The Orchid

it was Sunday, the early evening sliding down slow and gold over the rooftops, the whole suburb holding its breath like it already knew, and there I was in my small garden, listening to them, that couple going at each other, screams with no floor to them, rage coming up out of the throat the way water comes up a drain backward, voices climbing and splitting, no pause, no breath between, just the red of it pouring over the fence.

i leaned in, parted the leaves slow so they wouldn’t give me away, looked through the hedge where the blossoms hung heavy, purple and pink and a blue so pale it was almost nothing, the petals shivering in what little wind was left, all that softness laid up against the hard thing happening on the other side — his hands around her throat, big patient hands, squeezing like he had decided something, and her hands going up into the air after nothing, fingers opening and closing on the air, and then the slap, flat and final, cracking off the patio stones and going nowhere, landing only deeper in, pain folded into pain. and the orchid on the patio kept on. kept blooming like it hadn’t been told, one petal easing open in the last of the light, and i couldn’t say if that was defiance or just that a flower has no eyes.

the pots around it drinking the last of the autumn off the day, leaves gone glossy with it, taking the sun like the sun was owed to them, and inside the house the children sat in the television’s blue, faces lit and still, watching whatever it was that moved on the screen, not turning, not once, hearing every scream and every slap through the open door or maybe hearing nothing, or hearing all of it and staying exactly where they were because where do you go, and the evening kept coming down anyway, slow and lovely and not on anyone’s side.

resentment begins,
no net across the pool,
the toddler under.