Afton Montgomery

True Novel, Lacking Chronology

7pm. Though everyone’s supposed to help, Daniel will arrive to communal dinner at 10pm with nothing but a pineapple he just nabbed from somewhere and no way to slice it. We will all be full and our forearms worn from using butter knives to cut the squash and the chicken breasts, which were skin on, bone in, and whose detritus will have to go all the way out to the bins on the curb tonight. Maybe we’ll tell Daniel to carry the sacks out, as penance, the minute he walks in the door, or maybe we’ll ignore his laughing lateness off like it’s nothing.

Tuesday. Tulips go in the ground behind the house. Hard to call them tulips when they’re just brown lumps, giant chestnuts, but we insist it. I insist it, I mean. At the very least, they will be called tulips. No one else cares to look at them, to call them anything at all.

Before. Jon is the name I’ve given to the one whose name I forget. Surely someone remembers what his name is, but it seems sort of insufferable to ask. We’ll all know I’m only asking so I can write it down.

Middle of the night. Some of us are assigned to the dumpsters that we know are good, and some are assigned to update the binder of dumpsters that have been good in the past and whose status we will soon know in the present tense. The padlocks on the supermarkets’ waste are multiplying, chiming their metal laughs. We split ourselves. Some find muffins in sealed containers, a trash bag inside a trash bag of clean bell peppers tossed by color. The others find padlock on 8th Street Trader Joe’s, padlock on downtown Whole Foods, padlock on Oregon Blvd, still none on the wide road down south. We update the binder, return it to the shelf.

October. Notes toward the autobiography collect in a sideways stack of papers in the shed, amongst the piled bricks we’ve gathered from the Habitat for Humanity outlet over the months. They’re the broken ones, measured by truck bed not by count. One day we’ll arrange them in order and give them grout to hold onto.

Middle. Vanessa makes butter in the yard when she can’t sleep. She smashes it with lavender and honey and leaves it on the table for us, with a loaf.

Sun in Libra. The heads of flowers come off with a pinch or with Celia’s shears. We pick their seeds into five-by-five quilt squares, whose corners we knot with twine for next year.

6am. The things we can see from here are a steeple, the stone dome of the Capitol, the sky carefully cutting out the complicated edges of conifers and bald maples in half light. We’re telling our dreams from last night but only one sentence each so that they become one timeless story. I was wearing cross-country skis. Pause. The basket was filled with marshmallows. Corin points to Celia. In the hallway, there was a little boy I didn’t recognize and shoes hung from every nail on the wall instead of pictures. It’s hard to keep track of my own words amidst so many other illusions. There was an accident, but I only remember after. Only enough time for a fragment. Then the basket was empty, and the sun got too bright to see.

Only. Jon is standing in the upstairs window, yelling something, and Daniel is standing in the yard below. Soon they will switch places, sort of.

Sundays. The autobiography makes all of the decisions for us. We wish for a novel instead.

11:48am. Corin brings the oranges for the orange juice, and we have only the mismatched butter knives that were here before we were. Toilet paper taken from the courthouse and the bank but nothing sharp to cut. Vanessa stabs one fingernail deep into the center of the fruit and squeezes everything from the tunnel she makes. Daniel is laughing from somewhere else in the house, but no one is laughing with him. We have sweet-sour juice in our eyes and in tiny, sticky specks on our cheeks.

The afternoon hours. We don’t miss what we don’t miss, which is the wrong thing to say.

Winter. Jon’s name comes to me in a flash, and I write it down. The bricks are laid now, over the dirt floor in the shed. The grout’s cracked along the edges where we never managed or tried very hard to get the ground flat. There are still some places to stash a note, some little piece of nothing. I forget those who didn’t bring what nourished or what destroyed to this house. Jon was just the one who tried to stop Daniel.

9am. Tulips are bundled in leaf. Waiting. Everyone is a fiction. Wasn’t I the one who watched him fall, from behind?