A candy wrapper fluttered across the yard. The girl watched it twist and pull in the wind, as if fighting back against the flow of air delivering it forward. Suddenly, it stuck on a blade of grass. Or, I could say, on the prick of a cactus in the yard, speared by the wind onto the needle’s point. First, the girl watched it and decided this was trash. The wrapper, one side bright colored and wax-papered on the other, flittered in the wind, splayed across the needle, spoiling the paddle-shaped cactus, spoiling the yard. Then the girl was moved, she felt a pang of something in her insides. The trash had a particular value to it. The value of any particle. That the way she’d rejected the trash as just that, trash, was cruel and rash. The wrapper was in fact pierced through the heart, bored through by this unwelcome, unexpected invasion. A wrapper on the side of the yard, away from the noise of the street, protected and yet penetrated through its center. The girl focused on this piece of trash, its intrinsic specialness. Its value found in its unremarkableness. Unremarkable being the clunkiest, most intrusive word possible for saying simple. Simple. The girl was alone on the porch, rubbing the spaces between her toes to dry out the sweat. As the wind picked up, it tore the wrapper from its perch and tumbled it on its way, lifting and dropping in the ever-faster wind. The girl turned away from the wrapper, looked down at the reddish crook of her toes. I have an urge now to send a car barreling across the lawn leveling it all in one fell swoop. A creeping, nagging desire to blanket the lawn, the garden, the porch, the house in a blanket of ash from the refinery next door. Tell me not to do that, please.

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