9

     The yard where we played and sometimes picnicked, where Esther and I once staged father-daughter pretend fights, with fake angry faces, to confuse the passing motorists—Is that a man fistfighting his young daughter?—or where we argued in earnest, with calm faces that belied our true feelings, Esther asserting, no doubt correctly, that there was something I didn’t understand—this yard might have functioned as a massive sinkhole. The yard, a throbbing pit in its center, should have exerted a steady pull on anyone in range.
    From above, through the brown smoke, you should have seen people and dogs and the smaller trees getting dragged into the collapsing grass.
    The day we left there should have been mourners in the street, a parade of weeping parents walking from their homes. Or not weeping. Past that. Devoid of all signs of feeling in the face. Just walking with calm expressions because their faces had finally failed to signal what they felt.
    There should have been music pouring from a loudspeaker on the roof of an emergency vehicle. Or perhaps no music, no sound whatsoever. Instead, an emergency vehicle broadcasting a heavy coating of white noise so that even the leaves rustled silently. A plague of deafness, as if an unseen bunting smothered everything, drinking noise, so we could hear nothing.
    Making mimes out of all of us. So that we couldn’t hear ourselves breathe. So that our shared language would have been suddenly snuffed out.
    What a fine bit of foreshadowing that all would have been.
    But our neighborhood was failing to foreshadow.
    What is it called when features of the landscape mirror the condition of the poor fucks who live in it?
    Whatever it is, it was not in effect.
    This was, instead, a plain day in the neighborhood, save for the shielded
officials of the quarantine, lurking under trees until an enforcement was needed.
    If you took the Sedgling exit off 38 and hugged the access road until the Beth Elohim Synagogue reared up, and from there you veered right, keeping the highway at your back, you would pass the ring of bread and coffee shops, and the town square with its deafening fountain, before entering our not-so-gated community of houses just new enough to be nothing special at all.