Sips and Whispers
Sips and Whispers
Timeless Thirst
September 7, 2022
Conciliate
“They’re moving to Germany,” she tells me as the dog barks under the sun and a distant radio whispers its song among the leaves of the trees pushed by a summer wind that knows it will soon be singing cold.
“Why are they moving to Germany?”
“Why do you think?” she replies. “You see what’s happening in this country. They don’t want to live, to raise their kids, in a country that’s destroying women’s rights. That’s shitting on democracy that’s…Good God.”
She throws her hands up and then shrugs and yanks at a few more weeds on her side of the chain link fence that was put up many years ago, ages before I lived in this house and she lived in hers.
“But…what if, you know, things get better? If things turn back around?”
“They can hope for that,” she says. “They can also move to Germany.”
The hours melt away and then it’s night and she’s in bed and the dog is quiet as I stand in the same spot in the backyard and the sun has been replaced by a bold star whose name I have never known and the noise from the radio from a block away is not there and instead there is the mating call of cicadas and the distant hum of cars on the expressway.
I look at the star and ask, shyly, “Germany?”
That was that day and then there is this day and a different person in a different place. This time it’s a dining room whose table is cluttered with newspapers and pill dispensers marked so that the right medicine is taken on the right day.
“They’re leaving Arizona,” she tells me. “The old couple. They’re selling their place in Arizona because they say it’s going to hell. The water is disappearing. It’s literally disappearing and no one will accept it. The politicians out there won’t even acknowledge it so they are selling their winter home now because they think in a few years it will be worthless.”
“Are they moving to Germany?”
A smile.
“No. They have kids and grandkids here, some western suburb. They’re abandoning Arizona but they’re staying in America.”
I get a drink of water from the kitchen sink. It’s clear and cool. W.C. Fields said he never drank water because “fish fuck in it.”
I sip the water at first then let the whole glass pour into my throat.--TK
Wednesday, September 7, 2022