Girl in Pieces

I take a long time biking home, trying to quell the panic building in me about money and rent and buying regular things and what to do. Linus did cash my check. I’ll have to pay Leonard tonight. To make myself feel better, I decide to visit a house I like where they’ve used bedsprings as trellises in a garden. The curvy bodies of green beans lace through the tendrils and coils. Beyond the bedspring trellis, the giant heads of sunflowers droop over cosmos and cactuses. Brightly painted paving stones have been looped throughout the yard, a path between the dazzling flowers, the cactuses, the glinting hubcaps suspended from cottonwoods like oversized chimes. Orange fish bob on the hazy surface of a round pond. The whole outside of the small house has been muraled with swirling clouds of color, thunderbolts, baying coyotes, lazy turtles. Sometimes when I walk by, I see a woman touching up the paint, her thick gray hair gathered at her neck. She works carefully, moving her brushes just so, a cigarette dangling in an ashtray at her feet. Once, she turned and smiled at me, a flash of white in the white-hot day, the mural a bright explosion behind her, but I hurried past her, shy. I like this house, and I like thinking about it, and that strange woman, the tidy wildness of her garden, and I want to know how to get there, to get a tiny spot on the earth, a little house to paint inside and out, a backyard to fill up and shape, how to feel comfortable in the very air around me.