Ann Cummins
Sick to death of remembering, the hunchback woman spends her days studying the habitats of insects and broken leaves in sidewalk cracks. Her territory: one square block in Oakland, Fruitvale District. Around and around the block she goes, climbing up, tottering down. Where she walks, exuberant tree roots have deformed the sidewalk. Oh, the concrete mountains grown from upheaval. Oh, the marijuana perfume of mulching eucalyptus leaves. Ladybug sentries patrol dark crevasses. Regiments of combat bugs spill into daylight. Her ivory knobbed cane tests the future, and her clodhoppers surveil.
In the shiny distance, she sees the glimmer of party lights all along a sidewalk crack. What’s this? Something she missed on a previous tour. It never ceases to amaze her, the surprising new in the familiar. Gets her old heart beating. With all her might she hoists her ragged left foot up onto the broken sidewalk slab, plants the cane, grips it with both hands. We are going to a party, she encourages her rotten right foot, drags it up and over the concrete mountain, and then whee, instinct makes the trip down toward the quicksilver blur, light before form.
On her giddy way, she listens to the murmur of sound without words. The hush and vroom of racing tires, honking horns, and the merry-go jingle of an ice cream truck. Hackity-hack of blue jays, whoosh of crow wings. Out the corner of her eye, she sees a spinning pinwheel. Hummingbird.
The day attends, momentum delivers, and she arrives—to disappointment. It’s just tinsel gleaming in the sun. Torn and dirty Christmas icicles, less than what she hoped. Somebody’s bygone party. Some gob of let’s pretend. She catches a glimpse of movement where the crack ends and the street begins. Iridescent insects feed on something fleshy, rat or squirrel. Maggots slipping in and out interrogate severed vertebrae, step on a crack break your…which calls to mind her own last big bash, unforgettable party, and in that mind’s eye . . . but the silverfish of memory too quick for regret carries the moment, and oh, she adores what she can see. And the stars at night, which, though she can’t look up, she now looks forward to because she found a mirror. Pity the dead sidewalk citizens blind to the night sky.
Habit and freeway noise carry her on to the curved base of a churchyard statue, where she takes a load off. The curve fits her as if it was made for her, and she is safe in her habitat, the halfmoon of her back. She hopes it’s Saturday. She believes in tomorrow on Saturdays because that’s when the popover men bake their pies, sell them in the church patio and give her all that she can eat.
She takes her mirror from her deep pocket and also the fruit she foraged, strawberries from a patch, a lemon hanging on a low tree branch, a pomegranate. All rewards for looking. Sleep does not concern her. It has a mind of its own. What concerns her is the distant and ongoing war of her complaining feet, but she’s consoled by her mirror, and by the heady scent of star jasmine, narcotic of the night.
About the Author
Ann Cummins is the author of the story collection, Red Ant House, and a novel, Yellowcake. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She’s currently working in hybrid forms that enfold fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. She’s an Emeritus Professor at Northern Arizona University.
