FEMALES OF THE SPECIES — JARED POVANDA
/I shove my husband’s clothes in boxes. The sweatshirts still smell of his cologne. I press one to my face, and I suddenly want to be the rain. The sweatshirt goes in the box. A Hawaiian button-down—orange orchids on a field of navy. Flamingo swim trunks. Glossy ties. It’s too cold for rain. I stand with a groan. My back hurts. I try to pinpoint when that started while walking to the kitchen. Last year? The year before last? A long time and no time at all.
Our son won’t stop painting doors. There are doors tacked everywhere. Yawnings opened to darkness, blueness, starness, thingness. Indistinct and almost animal. Almost light. Almost vanishing. I fill a small pot with water. I bring the water to boil. I steep a teabag in the boiling water. My husband hated tea. Hands braced on the edges of the counter, my palms are soft poetry unfolded one too many times. Outside the window, a Northern cardinal lights upon a telephone pole. He cocks his tiny head. Flashes a bright wing. I know what they say about cardinals and the departed, but I don’t believe them. I don’t believe the doors will take our son anywhere. I don’t believe he will escape his teenage years with healthy coping mechanisms, and I wonder what to do about it. Snow swallows the cardinal as I watch him watch me. The kitchen is silent, and I am surrounded by dead ends. My husband’s clothes pile in boxes upstairs. When we buried him, our son turned to me, face stung with tears, and said, Mom, I can’t do this. Maybe I should have said we have to be brave, he wouldn’t want to see us like this, everything will be fine, but I toed the dirt and said I couldn’t do it either.
Our son is somewhere right now. With his friends? Having sex? Getting high? Reading books and resting by a bonfire on the lakeshore? I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t breathe. The chair is in my hands, and then it’s through the window, a better metaphor for death than the cardinal. Cold blasts me. Snow in my hair, in my mouth. There’s glass everywhere. I’ll have to sweep before our son gets home. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll sleep on a bed of glass in this castle of doors. Turn my hands to rainfall to see if miracles exist between the drops. Is red the metaphor or is it the bird? Not all cardinals are red. Only the males. Only the females of the species are forgotten. Left behind. I curl on the kitchen floor. A sliver of glass cuts ear-adjacent. I let it pierce, open, wondering what will step from me into the dark.
Jared Povanda is an internationally published writer and freelance editor from upstate New York. His work can be found in Pidgeonholes, Maudlin House, Ellipsis Zine, Bending Genres, and Hobart, among others. Find him @JaredPovanda and jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com.
