48

Gardeners
Lio Patrick

He sits with the storm–his only company. Around him, the humid air 
warms his bare arms and legs, although a gust of  cold bursts through and ruffles his 
grimy T-shirt every few minutes. His long-gone ma’s clock strums inside the house, 
nailed just above the front door. The sun is invisible. Wind blows as if  the whole 
world is sighing into his face. His fingernails scrape the wooden arms of  his chair 
as he holds them tight, and he leans back as it rocks beneath him, nice and slow. 
Under the shifting weight, the floorboards cry. Rain comes down hard, unabashed, 
and endless.

The old man closes his eyes to hear the storm better. It’s not too far now. 
He knows it by the aches in his limbs and the thrumming of  thunder in time with 
his heartbeat. Storms like this come through every June. They always have, at 
least for the seventy-six years he’s been around to witness them. But they’ve been 
getting worse for a couple years. Everyone that once was here is gone now. Bucky 
and Alma, Jodie, Muriel, his ma and pa, and Christopher—they all gave up on the 
creaky, broken house, and found better places to die. The house, and everything 
with it, is his sole responsibility. And it might just blow away someday in a storm 
like this. Maybe he’ll be inside when it happens. With the raging thunder getting 
closer, faster than his heart now, he wonders if  today will be the day. He opens his 
eyes to see lightning tear the sky down the middle.

The wind rushes toward him, spewing cold droplets and ruffling his T-shirt 
again. This time it’s longer and more violent, as if  it wants more than the shirt to 
move. He can picture the flood rolling right up to where he’s waiting, planted on 
his porch like one of  the dead leafy things in the clay pots in the corner. Over the 
roof  and gutters, torrents pour in thick curtains. He can’t see more than a few feet 
of  his front yard even when the curtains are parted, but he knows that the grass is 
drowning. He would get up and do something, if  there were something to do. All 
that planting and caring he did, wasted. He even bought a fertilizer in hopes that 
the green could be made greener. Instead the sky wants to make everything blue.

His earliest memory of  thunder and rain like this is from when he was nine 
years old, in this same house. It is the farthest back he can go in his mind, and the 
image is like an old, water-warped photograph. He remembers the noise the clear-
est–thunder like God’s very own drums, lightning like the splitting of  the universe 
into halves. The holy instruments of  unforgiving hail and rain–weather like bullets, 
bearing judgment. He’d been convinced the world was ending. His ma and pa had 
taught him about Armageddon, so that even as a boy, he should have been able to 
recognize it.

He thought it was bad then. Now he just feels foolish. Foolish that he be-
lieved he could keep up a garden, foolish that he thought the house was really his, 
foolish that he imagined anything in the world was there to stay. There is nothing 
else to do; he sits in Jodie’s old chair, waiting for the storm to come take everything. 
Waiting for God to pull out the weeds.

- Best of  Fiction -