Please edit the shit out of this
i just wrote a dumb quick little piece to submit to the campus literary magazine tomorrow. please lay into it with bared teeth. I don’t have a title either. I was thinking “Seasons”, because pretty soon there aren’t going to be any anymore.
“It got down to 28 degrees in January,” he told me. “It snowed.”
“That’s just unnatural for New Orleans,” I marveled.
“It hasn’t happened in like, seventy years,” he said. “The frost killed my banana tree.”
“That’s because the world is ending,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I went along the sidewalk, half-exuberant and half-dragging, toward the cafe I was half-sure would be closed for Ash Wednesday. That is what these religious but quasi-Pagan towns do: they burn wild, and then everything is quiet. I stopped in front of my landmark, that place on the corner where I had given a girl a cigarette weeks before because the whole pack had only cost me a dollar fifty. I had been even farther south then, when I had bought them, no representation without taxation and all that from my father.
I retraced my month-old steps to the left and just as quickly paused in front of conjoined triplet limbs of sawed-off palm stumps. The frost must have claimed those too, but they had been salvaged. That, or euthanized with all proper sympathies. Their fibrous round surfaces glistened in the sun as I pitied them. Rot, I was sure. I touched my fingers to the slick, expecting to pull away the slow muskiness of decay. I brought my fingers to my nose and breathed.
The smell was fresh; not quite sweet, but new. Life. I rubbed my moistened fingers to my thumb and they slid. Nearby, I took a twig under my thumb to snap. Its bareness had my muscle memory primed for the familiar hollow disconnect, the emptiness inside and bark flaking across my palm. The tiny branch returned my pressure and bounded to resume its shape, bald but fat with laden sinews, against my imposition.
This city is alive, I tell my father, but he doesn’t know what I mean.
