fall by Andrew Siegrist

My mother reaches over the railing and catches a yellow leaf. She says autumn is early. Cold for this time of year. She steps back through the sliding door of her assisted living apartment. She’s lost a memory jar. She says this again and again. Lost in the move. The jar filled with baby shoelaces. A photograph of a bronze elephant. Small locks of hair.

She asks if I remember the blindman. He came holding the teacher’s arm. He came without a cane. Without a dog. I was in second grade. I came home crying. A boy in class had raised his hand. Asked the blindman, How do you avoid the cracks that break your mother’s back?

I asked the blindman, if a coin falls into water, would the ripple feel like words. The boy who’d raised his hand laughed and I came home crying.

There’s a name in the jar. Printed in Braille. The blindman gave it to me. My mother remembers the feel of letters under her finger. She asks if I do too. I can’t think of any of it. I wonder what name the blindman had given me to touch. Where it was now. A lost name in a lost jar.

My mother saved leaves too. Pressed them in a hymnal and glued them to the walls of the jar.

“You don’t remember,” she says.

The blindman said we’d be amazed at what we were all capable of. We watched him paint his fingernails. He touched the reflection of his own face in a mirror hung from the schoolroom wall. Then what.

I follow my mother into the apartment and she hands me the leaf. I tell her I’ll keep it somewhere no one will find it. I don’t tell her this might be her last autumn.  

She says, “Where will you put it?”

I open my mouth. Leave the leaf on my tongue. It tastes the way the basement smelled when we carried all her things up in boxes. What else had she kept?

“The jar will turn up,” I say. “Someday.”

“The blindman will find it.” My mother laughs.

I spit out the leaf.

“Step on a crack,” she says. “I should have married the blindman. Your father kept me dyeing my hair.”

My father sold crushed stone. Sold it to build highways. He saw money in piles of gravel. Quarry dust was in that jar too.

“He could have lived longer, but couldn’t stay away from that dust,” she says. “My god, the sound of him alone in that room coughing.”

My mother dyed her hair black. The blindman painted his fingernails blue. My father coughed gray stone into handkerchiefs.

My mother looks out the window.

“They can’t fool us with the trees.”

She’s said this before.

“Every window with a view of trees. But we know why we are here.”

She’s said this before too.  

“When the leaves fall,” she says. “All you can see is the highway.”

The memory jar must be in my attic. We hired neighbor boys to box up her house, every room. She’d rather we’d burned it all. Buried the ashes. But we boxed it and stacked it in the attic of a house where she never lived. Wrens made nests of her wedding dress. In the evening, they come out. Fly from the eaves, out into the gloam. I don’t tell her any of this.

A leaf falls. My mother reaches for it but touches the glass door instead. The blind must have words for things like this.

Andrew Siegrist's debut collection, We Imagined It Was Rain, was published by Hub City Press in 2021. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and daughters.  Check him out on his website at andrewsiegrist.com