The children search and rescue drowned worms.

It’s their first hands-on experience of loss, the flood

 

Smells like a sick ocean. The For Sale sign is pinned to the yard

Right in the middle of their games, and they resent it. They can no

 

Longer go to their best friend’s house to play, on the corner

Because the man who lives there is a threat.

 

There’s an open box of corals and brachiopods, pieces of the Devonian seas,

On the drive way between the stacked boxes labeled Laundry and Master Bath.

 

The smallest girl wrings her hands, watching the recovery.

Nothing may be left behind, not one tag from one stuffed animal,

 

Not a piece of our collected history. She shuts the lid. It all goes with us.

Through the yards that mark the distance between our house and his,

 

The children begin hide and seek. The truck is loaded and locked.

We call them home. On Interstate 80, the fender of a tractor-trailer peels

 

Away and flies in slow motion straight for us. It thwacks

The left corner of our bumper and hurls behind us into what’s becoming

 

Our past. I have no idea what damage it does. I can’t look back.

 

 

© Heather Derr-Smith