When she is satisfied, the girl lets it fall a second time from the branches of her lissome fingers with a feeling that would break the backs of any words, and so is destined to lodge, unsaid, where loneliness begins and sometimes ends.

Like all children, the girl senses patterns that overlap to give the illusion of singularity.

Like trees, she knows all, but understands little. What she’s told is the truth, is merely the safety of division, an ignorance so perfect it’s holy.

What she is certain of cannot be glimpsed all at once, nor dragged, dying in a net of sentence.

When afternoon comes, the girl helps her mother and father rake the leaves in their garden⁠—a summer in pieces.

Later, twilight sharpens the sky. Breath is worn in veils. The mother, father, and child put down their tools. Look at the leaves then at each other before leaping into the piles.

Laughter spreads like wings beating.

Soon, the man and woman are tired. Too much happiness brings worry.

They go in to prepare a meal that will be churned in the wet soil of their bodies, transforming one life into another, the way fire catches after being caught.

The girl remains outside in the darkness. She rakes, then jumps into the pile, then gathers up the leaves into another soft mountain to be splayed. There is no thinking; it just happens, this joy amidst the ruins.

The girl’s mother watches from a window while washing things in a basin of hot water. Her hands swim in and out of sunken cups, until each vessel is pulled, glistening, through white froth like a prize. She turns from the window to a shelf of photographs. There are people there. Some sleep, while others are more alive than ever. Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence.

Outside, the girl is lying still in the pile⁠—a leaf herself. The mother leans forward, taps on the window, as though trying to part the darkness, still unaware⁠—eight years after his death⁠—that what’s lost is, eventually, given back. But most fail to recognize change as restoration, a perfect geometry beyond the paradox of now, where: a plant is not a plant, a fly is not a fly, a bird is not a bird.

Words are communal yet bring material order through spiritual separation.

The girl sits up, as if sensing a presence. The old leaves crack like tiny bones, while those still-green tongues freshly fallen can only whisper, sotto voce. The mother waves, but from the white rectangle of kitchen her face seems different to the girl, like the map of a place she is not old enough to visit.

The mother presses her face to the glass, as if to resist any barrier that separates.