Page 96 - Vol. VI #1

The Dying Kind (continued from page 63)
for which she almost immediately felt sorry. Mrs. Harper’s upper torso swung forward wildly, and Sheila had to reach out and grab a shoulder to keep her in the chair. Mrs. Harper fumbled behind her, finally grabbing Sheila’s wrist with a surpris- ing amount of force. She crooked her neck back and stared at her with one magnified and watery blue eye.
kept pushing it back in a futile, repetitive gesture. He dragged the rake over the grass, letting the mulch bits popcorn against the tines and jump out of the rake’s path. He probably moved ten pieces of mulch to the main pile under the trunk, and scattered another ten on the grass. It was the most inefficient raking Sheila had ever seen.
“Watch it,” she said with utter clarity.
“He needs to cut his hair,” Sheila said to Mrs. Harper.
Sheila gave her hand a squeeze. The guilt washed all but a remnant of the anger away, and replaced it with self-loathing. Her anger, once acted upon, always felt misdirected and dangerous.
Mrs. Harper sighed, and Sheila saw her shoulders slump in the chair. She noticed the old woman’s short silver-white hair was matted in the back. Dora hadn’t bothered to comb it today.
“Sorry, Mrs. Harper. Look, there’s the tree.”
After a bit more futile raking, Randall leaned on
Randall kicked some errant wood chips into the pile around the base of the tree trunk. Sheila hadn’t noticed the tree before, but she now noted how it looked like a large version of a dried-out Christmas tree left on the curb for too long. Its brown and grey needles drooped in patches interspersed with green ones that were not yet infected.
“Did you kill him?” Randall gave
the same kind of mean chuckle his mother had on the lawn.”
“That tree’s going to have to go, Ma,” Randall said.
Sheila pushed the wheelchair to the edge of the driveway, where a passageway had been cut into the box hedge, providing a good view of the yard and pine tree.
the rake handle, small sweat stains forming underneath the arms of his dark green polo shirt and dust sticking to his khaki pants.
Mrs. Harper leaned forward, staring at the tree like the Book of Life was written on its trunk and she was trying to find her name. Randall disap- peared around the side of the house, and returned with a wood-handled rake. He dragged the rake over the thick green grass, picking up small pieces of mulch and bringing them to the main pile. Mrs. Harper’s shrubs were cut into neat squares, and
“It’s like I have three jobs,” he said. “I go to work at HomeMart, I come here and help Ma, and I go home and get yelled at by Christine. I shouldn’t have gotten married, should I, Ma?”
a tree in the corner had been cut in the style of a poodle, its mostly bare branches capped in green balls of foliage, like leafy pompoms or some tree from the imagination of Dr. Seuss. Sheila and Mrs. Harper watched Randall half-heartedly clean up the yard. His dark hair, long and loose on top and shaved in the back, kept falling in his eyes and he
Christine was Randall’s wife, and he seemed to put as little energy and work into their marriage as he did raking the mulch from the grass, which is to say not much. Sheila wondered if he worked hard at HomeMart, selling mobile homes out of gravel lot in a sketchy stretch of Admiral Boule- vard in east Tulsa or if he also carried out those
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