When we move into the apartment, I make note of all the buildings on the block, along the walk that feels like ours.
Four thin homes. Then, the Hi-Point building with its gray slab walls, its gray lawn, and its many tinted rows of mirrored windows.
Nothing along our street is anything worth looking at, but when you look at its reflection, gleaming, through the Hi-Point, everything takes on a warm-gold, just-beginning sort of glow.
Although, the parking lot is filled with split brick, crumbled stone, and shards of glass.
_
Tall weeds grow through the cracks.
Some grow as tall as me.
Some, taller.
They grow on and up and they grow into their reflections.
They sway back and forth like pale, pleasant winds, a kind of gentle bobbing bound in movements from some world that I cannot see.
They bob their heads, like stems sprung, springs of movements made of ether, made of shine, some wave that seems to rise up from the glass.
A sense of nothingness waves to me through their warm gold-lit reflections.
Hello, says the nothing.
Hello, hello, hello.
_
I pass the Hi-Point every day on my way to and from the store.
Hello, hello, hello.
Hello, hello, hello.
I go with empty bags, then I return with full ones, and I see this emptiness, then fullness, as reflected in these windows.
Hello, hello.
Hello, hello, the nothing bobs and gleams.
Hello, hello, hello.
Hello, hello, hello.
I start to feel I am on the verge of knowing something new.
I start to feel like I’m part of some strange process.
_
I leave with empty bags, then full.
Empty, then full.
Hello.
The sky turns blue, then gray, but always warm-gold through the Hi-Point windows.
You take another business trip.
Another business trip.
I buy a little less.
My bags return less and less full.
_
In the morning, I watch as you sleep, as you wake, as you breathe through the space between sleeping and waking. You breathe deep, then light, as the sun starts to rise, to come in through the curtain.
A few small flakes of skin push through your chin, your cheeks.
Small spears of hair through which your frail skin shines like broken glass.
_
I fill my bags with oranges and apples, green and red.
When I bite into them, my teeth begin to bleed.
I fill my bags with bottles of wine, red and white.
I line the empty bottles in a clumsy, green, black barricade against the door.
You take a business trip.
You take another business trip.
I buy new nylons, dangle them above my head before the light.
Imagine walking through the world on these strange, flat, legless legs.
I pass the Hi-Point, watch my gold legs shimmer.
Sad, flat, pointless gleam.
_
You take a business trip.
You take another business trip.
I take my time to get whichever ways I do not need to go.
I take my time selecting things I do not need, then buy.
Then, take them home.
I buy a new, bright blue umbrella.
Then, the sky begins to rain.
_
It rains and rains and rains. Your coffee cup sits still, now, as my finger stirs the emptiness around in it. The dregs. I feel a gentle vapidness amid these unsipped fragments, like the soils from some plant that wouldn’t grow.
I wash my hands. The soap is filled with strands of hair, both mine and yours, like fine black fractures set in cool white bars of bone.
I feel my own bones, hard beneath the vagueness of their movement.
Crack the window, now, to smell the bits that rise up with the rain.
_
While you are gone—another business trip—they tear the Hi-Point down.
Day one: they break the windows into shards of glass and long, gray slabs.
Day two: they clear the innards, tubes and wire, tangled sheets and strands, soft tufts of snowy, pastel piles of insulation.
Day three: they slam into the building’s metal skeleton, completing their destruction, their construction of an empty space.
I leave with empty bags.
Then full.
I stop.
I glance.
I look into the space.
My bones feel brittle and my bags feel heavy.
_
The rain clears.
You return.
The empty lot remains.
I pass the lot.
Empty, then full.
Empty, then full.
Empty, then full.
I glance at what remains, now crumbled dust.
No weeds.
No warm-lit nothing.
Bright skies.
Bigger, now.
An unreflected blue.
Meghan Lamb lives with her partner in St. Louis, where she studies and teaches at Washington University. her novella Sacramento was recently released on Solar Luxuriance. Her book Silk Flowers is forthcoming soon from Birds of Lace. Her work can also be found in Necessary Fiction, Spork, wigleaf, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, and other places.