After the Deluge	Download PDF Version
ALAN SOLDOFSKY
Published in Red Rock Review - Issue 13, Spring 2003
He's there in the backyard waiting for the sky to clear. Under the aluminum ramada, he slouches, yawns, as if trying to remember some unimportant something that, anyway, he knew would be forgotten. It's Thursday, nearly four. A few school papers have slid from his backpack onto the lawn. They lie amidst the unmowed flower heads, rain-sponged skeletons of thistle and buckthorn, blown-out dandelions, the ruins of summer. This is the world created for him. A brown butterfly, wings rusted shut, clings to the underside of a branch of the bare Japanese plum. When he tries to coax it onto his finger, it falls to earth with his touch, like a Rosicrucian hope. If he could invent a companion, would he still try out these postures of boredom? Perhaps he's thought there is no one who remembers being with him that day in the cypress grove where he found the monarchs clinging together like braids of paper in the mist and called everyone over to see what the sea breeze could not blow down. What discoveries of risk. In the dimming afternoon he watches the arc of clouds, wind riffling the palms, and touches with his fingertips a red splotch that has formed on the side of his chin, then extends his hand in front of him to test if the air is dry enough to go out in.

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