I find you on the lawn, building a grassbridge across the sidewalk, one blade at a time, for the worms evicted from their homes by the late-season rain. You are wearing your camiseta bonita. English is our only language, but we have made an exception for this shirt. I smooth my hem, where a string waits to unravel me into my composite parts.
You are doing this thing on a sidewalk and a lawn that are not yours. The lawn once belonged to you, but the sidewalk never did. The city gets to keep all the sidewalks.
Your eyes are flecked with shadow and liner; your blonde roots are palimpsests on a strawberry page, the hair showing through again at the ends to stand in for seeds. You tell me you are cold, and this means I am to swaddle you in my shirt. I cross my arms against my bare chest and hope you don’t notice the unincorporated hairs you used to pluck; the stragglers. When your eyes come to mine I find the grassbridge very interesting. My shirt becomes a scarf and then a shawl and finally a shirt again. I don’t tell you you look like a child in my shirt because I don’t want to see the way your nose will scrunch up if I do.
I try to explain why I’ve come back but you tell me be shushed and you pat the sidewalk next to you and when you do loose gravel sticks to your palm like a fortune waiting to be told. It’s too bad you no longer have your gypsy shawl. We sip the silence together and you hand me one blade and then another. When I lay them down I try to graze your fingers like some cheesy movie but you are agile. You are nimble. I want to pour out what’s inside and sift through this floodwater, this standing stagnation, but you tell me be shushed and so I lay another blade down.
When you aren’t looking I put a dandelion in your hair and blow the seeds so they cling to you. This flower cannot reproduce here, but it will try.
I expect many things, but not a smile. Your teeth show for a second but you hide them behind your lips like you always do. You finger-paint grass stains onto my chest, shoulders, face. I am to be a warrior. When I ask you who I’m fighting you tell me be shushed.
A worm wiggles across the bridge we’ve made, displacing some blades and gluing others to the sidewalk with its residue. This worm has a family, but they hesitate to cross. They come from a long line of noble hesitators. You coax them with dandelion seeds and I ask where she is. Or he. They must be… (I fake mental mathematics) four years old by now. You take off my shirt and hand it to me. Your camiseta bonita comes next. Underneath there is skin that is untouched snow. You do not hide the snow. You guide my hands to the cold. You were given these mother tools but have not used them. I see this when you trace my finger down, over the scar like scorched earth challenging winter, incomplete Caesarean, and when we’re done the camiseta can stay right where it is.
The worm family starts to cross.
There are no things I can say, and I see that nothing is No Thing. You try to speak and I tell you be shushed. We speak with our fingers and make the alien like we used to, the one with ten fingers on each hand. Our song comes out and we hum the tune in the spots where the words won’t come, the places memory’s forgotten. But we remember some things. We remember the tune, and the hum, and the many-fingered alien, and the steps segueing from sidewalk to grass where our toes touch, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s all right.
The worm family makes it to the other side.
Liza Olson 