Such Being Death: A Young Girl, A Fence and the Old Woman

A young child, a girl, stood at a street corner contemplating a broken piece of fence. The street was quiet and the wind swept up the dust into thin brown tornadoes.

The wind rustled the girl’s dress. It was two sizes too big for her; its hem hung in tatters and the breeze pushed and pulled at the tangle of dirty string. The blue color had long since faded into a ruddy tan, more like the color and texture of a burlap bag than a cotton garment. Her shoes gave only a hint of the polished black they had once been. Scuffed, scratched, and grey, the shoes hovered above the girl’s feet like thick clouds.

She was quiet. A dog barked in the distance. The wide leaves of the elm rubbed together. An older woman stood across the street, sucking spittle in a perpetual ebb and flow through the spaces between her teeth.

The girl fixed her eyes on the fence. The old wood smelled like a place smells after 20 days of rain and no sun. It was worm eaten and broken. Some of the posts hovered in mid air, held up by the lateral pieces of wood running along the backside of the fence. The old posts had rotted where they met the ground, rotted from weathering and time.

The new wood smelled fresh and crisp and its color was bright and reddish rather dingy grey. Some pieces of the new wood curled off like tiny strands of blond hair. The girl tried to stroke them with a fingertip. She rubbed the wrong way and a long piece of fresh wood dimpled the tip of her finger before it pierced her skin and slid in.

Blood peaked up from where the splinter met her flesh. Her finger was soft and pink with dirt sinking into the grooves of her fingerprints. Her blood slowly trailed down her finger and cleaned a path red.

She watched this.

Her eyebrows furrowed as the blood moved and settled at the base of her finger. She looked again to the fence that was part old and part new. She reached out with her other hand to touch the old wood, the grey wood that looked brittle and soft. She wanted to break off a piece of it in her hand and crush it.

The old woman crossed the street, approached the girl and the fence, with a long slow shuffle. She grunted as she lifted one leg onto the curb, then, hunched and bracing her hands on the knee of the raised leg, she pushed her other leg off of the street.

Her face was prominently lined, obviously old. She sucked spittle in and out and rubbed the tips of her fingers together as she reached for the girl’s outstretched hand.

The girl turned her face towards the old woman, watched the trembling finger coming closer and closer. One fell and grasped the wrist of the wounded hand. The flesh of the old woman was like eucalyptus bark. After the tree has had a growth spurt, it stretches out of its old skin and the bark hangs down in soft thin layers. The old woman’s hands were like this. Soft thin layers.

The blood looked brighter on her skin than it had on the child’s. The girl watched with interest, watched the raised blue tunnels, thick like tree roots, on the back of the woman’s hand. The girl saw her own tunnels, hiding below the surface of her skin that was fat with blood and water.

She turned back to the fence. The fence that was old and new. She closed her hand around the old part and felt the wood bite into her hand rather then crumble like used charcoal.