Every Saturday, Lukas received a small allowance from his grandfather. It was never much, but it was enough for little adventures. One morning, he decided not to spend the money right away. Instead, he took a notebook and went to the old yard behind the house. There were apple trees, an old well, and a weathered bench.
Lukas sat down and began to write stories. He wrote about pirates sailing on clouds. He wrote about cats playing chess. He wrote about a fox who studied astronomy. With every page, he enjoyed writing more and more. After several hours, the notebook was almost full. His grandfather came by and sat beside him. He asked what Lukas had been doing all day.
Lukas proudly showed him the many pages. The old man turned through them carefully. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes he nodded thoughtfully. When he had finished, he handed the notebook back. Lukas seemed content.
That evening, he knew the day had been better than any shopping trip.
The doors rolled, Clank, Clank, Clank, every morning at 4:36. Followed by the annoying voice of the duty officer over a crackling PA. “This morning announcement, everyone out, file out to the rec’ yard. Inspection day, move it girls”.
“Damn inspection day, seems like they're doing this once a week now.” sputtered my “celly” as he fell from his top bunk perch.
“Come on Manuel, it'll give us a chance to get out of this hellhole for a while. Get out and see some sunshine “. Besides, all they want to do is just go through all of our stuff and see what kind of content we're stashing.
“No sunshine today Manuel”. Cloudy and rainy, our white dungarees be soakin’ wet after a while. I think they do it just because we can't get dry clothes until after showers tonight.
At least it won't be so hot on the floor. “But damn, Manuel, you gone a be stinking by then”.
By the time they let us back in it was time for chow. Our meager allotment of dried eggs, a tortilla and some green shit. Not sure what it was but it didn't look very tasty. Once we got back to the cell Manuel was starting to wreak pretty bad. Nobody said life in the county jail was supposed to be pretty.
Every Sunday since the funeral there was a five-dollar bill under the flat stone by the fence, and Dale learned early not to ask who left it.
She was eleven the first time. She'd gone out at dawn because she couldn't sleep in a house that had gotten so much quieter, and there it was, folded into a tight green square the way her father folded everything, down to the corners of her birthday paper. She told herself it was the wind. The next Sunday she told herself it was a neighbor. By the fourth she stopped telling herself anything and spent it: gum, a paperback, once a plastic ring that turned her finger the color of a bruise.
Her father never mentioned it. He sat at the kitchen window with his coffee going cold and watched her cross the yard and crouch by the stone, and his face stayed so empty that she came to understand the emptiness itself was the instruction. Don't. So she didn't.
The amount climbed the year she turned fourteen. Ten dollars, then twenty, as if someone were keeping pace with her, with the things an older girl wants and might go looking for if she didn't have them. She started to think of it as an allowance, though nothing had been allowed out loud. It was simply a fact of the yard, like the lilac coming back, like the fence leaning a little further into the neighbor's every winter.
She was seventeen when she lifted the stone on a Saturday, a day early, when there was nothing under it yet to take.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected. Some machinery of grief, some answer folded into the ground. There was only the bare scrape of dirt where tomorrow's bill would lie. She had never once dug. She dug now. A hand's depth down, her fingers found the lid of a coffee tin. Inside, a stack of bills gone soft as cloth, and beneath them, where the rust had eaten through, one photograph. Her mother in a yard that wasn't this yard, younger than Dale was now, laughing at something past the edge of the frame, one hand lifted as if to say that's enough, you've had your fun.
On the back, in her father's small, square handwriting: In case I forget what content looks like.
She put it all back. Tamped the dirt, set the stone square to the fence, exactly as it had been. Then she went in and made two cups of coffee and carried one to the window, and her father took it without looking at her, and they watched the empty grass go gold as the light came up over the lilac, and neither of them said one word.
She's grown now. Her father is the one who's gone, and the house is hers, and at dawn it's quiet again.
But every Sunday she folds a five-dollar bill into a tight green square and sets it under the stone, square to the fence. For no one.
"Every Sunday since the funeral there was a five-dollar bill under the flat stone by the fence, and Dale learned early not to ask who left it." Is such a good opening: it poses so many questions in one simple sentence. I really enjoyed this story, thank you for sharing it with us.
The allowance landed on the first, before I woke, so that the first thing I did every month was reach for my phone and watch the number arrive like weather. He never sent it late. He never sent a note. A note would have made it a gift, and we had agreed, without ever saying the words, that it was not a gift.
