Hint of Spring

HINT OF SPRING / Steven Bauer At the turn of the year, into '84, when the days succumbed to darkness, then struggled to return, it seemed that everything broke. The superstitious pipes burst in thirteen places, ruining furniture and books. The days were heavy with portents, the sound of plaster being scraped off lath, the noiseless warp of oak exposed to water. Even the dog, panting in her pregnancy. The night she burrowed beneath the bed, she bore eight cellophane sacks and licked them into life. The next day I came home to find she'd tongued the last one's belly so hard it had given way, and in my hand I held just half a dog, just the delicate trace of its ribcage, thinner than birdbones, and its two closed eyes. I thought of all that water, eating away the foundation. But today the air is blue as the hottest flames which burnish our copper pots, and it smells of dirt and hay. I rode the red bike you gave me as fast as I could, turned the corner by the iron bridge and tested myself flat out against pavement and the brown and white dog that raced me to a place where Indian Creek runs wide, its turquoise water as clear as the river in California I thought Td never match. I came home, unable to catch my breath. I can't describe the sun's 244 · The Missouri Review touch on my face. In a month the earth wUl burst with daffodil and iris. Maybe we're coming through. The world could almost maintain such happiness. Steven Bauer The Missouri Review · 245 ...