Left Behind
Audra was used to getting left behind. On her fifteenth birthday, when she was supposed to be enjoying cake and playing party games with her friends, she was watching out the porch window and thinking about how her dad would burst in, driving his broad shoulder into the wood to unstick the door from its warped frame. He wasn’t a subtle man; he never had been. But somehow, when he’d said he was leaving, screamed it at her mother, spit flying from his bearded face, Audra had imagined there was some nuance there, some subtlety that somehow said “don’t worry, honey. My life has gone to shit and so has my marriage, but I’ll be back for you.” It was stupid for her to think that, but even now, at 72 years old, she still had a piece of that feeling in her heart, jutting out like a stubborn splinter from that long-abandoned door.
This morning, she made herself burned eggs and scraped them from her cast iron pan onto the one of the plates her mother had left her. They were still usable, even all these decades after the funeral, and when the scrambled mass touched the cool china, little wisps of steam licked up to the sky, trying to escape. And then the house started to shake. The table rocked back and forth gently, but nothing fell. Audra had nailed or glued down the valuables years back, and those that she hadn’t secured were long gone now. She ate breakfast, ignoring her rattling home, and she smiled because she liked eggs.
Her husband had hated them. But that didn’t matter, because he had left too. Or rather, she’d thrown him out. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you come home from a doctor’s appointment early and find your husband peeling tiny strips of lace off the body of a woman half your age. As she chased him out, the only question he asked was why she had returned home so soon. As if that was the most important thing in the world. It took longer for his mistress to leave. She was just a girl, and when Audra had come into the bedroom, the poor thing had curled into a ball and cried and cried. Audra made her lunch and let her take a shower before she went. Those were tough years for everyone, after all.
Once the house stopped shaking and she finished her breakfast, Audra walked out to the garden. The last two decades or so, everything about the world had become so out of shape. The corn wouldn’t grow straight anymore, and the roots twisted in odd angles. Even Audra herself bent in uncomfortable ways, hobbling as much as she walked, her left foot leaving a deeper impression in the soil than her right. She knelt down in the dirt and relished the way that the warm loam spread around her knees.
The garden had been an escape for her. After her husband left and she realized that she was pregnant—that a part of that wretched man still wormed and grew inside her—Audra had been devastated. The weight of single parenthood dug into her shoulders like a set of rusty shackles. But as the baby grew inside her, so did her courage, and as she finished getting the bedroom ready she realized that she had gotten ready too. When the baby—her daughter—came out stillborn, the doctor had been apologetic but not surprised. Not much still grew on Earth, he said, like she didn’t already know.
The garden was Audra’s way of proving the doctor wrong.
She pulled a potato out of the dirt. It was a shrunken thing covered in wrinkles, but hey, so was she. She smiled at it, and thought about the ways she could make it delicious: frying and baking and mashing with herbs from the window pots. Feeling around with her fingers in the dirt, she felt two more growing, small things pulsing with life. She left them there for now.
As Audra stood, she looked to the sky, where the cloudy trails from the rockets—dozens of them, like tightly bound little threads—glowed ivory in the morning sun. She was being left behind again. But she was used to being left behind. She turned her attention back to the garden. Someone needed to water the plants. ♥