Now

So today Mena’s got a bucket, and a bright, sharp trowel, and a scary-sharp gleam in her eye. Rain’s streaming down, and the air’s thick and gray. Her nails are dirty, and it looks like she hasn’t brushed her hair this week. Nothing unusual there, really. But the bucket, now. The bucket is wooly with condensation, like a window in midwinter.

“I’m off,” she says. “And I think I’m going to be a while. Look after Billy Behind Me, okay?”

Billy Behind Me is either the imaginary friend who lives on the third step of the front stairs, on the far right, away from the handrail and most people’s footsteps, or a cat she had as a child. Sometimes he’s both.

“What are you up to?” 

She shakes her head.

“Damn it, Mena. What’s in the bucket?”

She walks away, heading toward the road, toward the world. I follow, not to stop her, but just to get a look. I only want to see.

The rain is hot. The air is thick.

And Mena’s bucket is cold. A mist is coming off it, the tenuous white of winter breath.

“There’s very little point talking to her when she’s like this.”

I don’t turn around because I need to keep Mena in sight, but I know that it’s Billy, off his step for once, trotting behind me. His voice is higher than I expected.

And Mena’s walking faster than I would have thought she could. The soles of her shoes glint silver in the gray afternoon light.

“Do you know what’s in the bucket?” I ask.

Billy is silent for a block, then a block and a bit, and I am sure he’s not going to answer.

Mena, no surprise, doesn’t stop for lights, or cars, or even the woman pushing a stroller with two babies in it, who has to dodge. I’m starting to get out of breath, but I say, “Sorry, sorry,” as I pass her, which doesn’t make it right, but smooths the woman’s frown a little bit.

“Snow.” Billy sounds fine. He’s just cruising along, not puffing, not sweating, the bastard.

“In the bucket?”

“Yeah.”

I suck in air. “Where in the world did she get that?”

“My friend, your guess is as good as mine.”

I suck in more air. “But what’s she going to do with it?”

Again Billy drops into silence, but it’s a sort of…waitful silence.

Up ahead, Mena’s come to a stop. She’s looking around, this way, that way, every way but behind her. She crosses the street and sets the bucket down. Then she kneels, next to a patch of nothing, a break in the sidewalk that might once have homed a slender, hopeful sapling, back in the days when the municipal authorities did that sort of thing. Now it’s just a rectangle of gray dirt, without even a single skinny weed growing in it.

Mena stabs her trowel into the dirt and starts to dig.

“What,” I say. “What the hell.”

Billy lets out a sound that’s close to, but not really, a laugh. He’s feeling the strain too, I guess, however coolly he’s trying to play it.

We’re closer to Mena now, less than half a block away. Whatever she’s doing, it’s scaring me. Maybe I don’t want to see, I think.

Mena’s digging hard, digging deep. The wet earth she’s turning up smells of damp ashes and rotting paper. But the trowel is still bright, and the bucket is steaming. I can feel the cold coming off it, coming out of it, a tingle against my skin.

We go a couple of steps nearer. Three or four, no more.

Mena stops digging. Leaning forward, she peers into the hole. “I don’t need a bodyguard.” She doesn’t look behind her.

I don’t look behind me, either.

“Or any help,” she says, and sticks the trowel into the bucket, deep, then lifts it out, brimming with snow. Bright. Clean. Cleaner than any cloud, than any hospital bedsheet.

That snow did not fall from the sky, Billy whispers.

“Mena. Where did you find that…snow?” It doesn’t even feel like the right word for something so fresh and pure.

“I didn’t.” She tips the trowel over the deep, deep hole in the mucky dirt, and off slides the snow, in one smooth go, into the earth. “It was a gift.” She takes the trowel, the bright, empty trowel, and heaps it with the terrible dirt, and buries the snow, and that hurts so much that I cry out.

“It’s all right,” Mena says.

I think I feel a touch on the back of my hand, but I don’t turn my head.

“Why,” I say. “But why.”

Billy whispers, “She’s planting it.”

“Are you planting it?”

“Yep.” She tamps the soil down with the back of the trowel, then pushes herself to her feet. “This is a good spot. It’ll be safe here.” She lifts her face up to the rain for a moment, then picks up the bucket, which the rain does not come near. “Until.”

“Until?”

She starts walking again. “Until the future.”

But the future is always here, I think. Every second, the future arrives.

She walks on, not a raindrop touching her. “Thought I told you to take care of Billy.”

“I am.”

And there’s the sensation on the back of my hand again, soft, light, almost imperceptible. The voice is also very light, very soft: We’ll be walking all day. Until the bucket is empty. Maybe until dark. Maybe even after that. It’ll be a long time until we get back home.

That’s a lot of untils, I think. But there are even more. How long until the rain stops. How long until a future is here.

Mena is getting farther away again, but I am keeping her in sight. We will walk until, Billy Behind Me and I. She will plant until. The rain is warm, the shadows are slippery. The bucket is bright, a silver beacon. And Billy is holding my hand.

__________

Patricia Russo’s work has appeared in One Art, The Sunlight Press, Vagabond City, The Twin Bird Review, Revolution John, and Metachrosis Literary.