This entry republishes a short story first seen in the University of Waterloo's literary magazine in 1989. It has since been reworked into becoming the first third of a longer short story that remains, so far, unpublished.

Sitting shirtless on a hard bench, (in a shaded corner of my porch, cooled only slightly by the belief that it would be hotter in the house), I am watching the sun go down. The colors are smeared with fervid abandon across the west, compelling me to ignore my newspaper. The tickle in my nostrils from my neighbor's new-mown grass reminds me of the old translation: "0 Lord, what is man...? His days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth."

Driven by a doubt, I rise to make a quick trip indoors. In the upstairs bathroom hangs the poolside scent of chlorine and suntan lotion as chemically mixed in a roll of floral paper. The paper and the Psalms dent the layer of dust covering the radiator beneath the window. Looking up from the book, I can see two people through the grime on the pane and the vines on the window screen. With my recollection of the text properly polished, I return to my porch observatory.

My next door neighbor Nick rakes freshly-slain grass onto the sidewalk. Stone retaining walls (erected, along with the curbing and the houses themselves, the year we entered the First World War) prevent yards' erosion into the street. Nick towers over the sidewalk from the three-foot wall. It is so hot and dirty this July that the air, as if it had been pressurized, is too murky to shimmer.

Out on the sidewalk Darian, age eighteen months, sits his tricycle with the same aplomb that his imperial namesake bestrode a chariot. Nick rakes the grass down onto Darian in sheets like a great rainstorm. Darian sits still, neither flinching nor objecting, just waiting for the next green shower, while Nick takes forty or so easy strokes. Darian only gurgles when the first blades of each load spatter him, occasionally he wipes his fist across his forehead when eyelashes have been grazed.

In the heat the grass falls especially slowly: each spear separates from its fellows in an expanding torrent. In the thick, orange air the humidity, pollution index, and temperature all stand on the wrong side of ninety. But the sun offers help by dropping away. It fades toward the roof line with dispirited ease. Thus a dignified clergyman would swing open the sanctuary door and let his breath play among the tepid vestments.

The backwash of the falling blades creates a spurious breeze around Darian and his immobile tricycle. His brown hair, as thin as the edges of the grass itself, stirs slightly. Wide-eyed, Darian does not smile, which is a blow to Nick's pride; but at least he does not cry. The sirens and the traffic are not in need of competition.

Ann, Darian's mother, stands in the edges of the fallen sun underneath a bursting crepe myrtle tree. Nick sends one extra-large rakeful onto Darian. Darian tilts his head back, daring to look up at the yard, and says, "Stop, Nick!" in softly rounded syllables made imperative by their sudden energy. Nick halfsmiles at Ann in that conspiracy of adults which finds amusing any child's expression of strong preference. Nick says, "Well, as long as you ask, otherwise I wouldn't," trying to assuage rejection with limp levity.

Nick lives in the basement of, and owns, the house in which Ann rents a room for herself and Darian. (Like Ann I am a renter, not an owner; I borrow porch privileges merely.) Darian seems to own Ann, a fact to which Nick--and Darian's disused father--both object. I have been sleeping with one of the four other people who share Nick's house, but tensions are rising between us. I am waiting on the porch to see her get home from work; wondering which one of our faults we are going to argue about tonight, I contemplate with satisfaction the even distribution of a pile of blame. Meanwhile sun-shards shatter convenient clouds; silent explosions of color mark the roofs and the tops of western trees. No wind whips the soup we all breathe.

The cut grass, all raked from the yard, lies exhausted on the concrete. Darian wheels over to the stop sign on the corner. The rough plastic wheels of his tricycle burn the sidewalk with their effort and sear all nearby ears with their protesting progress. Ann and Nick laugh and move apart, full of separate intentions. If Ann didn't have a child I think Nick would have undertaken a campaign upon her by now.

Standing on the tricycle pedals in a pose from a Persian miniature, Darian is a sun rising at the end of the sidewalk. Nick sweeps the listless grass into a pile. He looks at Darian over his shoulder while sweeping by rote. This is unusual for Nick, who normally concentrates on everything he does with an intensity characteristic of masked anger. Radiant Darian doesn't care whether his smile at his own agility is mistaken by Nick for one of gratitude.

Ann goes into the house after asking Nick to take charge. Darian is always, in a house of six people to only one of whom is he blood-related, given into the specific custody of a named adult person. Ann works in a hospital and treats childrearing as an affair requiring some of the same procedures as the post-operative room. She isn't cold about it, just frightened into meticulous caution.

Despite being a high-school teacher, Nick retains a residual respect for spontaneous gaiety, even in much younger persons placed under his authority. Nick therefore will let play continue until it becomes too loud, too long, or too dangerous. Having attended many schools, Nick has a sufficiency of definitions for each of these categories. He prevents Darian's turning the corner.