I made content out of what it bought. The flat with the river in the window. Peonies I bought for myself and arranged as if they'd come from him. A cup of coffee I let go cold because a full cup photographs better than an empty one. Thirty thousand strangers watched me be content. And I was good at content.
His name was Gerald, he was sixty-three, and he folded his reading glasses shut before he answered any question, every time, as if each answer cost something he wanted to feel himself spend. He had a house an hour north with a yard you could have parked my childhood in: lawns the flat green of money, a wall of lime trees, a gardener I never once saw, trees older than the both of us put together. Weekends I drove up. I learned the forks. I learned to look interested, and sometimes I was, which unsettled me more than the boredom ever had.
It went on like that for a year, frictionless, the way a thing is frictionless when everyone is being paid.
Then one Sunday in the yard I made a mistake.
We were walking the long lawn down to the limes and he was telling me about the trees, the years they take to come to anything, and I wasn't performing. The sun was on the back of my neck and I forgot, for a second, to arrange my face, and I told him a true thing. Something small. That behind our house there'd been a yard the size of a parked car, and my mother had grown tomatoes in it, in buckets, more than the two of us could ever eat. Nothing tragic. Just mine.
He listened with his glasses already folded in his hand. When I finished he smiled and told me, in the same voice he'd used for the trees, that he liked me best in the blue dress, the one from Florence, and asked would I wear it to dinner.
And I understood the arrangement completely, for the first time, standing in a yard that wasn't mine.
I'd thought I was selling him the river in the window and the cold coffee and the peonies I bought myself. I wasn't. He was paying for the smooth bright surface of a girl who had no yard behind any house, no mother, no buckets of tomatoes, nothing under the content but more content. The real thing was the only thing not for sale here. I'd carried it around the whole year like unsold stock, certain it was the part of me he couldn't have, when it was only the part he had no use for.
I wore the blue dress. I always wore the blue dress.
The allowance still lands on the first, like rent. I photograph the life it buys, and thirty thousand strangers tell me I look happy, and I have stopped, almost entirely, being able to tell whether they're wrong.
Every Saturday, Lukas received a small allowance from his grandfather. It was never much, but it was enough for little adventures. One morning, he decided not to spend the money right away. Instead, he took a notebook and went to the old yard behind the house. There were apple trees, an old well, and a weathered bench.
Lukas sat down and began to write stories. He wrote about pirates sailing on clouds. He wrote about cats playing chess. He wrote about a fox who studied astronomy. With every page, he enjoyed writing more and more. After several hours, the notebook was almost full. His grandfather came by and sat beside him. He asked what Lukas had been doing all day.
Lukas proudly showed him the many pages. The old man turned through them carefully. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes he nodded thoughtfully. When he had finished, he handed the notebook back. Lukas seemed content.
That evening, he knew the day had been better than any shopping trip.
The doors rolled, “Clank, Clank, Clank”,
Dried eggs, old tortillas and some green shit
The doors rolled, Clank, Clank, Clank, every morning at 4:36. Followed by the annoying voice of the duty officer over a crackling PA. “This morning announcement, everyone out, file out to the rec’ yard. Inspection day, move it girls”.
“Damn inspection day, seems like they're doing this once a week now.” sputtered my “celly” as he fell from his top bunk perch.
“Come on Manuel, it'll give us a chance to get out of this hellhole for a while. Get out and see some sunshine “. Besides, all they want to do is just go through all of our stuff and see what kind of content we're stashing.
“No sunshine today Manuel”. Cloudy and rainy, our white dungarees be soakin’ wet after a while. I think they do it just because we can't get dry clothes until after showers tonight.
At least it won't be so hot on the floor. “But damn, Manuel, you gone a be stinking by then”.
By the time they let us back in it was time for chow. Our meager allotment of dried eggs, a tortilla and some green shit. Not sure what it was but it didn't look very tasty. Once we got back to the cell Manuel was starting to wreak pretty bad. Nobody said life in the county jail was supposed to be pretty.
I really liked this - thanks for sharing!
The Going Rate
Every Sunday since the funeral there was a five-dollar bill under the flat stone by the fence, and Dale learned early not to ask who left it.
She was eleven the first time. She'd gone out at dawn because she couldn't sleep in a house that had gotten so much quieter, and there it was, folded into a tight green square the way her father folded everything, down to the corners of her birthday paper. She told herself it was the wind. The next Sunday she told herself it was a neighbor. By the fourth she stopped telling herself anything and spent it: gum, a paperback, once a plastic ring that turned her finger the color of a bruise.
