Published in Literary Pasadena: The Fiction Edition (Prospect Park Books, 2013)
The fall they are sent to live with the opera singer in the Altadena foothills she stops speaking. It is autumn and, new orphans, they find themselves in a large house with a large man who sings and fancies licorice Allsorts and is worshiped by a smelly miniature dog. A window in the main room of the house frames the silhouette of an old church dusted with jacaranda blossoms and white ash that drifts down from the smoldering San Gabriels when the winds are hot and strong.
While her brother fashions weapons out of spiky pods from the sweet gum tree, she passes the time eating butterscotch drops in her room and sketching faces to the soundtrack of his arias, which quiver glass and course through all of the metal in the house till it rings. The swelling of the large man's chest and shapes his mouth makes when he sings warms her. She is a farouche girl, unaccustomed to the behavior of effusive men. Her father was a man of few adjectives and spoke only in low octaves. The singer breaks silence over and over without warning and she imagines his notes contagious, bouncing around in the immediate ether until they tire and attach to strands of her hair like small iridescent flies. In the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door, she examines her body, brushing the large tan nipples with her fingers to see them tighten like the mouths of sea anemones. As his solfège climbs, she takes to kneading the warmest part and the sounds siphoned from her mouth echo off the high ceilings in tones as foreign as the Italian lyrics trembling under her door.
At night, deep longing for home and the certainty of deciduous trees. She returns often to her memory of a picture from The Ox Cart Man, a book her father would read to her before she went to sleep. A farmer with a red beard and tall boots prepares for a trip across New England to sell the family's harvest—mittens and shawls knit from their sheep's wool and brooms carved from birch wood. His wife, daughter, and son help him pack the wagon tethered to a brown-and-white ox. Behind them, a green hill covered in crimson leaves, embosomed by a range of purple mountains. The picture nurtured a great sadness in her each time, knowing that while his children tucked spools of wool into the back of his cart they were thinking of what she would later recognize as a great unraveling—the empty chair at the head of the dinner table, the kindle they'd gather alone, their mother's lonesomeness leaking like maple sap from a wood wound.