Weather

by Jenny Offill

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person.

He looks at me and I can see him calculating all the large and small ways I am trying to prevent the future. “Well, good luck with that, I guess,” he says.

Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.

The moment you tell Catherine about a problem she begins to act and she does not stop acting until the problem is solved. For this reason, my brother sometimes lets a problem go on for some time before telling her about it in order to prepare himself for the intensity of her mobilization.

And this man tells the most depressing stories; even when you think a story won’t be like that, he finds a way.

“Where did all these hipsters come from?” says my brother in his fleece-lined trucker’s jacket.

The top of that tree is on fire. Or else it’s fall again.

I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action. One night Ben and I go to a meeting about justice at the Unitarian church down the street. Good people all around, making plans, assisting—so why do I feel so embarrassed?

When I was younger, I sometimes knew why a man was staring at me, but these days it’s often no more than a lapse in memory.