The Red Envelope
She stands by a church at the top of a hill with a spire dwarfed by the eucalyptus and wild grains near an open quarry that stand taller than her child and resemble the straw on which they slept for seven nights.
Her breasts ache, going dry, her hands ache as they pass over the flaking paint of a railing.
She waits for a red envelope, a benevolence. She has received it with a heart-shaped card before, knows what it contains, the gifts, cards, cash, survival, and imagines the faces of those who fill an envelope, shiny-headed elderly, common working John and Jane Does, stable, with houses or apartments, places to call home, who avoid the random terror she experiences.
Inside the sanctuary, she peeks at the old chairs stacked in fours with a worn sepia patina, then climbs two steps to a stage where a drum set sits behind plexiglass. Behind the drums, she spins the chair up, takes up two beaten sticks, clicks them against the snare, and beats the bass drum with the kick.
Her child comes and pats both toms, grows bored, and runs up and down the aisles like a plane circling to land.
May you never land, the mother whispers. A swung hammer flashes through her mind, the sudden impact not of iron on flesh but the distance the impact brings, the marriage severed. She clutches her shoulder, thinks how stupid she had been not to hide money, not to insist on joint ownership. I fled, she says, to herself, but corrects to I am fleeing, always fleeing, one site to another, anonymous, avoiding the hammer. She has made her daughter into a buoy in the ocean, something to clutch, to hold fast, not to prevent the child from drowning, but herself.
Wild small magenta plums hang from two trees in the back lot of the church and she plies five plums not pierced by robins or yellowjackets from a lower branch and first shines four on her blue skirt, opens them with her front teeth, pushes out the stone seeds and drops them, giving the stones life by pressing them into the soil as if putting out the stub of a cigarette. She hands her daughter the three plums, saving one for herself.
The woman who works the church front office returns, her feet not making a sound on the walk, hands her the red envelope and asks if she’d like a cup of coffee.
It's good, the coffee, the churchwoman says, as if surprised, then asks if she can give the woman a hug.
Yes, the word leaps out of the mother’s mouth without thought, as if a reflex, and the churchwoman, smaller than she is, envelops her, like earth the stone of a plum.
The mother could weep right then, weep over the coffee, or the plums, or how silently the churchwoman stepped on pavement, or the awkwardness of the hug, or her child still an airplane on back grass, or weep over nothing, but she catches herself, bites her lower lip, tastes the plum skin, the acrid stones, steadies, drops first one hand with the red envelope and then the other into the skirt pockets like two spades put away after planting.
© Jeff Burt
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Jeff Burt
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Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and Labrador that dreams of being a plow horse. He has contributed to the Williwaw Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Red Wolf Editions, and numerous other publications. He has two chapbooks available and a book of poetry scheduled for release in October. More can be found at http://www.jeff-burt.com.
