Year of the Snake

Loneliness

9 Loneliness My father made me keep the bright orange Sanka cans, with holes in the lids for ventilation, on the back porch overnight. But by morning, sunlight had steeped my frogs like tea bags, their bodies hot to touch as I laid them out under the Nanking cherry trees and tried to revive them with cold water from the garden hose. When my father took them away to bury, my mother asked me not to cry. That night was the Fourth of July, and my mother and father and I went up to the attic to watch the fireworks, each with a plate-sized circle of watermelon. I remember the rusty smell of metal and dirt from the attic screen windows, which were rarely opened; how they were littered with the clear, silver skins of mayflies, who had shed 10 the boundaries of their old bodies so easily. I remember how silent it was in between the sporadic, bass-drum putter and teakettle whistling of the fireworks, and how, like some exotic, spangled night-blooming radiance, desolation flowered again and again over the roofs of our neighbors’ houses. ...