Her father never mentioned it. He sat at the kitchen window with his coffee going cold and watched her cross the yard and crouch by the stone, and his face stayed so empty that she came to understand the emptiness itself was the instruction. Don't. So she didn't.
The amount climbed the year she turned fourteen. Ten dollars, then twenty, as if someone were keeping pace with her, with the things an older girl wants and might go looking for if she didn't have them. She started to think of it as an allowance, though nothing had been allowed out loud. It was simply a fact of the yard, like the lilac coming back, like the fence leaning a little further into the neighbor's every winter.
She was seventeen when she lifted the stone on a Saturday, a day early, when there was nothing under it yet to take.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected. Some machinery of grief, some answer folded into the ground. There was only the bare scrape of dirt where tomorrow's bill would lie. She had never once dug. She dug now. A hand's depth down, her fingers found the lid of a coffee tin. Inside, a stack of bills gone soft as cloth, and beneath them, where the rust had eaten through, one photograph. Her mother in a yard that wasn't this yard, younger than Dale was now, laughing at something past the edge of the frame, one hand lifted as if to say that's enough, you've had your fun.
On the back, in her father's small, square handwriting: In case I forget what content looks like.
She put it all back. Tamped the dirt, set the stone square to the fence, exactly as it had been. Then she went in and made two cups of coffee and carried one to the window, and her father took it without looking at her, and they watched the empty grass go gold as the light came up over the lilac, and neither of them said one word.
She's grown now. Her father is the one who's gone, and the house is hers, and at dawn it's quiet again.
But every Sunday she folds a five-dollar bill into a tight green square and sets it under the stone, square to the fence. For no one.
She doesn't watch to see who comes for it.
So far, every Monday, it has been gone.
"Every Sunday since the funeral there was a five-dollar bill under the flat stone by the fence, and Dale learned early not to ask who left it." Is such a good opening: it poses so many questions in one simple sentence. I really enjoyed this story, thank you for sharing it with us.
Thank you 🙏 🙏
The Blue Dress
The allowance landed on the first, before I woke, so that the first thing I did every month was reach for my phone and watch the number arrive like weather. He never sent it late. He never sent a note. A note would have made it a gift, and we had agreed, without ever saying the words, that it was not a gift.
I made content out of what it bought. The flat with the river in the window. Peonies I bought for myself and arranged as if they'd come from him. A cup of coffee I let go cold because a full cup photographs better than an empty one. Thirty thousand strangers watched me be content. And I was good at content.
His name was Gerald, he was sixty-three, and he folded his reading glasses shut before he answered any question, every time, as if each answer cost something he wanted to feel himself spend. He had a house an hour north with a yard you could have parked my childhood in: lawns the flat green of money, a wall of lime trees, a gardener I never once saw, trees older than the both of us put together. Weekends I drove up. I learned the forks. I learned to look interested, and sometimes I was, which unsettled me more than the boredom ever had.
It went on like that for a year, frictionless, the way a thing is frictionless when everyone is being paid.
Then one Sunday in the yard I made a mistake.
We were walking the long lawn down to the limes and he was telling me about the trees, the years they take to come to anything, and I wasn't performing. The sun was on the back of my neck and I forgot, for a second, to arrange my face, and I told him a true thing. Something small. That behind our house there'd been a yard the size of a parked car, and my mother had grown tomatoes in it, in buckets, more than the two of us could ever eat. Nothing tragic. Just mine.
He listened with his glasses already folded in his hand. When I finished he smiled and told me, in the same voice he'd used for the trees, that he liked me best in the blue dress, the one from Florence, and asked would I wear it to dinner.
And I understood the arrangement completely, for the first time, standing in a yard that wasn't mine.
I'd thought I was selling him the river in the window and the cold coffee and the peonies I bought myself. I wasn't. He was paying for the smooth bright surface of a girl who had no yard behind any house, no mother, no buckets of tomatoes, nothing under the content but more content. The real thing was the only thing not for sale here. I'd carried it around the whole year like unsold stock, certain it was the part of me he couldn't have, when it was only the part he had no use for.
I wore the blue dress. I always wore the blue dress.
The allowance still lands on the first, like rent. I photograph the life it buys, and thirty thousand strangers tell me I look happy, and I have stopped, almost entirely, being able to tell whether they're wrong.