We rent a furnished room now.  Here’s our potluck inheritance: gangly lamps with corduroy shades.  Curtains of musty tweed.  Trampled shag carpet.  Fuzzy couch marked with cigarette burns, the impression of your body, the tension of nights in separate rooms when you sulk and I quiver like a piano wire.  Plastic coffee table.  A mélange of peach and coral and rust.  Psychedelic harvest tones must have been big the year these choices were made.  More garish than anything I’ve seen since the summer we went south and stayed with your great-aunt in her turquoise mobile home.  She made us meat loaf sandwiches, told us we could borrow her car, her golf clubs, even her clothes.  Living with her meant flooding the toilet three times a week and tripping over troughs of birdseed; a string of smoking appliances tended by sweaty repairmen who blew smoke rings of their own; learning to walk sideways and the end of privacy.  Close quarters and her long hall no wider than a telephone book, I had to keep my back against the wall.  But the old lady was an unflagging optimist; whenever something went wrong, she waved her hand and chirped, “No guarantees.” 

I sought refuge outside.  An obligatory pair of flamingoes menaced the astroturf yard, made-in-Taiwan and eternally bending one knee, eternally gazing at each other, beak to beak.  If falling in love was only a matter of proximity and time, surely I would have seen them break the staring match, peck and nibble each other with affection.  Inside, garrulous parakeets had free range and the old lady kept her aquarium by the microwave.  You told me she was a licensed breeder of tropical fish who sometimes concocted a new breed.  I thought her fish seemed to have extra fins, like stuck-together wads of neon clay.  Maybe it was radiation from the oven; maybe your great-aunt knew something about genes. 

And then the beachcombing business didn’t go the way you planned.  You would have thought I was a Geiger counter if you had heard my heart tick, I wanted so badly to believe everything you said.

Based out of Iowa State University, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction exploring the many complicated facets of the word environment – at once rural, urban, and suburban – and its social and political implications.