SOME OTHER LANDSCAPE

Jane bought her house because of the willows that veiled the backyard from other people on all sides. It hadn’t occurred to her that most of the trees weren’t hers until somebody started cutting them down.

Because now the neighbors are clearing the land behind Jane’s, and one of her cats must be lost somewhere in the new space they’ve made. Her ten-year-old neighbor, Doyle, is following her through the woods behind her fence in search of the cat. The boy looks down more than around, finds a baseball in the leaves, and what he thinks is a bar of gold, though it’s gone all black, like rock.

“Wanda, kitty, kitty,” Jane calls, but it’s not until their third circle of the neighbors’ new foundation and back into her own yard that she hears the cat chirp from up in the maple. The view is entirely different than it was on Thursday. Jane can see clear to the next street over, she can see the backyards of the houses on Cherry Street. Her cat is in the tree, and Doyle has gone back to dig up the bar of gold, and next week she has an appointment concerning the abnormal cells on her cervix.

The boy had come over earlier, not long after Jane woke up. She was making coffee for the surveyor she brought home from the bar the night before. Doyle walked in without knocking and headed straight over to the couch and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said, as if he were the man of her house. “I’m Doyle.” The surveyor nodded back. “Paul,” he said, and that’s what Jane had thought his name was. Paul slipped on his t-shirt and Jane got mugs out of the cupboard.

Jane handed the surveyor a cup of coffee and sat with hers on the other end of the couch. “This is my neighbor,” she said to the surveyor, though they’d already met. Doyle talked and asked questions, and Jane and Paul listened and woke up slowly and once in a while looked at the clock. They sat in her living room like a family. Doyle wasn’t her kid and the surveyor wasn’t her husband, and Jane was nobody’s mother or girlfriend of wife. The cats sunned themselves in the streaks of warm light on the rug. “I bet kitties are solar-powered,” Doyle said. The surveyor set down his coffee then and patted the boy on the head.

The cat got out when Paul left, and that’s when she and Doyle went out to track her. Now the cat’s been found. Doyle’s bar of gold looks like a mossy stone to her, but he’s already asked if he can keep it. Jane makes him promise to do something good with the money he makes from it, he should think about the future. When she goes to see the doctor, they’ll tape a grounding strip to her leg so she’s not electrocuted by the machinery they put inside her when they biopsy her cervix, and her doctor will tell her over and over “Good girl,” and when they’re done, “You were excellent,” when all she’ll do is let her legs fall open without flinching. She calls to Wanda now, the cat up in the tree, her arms out like a fireman in love, saying come down, come down.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Click here for Jennifer A. Howard's bio