In a box are components of an era: gray twill shorts, tough with starch. Silver ring. Moving pictures of being in a hurricane.
Her car is a box, too, and in it are the trimmings from today, things like a milk cup and half-eaten sticky candies. Glued art projects shaking glitter loose on the floorboards of her car. Boys looking out the windows and spying motorcycles they wish they were on, brandishing toy swords, pirates on bikes.
Under the hard soil outside her house, there is plywood. All she need do is dig it up and build a crate. Hoist wood up and nail iron pegs into it to fashion a cage of sorts, where she can stow the things she’ll accumulate soon. Days poolside and a trip to the Academy of Natural Sciences. What else will go in there, she wonders. Good things. Clean things.
(At night, she sneaks out and runs water over the soil, to soften it.)
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mary june brown 