charcoal smudge
It should have been peaceful, but it wasn’t–the view outside the picture window, trees in silhouette, charcoal lines against charcoal smudge houses, two charcoal stamp cars parked against the black street. The sky was losing its blue, and the neighbor’s light was on, orange through the front window and the porch.
Why was he awake, she wondered?
He thought the same sitting in his chair in the front room, staring across the black street, through the charcoal trees, to the one charcoal stamp car sitting in front of her house by the mailbox. Why is she awake?
They’d never met. Six years, and not a single exchange. Houses like cubicles on a fading block, the people inside rarely groundhogging up through the chimneys to say hello or ask for kleenex. He’d helped her dig her car out of the snow once, buried fender-deep at the end of the driveway. Why hadn’t she asked his name?
Long gray hair in a pony tail. Blue-collared shirt and work boots. He wore three fingernails long. Maybe that’s why. She hated long fingernails. But still, she should have asked.
He knew her name was Margaret; he’d kept a piece of mail arriving in his box by mistake. It wasn’t important mail–just an invitation to a book fair somewhere on the east side. He went instead. He bought a book about gardening and had half of a mind to leave it with the invite in her mailbox, but he didn’t.
Curly brown hair that hung just to her jawline. She wore glasses and could not keep them up when she shoveled the front walk in her man’s winter coat. He never helped–only once with the car. He should have helped more.
Should have. But six years is a long time to live with should. A window closed, took with it an invitation to connect. And now in the pre-dawn, as the neighborhood relearns its color, charcoal trees line a black street, where unnamed people nail their front doors shut.
