Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn’t mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.

You’re at the window, yapping. You yap with your whole body, as if each yap were a volt of electricity, cracking through you from whiskers to tail.

sit quietly on the windowsill. In the potbellied armchair, I read. Sometimes you’re up straight and looking away across the water, your thousand-mile stare. Sometimes you lie with your beard rested on your front paws, looking in, watching me. What are you thinking? I wish I could teach you how to read. I wish you could understand when I read to you.

Today, we are planting. I know it’s already too late in the season. My father’s shelf full of gardening manuals would shake their spines in reproach. But every year I plant according to my own unwritten and annually misremembered set of rules, and every year I accept the bounty, however scant or sickly.

On Tuesday, I go out alone and into town. The post office followed by the supermarket, and here I buy saplings and seedlings from the gardening section. Fruit, vegetables and herbs; I’ve never bothered with flowers. I’ve always thought it would seem like an insult to the wild ones which every summer arrive unbidden in my yard. Up from the lightless cold they thrust their heads through the compacted dirt and burst into petals amongst the gravel. As though, like the swallows, they’ve chosen me.

Why does everything either starve or drown? Always either too much or too little, always imbalance.

pigeon settles on the stone fence. Its feathers are palest mauve, the colour of forest fruit yoghurt. It has a plastic tag around its right ankle and seems to be watching, checking to see if I’m the human it knows, if this is the backyard where it left its coop.

There’s nothing sadder than a rainy zoo, or wildlife park. All the creatures look either slightly dejected or slightly deranged. The big ones paced their enclosures. The small ones cowered under something and I couldn’t tell if they were sheltering from the downpour or trying to hide.

My father told me that after he died the games were to be destroyed without exception. I expect he was ashamed of the snot-nosed and sticky-fingered child who dwelt within him, who tinkered. He didn’t want people to weigh the worth of his life in puerile toys. But I didn’t preserve them out of malice; it’s just that I don’t have a knack for destruction.

I’ve never looked through his stuff and I can’t explain exactly why it is I’m so incurious. I suppose there are clues about his life there in the shut-up-and-locked room, perhaps even some traces of my mother, but better to be content with ignorance, I’ve always thought, than haunted by the truth.