Someone – and let’s assume it wasn’t Anya – had strewn scented pine cones throughout her sponsored apartment. Floor grates and bookshelves and piles of perfectly folded kitchen towels masked by industrial cinnamon. Even her dust smelled aggressively delicious.
She was seated in the kitchen, a solitary vine winding its way towards scarce, slatted sunlight behind her. Anya casually cocked her head and gently fingered the silver pebble in her right ear. She’d clearly plagiarized the look.
“White creeping thyme,” Anya blurted. “It reminds me of the concrete stepping stones outside the church.”
“The one where we parked?”
“Of course. Do you remember the hand-painted sign? I’ve never seen such brilliant whites and blacks.”
“It was so dusty – dry red clay riding the wind. Was it, what, early fall?”
“Remember? I was wearing your gray sweater. The one you gave me the first night behind my parent’s house.”
“Definitely remember the look on your sister’s face when we came back in.”
“Anyway. I still think I heard ‘In the Garden’ coming from the church that morning.”
Anya shifted, lips parted, ear untouched. She remembers what I can’t – the trebled plink of a church piano long past tuning, the lone woman’s longing voice meant for someone else. She quotes, from a place I’d never seen, “I’d stay in the garden with him / though the night around me be falling / but he bids me go through the voice of woe.”
“I just remember the wind.”
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