They are in their garden, the sustained pleasant spring weather affording them further opportunity to continue establishing this year’s floral border in front of their house, and to bed in whatever few decorative and colourful plants the limited space affords.
They work intent, both kneeling and bent double, only to find themselves suddenly distracted when from behind that house opposite and emerging through its adjacent gate they witness their neighbour, a woman of indeterminate age but whom they have both long suspected is some deal younger than her appearance and demeanour might otherwise suggest, carrying between her gloved hands and at arm’s length a plastic container over-filled with soil and garden debris, its actual mass and distance from her body to preclude its carrying, though she appears in no way compromised by whatever pressure they infer from its borne weight.
She comes slowly forward out onto the pavement, turns to her left, and walks away.
That there is nowhere nearby she might dispose of this detritus, and too that their street is a figure-6 loop, still they expect her to re-appear unencumbered, and it is in such anticipation they momentarily quit their respective chores to wait, unspeaking, the other’s eye occasionally held by each, accompanied by a raised eyebrow, a shake of the head.
Finally, in completing the loop she comes again visible approaching her house, still clutching at the level container’s mid-air weight, almost as if in her own lack of agency she finds herself being passively dragged around in its wake, her every carefully measured step that of the somnambulist navigating a sudden and unexpected consciousness.
They chop again now furiously at the soil as she moves on past, shake dirt from roots and pull roughly at weeds, continuing so to do until her eventual next passing prompts them bite at each other and back:
cog: Don’t you, no, no, no way, I’m not, I’m not, I don’t want to get involved in this. Jesus Christ if, you know, once you start that you’re... that’s it, isn’t it? You’re, you’re, you’ll be stuck... helping.
cog: Oh fuck off and listen to yourself, “stuck helping”. That’s
cog: You fuck off, you know exactly what I mean. Hey, do feel free to stop her on the next go-round, just... you know, get out there and sort it all out.
In the caustic settling silence as now envelops both they each separately wonder at the continued absence of their neighbour’s only son and his seeming lack of concern for this living ghost of his mother, and that degree to which such might feed into her recurring blanks within each of which she seems so perceptibly to vanish, this silence sustaining them until she re-appears to pass them by a third time, and as one they remark her face streaked with its weeping.
Abandoning their work, they collect up their various tools, return them to the garage, and retreat back inside their home.
