white from her calf. The first time I saw it she said the owner claimed the dog just wanted to play. I said it was like that joke about the — but then she kissed me and I managed only to say, “ — off my lawn.”
Prospects are hospitable. It’s a misconception that a happy present makes a future when one has only to imagine a future to want the present. As for the joke? That’s what I mean. Of course she laughed.
And, now.
Now we arrive at the quarry where, supposedly, two can work out whispers from opposite ends. Here, we are on another planet. We are aliens attempting contact. We cup our telescope hands around our mouths. Diligently, we hum: “Hello?” And then we listen, we listen before trying once more: “Can you hear me?”
Mackenzie Singh’s work has appeared in SAND Journal, SHiFT, Maudlin House, Lithub, and The Rumpus. She lives in Brooklyn.
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