Leominster
by Carolyn Oliver
In a city not quite famous for being the birthplace of lawn flamingos and Johnny Appleseed, Hazel lived alone in a two-bedroom house. It was March, the usual gray and grim, and after a decade pretending she wasn’t lonesome, she concluded the cure for her feelings was to make a space for them to flourish, a place where they would become a natural part of the landscape, nothing to fear: she would turn her yard into a moor.
Not the front yard, a strip of crabgrass the width of two dachshunds, or the back, three maples and a dying crabapple she didn’t want to take down. It was the side yard she chose, a half-acre slope running parallel to the driveway, bordered on the street by ten-foot arborvitaes, on the east and north by woods. She sampled the soil, ordered as many varieties of heather as she could track down, and started ripping up grass and dandelions.
Her neighbors didn’t ask about the growing pile of debris in front of Hazel’s garage, or the unusual number of delivery trucks rumbling up the driveway, maybe because they were too tired to be curious—the long drudge of wintry spring never reliably lifted until May—or maybe because she was already a mystery to them, and they to her. Hazel worked nights as a medical transcriptionist, so she was asleep when the O’Laughlin kids walked home from the bus stop, showering when the Silvas pulled in from their evening commutes back from Boston, at work when the Bouchards argued after they put the kids to bed. To all of them the deep night went unwitnessed: foxes crying murder, the crabapple working too hard to draw sap to its branches, a girl who wasn’t really there following an escaped golden retriever.
Through groggy mornings, weekend nights, and several nasty head colds, Hazel labored to build the moor. Finally, in mid-July, the morning light pooling on the backs of the flamingos his husband had assembled for Tomas Silva’s fortieth birthday, she came home from work to find haze hovering over the blooming heather. She got out of the car and stepped into Yorkshire.
For an hour she walked up and down and across the slope, running her fingers over the bracken and cotton grass. She could hardly bear to step inside to eat and change, so when it was time to sleep she pulled down a quilt from the closet and settled down in a patch of shade. When she woke, a bird—she could swear it was a pheasant—startled skyward from a tuft of heather. Her back ached and her hair was damp, but instead of running a hot shower she walked a little more and took the smell of the moor with her to the office.
After the pheasant, other animals came: grouse, lapwings and emperor moths, owls and hares and field mice who nibbled at the edges of the quilt. Neighborhood cats prowled the edges of the slope, desiring the mice but deterred by the hawks; dogs broke their leashes, and Hazel, when she was home, returned them to joggers and curious O’Laughlin children, who lingered long enough she felt compelled to offer them tea. Resentment stirred within her, a sense that the moor, the place she’d built to make of her solitude a lovely thing, was busy trying to end it. She bought more arborvitaes to block off the border with the driveway, but that didn’t stop the neighbors from peering through the branches.
As fall turned winter, Hazel walked on the moor every morning after work, thrilled at the wet funk of it, the muffled sounds of scurrying. It didn’t seem at all strange to her to collect golden plover feathers or snakeskins to decorate her window ledges, while the other residents of the cul-de-sac couldn’t help but marvel at the thick fog draped over their neighborhood in the mornings and evenings, the conspicuous lack of snow, the boggy rain. New Englanders like to complain about winter, test their hardiness and their joints against its edges. But nobody could remember a year like this one. They ought to call that Channel 7 meteorologist, Miranda Bouchard said to Paul, but they didn’t—work, school, kids, Christmas. Plenty of snow and ice to deal with once you hit Union Street, anyway.
One morning in late spring, more than a year after she’d decided to make the moor, Hazel, exhausted from overtime at work and wearing trousers too thin for the chill, waded through the scrub at the top of the hill, stopping sometimes to squint into the woods, which seemed deeper and louder than she remembered.
A step, a sizzle in the grass, a swerve: sting and a light rip in her skin. Hazel fell, there at the top of the hill, too quickly to see the adder retreating after the bite. Her ankle swelled and burned, and for minutes she sat stunned, unable to focus her thoughts on getting down the slope. Then the girl who wasn’t really there gave her a push, and Hazel rolled, rolled through the heather and the grasses and a fox’s den until she landed against the arborvitaes, where an escaped golden retriever waited for her with a bark just as the O’Laughlin kids were jostling out the door for school, as Tomas Silva was reaching for his keys to lock the house, as Miranda Bouchard opened an umbrella against the light rain.
When she got back from the hospital, her front lawn was covered in plastic flamingos, fiery pink. The crabapple was blooming, and mist was just dissolving over the moor.
Carolyn Oliver’s very short prose and prose poetry has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, Jellyfish Review, jmww, Unbroken, Tin House Online, FlashBack Fiction, Midway Journal, and New Flash Fiction Review, among other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in both fiction and poetry. Carolyn lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she serves as a poetry editor for The Worcester Review. Online: carolynoliver.net.
