Troped

She lay buried among the dedicated pumps, perhaps in a tattered and gray linen nightgown, though Able is not sure since he can not see her from where he stands. The little accordion towers surrounding her move asynchronously up and down with tiny huffs and sucking sounds. The small back room is a miniature city skyline, almost entirely filled with tubes and pipes and dirty glass huddled in around the park, the valley that must be where her body lay… perhaps on the small, rotting mattress. Only a single window, high up on the rickety wall allows in any light, and only a breakfast-tea-colored light pushes through the twin filters of dirt and fingerprints on the inside and gray restless dust outside.

Able shifts his weight in the doorway and hears the tired floorboards beneath him creak, their mourning disturbingly louder than his own. His is lost in confusion. He holds his hands uselessly at his side. Then clasped behind his back. Then at his side—watching as the pumps rise and fall, his eyes moving from cylinder to cylinder as each one reaches a peak, seems to hold its breath, puffs and slides down. Falling in a stacatto shuddering, the paper lungs huff dust off into the air in snowy spirals where the tired light captures and frames each tiny particle’s Brownian dance, the bludgeoning of a thousand tiny, invisible fists. Able feels each molecule of pollutant travel up his nose and down his dry throat into his crusted lungs. He closes his eyes and takes a moment to miss her. He travels backwards. Lost in memories behind closed eyes now, he looks up from the floor, playing with bits of rock, to see her looking at him with that familiar perplexed look on her face, wondering at the measure of her own oddity in him. But then, as always she smiles and pats him on the head, the sun behind her silhouette then yellow and streaming. Able opens his eyes to the room, filled with colors like mold, mildew, rot, and is not sure why he remembers the sunlight ever being yellow.

Outside dust devils come to rattle the window and pay their respects with obsidian-eyed sorrow. The land is gray and covered with strewn speeches, arguments, stone artifacts chilsed with law and the broken tablets of theorems. Only a few hundred yards away from Able’s father’s pathetic shack is a shallow grave that Able’s brother has dug. Two rotted pieces of lumber, tied with twine, claw their way up from the scrabbly rock.