Still

By Bruce Floyd | June 1, 2012

Another hot day here, a bronze sun sits blazing in a cloudless sky. A warm wind stirs the leaf-laden trees. The ripeness build and builds, growing fatter and fatter, slowly aiming for its apex. It’s early June. I hear no voices prophesying the fall from fecundity, the inexorable rottenness to come, this green and vibrant world heat-blasted and withered by the time August comes. How weary, finally, summer will become, how tiresome, how ragged and worn, its vitality leached out by the relentless heat, the long, scalding days, heartbreaking days.

After my workout, I came out of the large room out back, looked at the profusion of green washing the fig tree. Then I saw at my feet, lying there in the green grass, a dead mole, a little fellow not as big as my little finger. How tiny it was. He hadn’t been dead long because his grey fur (I wish I knew the names for the gradations of colors) still looked glossy in the June sunlight. Dead lay the creature. I did not see a mark on it, but dead lay the creature. I went inside the storeroom and got my shovel. I came back out, gently scooped up the dead mole, and walked over to the ground cover about the house and tossed the creature into it.

When I first saw the little mole lying dead in the sunlight, I thought, “How still death is.” Even in a world bursting with green, gone mad with it, death lies still in the sheets of light spilling from the sky.