I visited this thrift store selling books. I was alone in that open air utopia for the intelligentsias, rummaging through paperbacks and dog-eared hardbound copies of long-forgotten Mills and Boons and precious Hemingways. I found Olive Ann Burn’s (unfinished) Leaving Cold Sassy: a behindhand birthday gift for my mother.

Then the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon. I came to feed the orange and pearl-colored aquarium carps breeding in that gray moat surrounding the stone crematorium. My peaceful water animals with their clean, gossamer o-mouths swallowing the salt bread crumbs I would throw in the waters. Calm, I was.

The dead fruit trees above my head; the deceased hushed like sleeping infants beneath the dirt at my feet. The bone orchard: a home.

My fat, black heart remembers.