Fall Is a Garage Sale

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by Olga Katsovskiy

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A man sitting across from me on the train is talking very fast to another passenger. He has two cell phones and scrolls both, one at a time, balancing each on his knee. The phones ding and chime. “It’s a very busy time in our lives.”

Last night the moon was a hazy crescent. Rolling down the blinds, I paused to focus on its fuzzy edges. I remembered its fullness that night, being caught in the definite circle of a searchlight. I have lost count of how many cycles we have lived now without you. I remembered falling backwards in a slippery bathtub in Berlin and crying not because it hurt but because the hotel shampoo smelled like the cedarwood and musk of your aftershave.

The violet hibiscus flowers scatter on the pavement like folded cocktail umbrellas, a sign that another summer is over. Fall arrives with cawing crows and geese flying past with the sunrise. I wake up shivering, cold to my bones, and find a quiet pleasure standing in the warmed square where the sunlight touches the tile in front of the kitchen sink.

Fall is a garage sale, sitting on matching beige leopard print chairs beside the mini fridge with the door wide open. We sit and wait. Mom presents me with a deep plum radish in the palm of her outstretched hand. A woman we don’t know looks quizzically at the pile of framed paintings in a cardboard box and asks if the one with the Native American in a brown bear skin coat is a real watercolor. Mom crunches the radish. We go on waiting to rid ourselves of the weight of the past. We sweep the concrete floor. The stranger leaves empty handed.

Fall is “just looking,” getting back-to-school, back-to-work, back-to-life. There is a newness that aches to be impeccably clean, but it is startling, an orange check engine light turned on. I need to move and pack my tools to sit in a coffee shop. In the after hours, most people have left. The jazz music, all music, stops. The lights dim. A chunky little dog walks ahead of his owner, his fur soaked by the rain, and looks up at me through the window with the most hopeful eyes I have seen in a long time.

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