I can imagine Nick giving Darian a lecture about weeds. Peering through the gloom of my unemployment, wrapped in the bitterness of awaiting a woman whom I do not want to see tonight, I have enough material to occupy this idle moment. However, I would much rather sit on the hard bench in the falling sun and pretend to overhear Nick talking to Darian.

"These plants," holding out a fistful of weeds, "grow too fast and take too much land. So we throw them out. What we are growing instead is grass, which you can tell from weeds because it is thinner, harder to grow, and costs money instead of showing up uninvited." If I squint my eyes through the pulpy air, I can see across the street to where some mental patients promenade in front of their halfway-house's wrought iron fence. If I look to my right, beyond the porch rail veiled in rose-runners, Darian and Nick are acolyte and minister: Darian peacocks back and forth on his tricycle while Nick ritually sweeps the sidewalk.

"Weeds have rough edges," showing little welts across sides and backs of hands, "and will not move on unless threatened. The one-at-a-time manual method of weed control is the only guaranteed application against lawn death." Gesture at empty brown patch of yard underneath crepe myrtle. "You must touch the dirt to control plants' growth." My hands are smeared with newsprint; I wipe them on my sweaty legs below my cutoffs and leave broad smudges there.

Darian has rolled across the driveway dividing my porch from Nick's. Darian is experimentally running into the stone wall, backing off, and running into it again, as though it might decide to move if he were patient. Nick is almost through with his tasks. I avoid looking left lest I see someone walking home toward Nick's from the bus after work.

"When you pull up the plants that you do not wish to see, you knock the soil off their roots back into the hole you have just made," hitting the root-ball with the trowel, "because good dirt is precious and must be kept in the yard where it will be useful. Then your weed looks like an old German handgrenade; and if you flip it into the air, just so, it will loop the loop. You can't get all the dirt out and one end is heavier."

A weed lands at Darian's feet. He moves over to it, picks it up, and rhythmically pounds it on the handlebars of the tricycle while making faces. A small pillar of dust arises from his exertions and sticks to his face and hands.

Passing from the moist darkness of the house onto the faded porch, Ann hears Darian say, "Weeed? Weeeeed? Weeeeeeed?" in that rising tone a human uses for urgent inquiry. She looks down the steps onto Nick's bent back; sweat holds his shirt to his airless skin with te weight of centuries multiplied by light-years. Farther down she sees Darian's head helmeted by the hair lying pasted to his skull by the weight of the day. Ann says, "Come on inside, Darian; I think it's cooler." Darian looks up at the sound of her voice and lets the clump fall at his feet.

Nick points to the house and for inspiration gives the Viet-Nam era cry of "Hey-yo!" Running into the handrail for a brake, Darian has come to the steps in three powerful pushes, not even bothering to use the pedals. He clambers off the tricycle and up the steps to Ann; he grabs her leg at the calf and turns around to look down at Nick with her. Ann inflects her parting "OK" equably, generally, omnidirectionally; and she goes inside with Darian.

Nick picks up the last tuft and throws it into the street. He has been so careful to gather the raked grass and weeds into a pile, and to transfer the pile to his trash can, that throwing away a token weed is a gesture of defiance.

No one I know has come from the bus yet; the last of the light drains into the whirlpool night. I can't even try to read my newspaper any more. Suburban wheels grind past the houses, belching their illtemper upon the innocent bricks.

On the balustrade the roses are in a fallow period. I did not count how many times they bloomed this year. The canes, dotted with blown flowers, give no perfume to mask the exudations of the evening. Had I kept the roses plucked all summer they would have bloomed more frequently, and perhaps be blooming now. The porch is a denuded altar and I am an indifferent worshipper. When I get up to go inside, the bench clings to my naked back and pulls away like a bandage. The shadow of an asparagus fern wavers from a window at Nick's in the false breeze cast by a candle.

In the kitchen I take a shot of bourbon, neat, leaving the white wine (which I bought in a transient moment of gaiety) unopened in the icebox. Against a next-door lover it would be as futile an act to disconnect the doorbell as to take the phone off the hook. Downstairs being available to me owing to the absence of my two landlords, I settle down with a book at the kitchen table, rather than in my room, so that at least my presence may not be betrayed by the light.

However, the taking of precautions does not exempt me from any pain. Although they succeed to the extent that she doesn't come over that night, my evasive maneuvers only temporarily distract me from acknowledging that I have decided to abandon her. I never directly tell her. The following week I borrow some money to travel to a cousin's wedding, leaving my message for her in the crude form of the symbolism of sudden absence.