New England Grass André Mancebo Heizer

New England Grass

André Mancebo Heizer

Wren downs the tea and watches the shadows dance on the yellow wall of his neighbor’s house. It’s probably the most beautiful day of the year, a fitting adieu. He sits in his lawn chair admiring the cloudless sky, the summer sun shining through the branches of the big oak tree in his backyard, the source of the shadow show. He smells the cool air as a breeze passes by, and suddenly the aroma of Bia’s flowers permeates through his lungs; he feels it on his tongue. Wren is tempted to walk over, pick up her magnolias, and rub them on his nose, but he is distracted by the rest of the garden: the chubby roses, the tall looming sunflowers, the butterfly bush, how beautiful it all looks. Bia is a great gardener. Bia is the best gardener. Good for her, good for her. Wren wishes he cared about something as much as Bia cared about her plot. Wren starts thinking about the oak tree again; he finds himself suddenly taken by its magnificent size. A true goliath, this tree stands taller than his two-story home, its thick branches extending almost twenty yards to the balcony of his bedroom upstairs, its leaves a canopy hanging over the entire backyard. This tree is old. Maybe one hundred years old. Probably older than the house. Maybe older than the city. Definitely. Maybe older than America itself. Wren seriously considers researching the history of this tree online, maybe he can get information about its first appearance in the Burlington foliage scene. He starts giggling in his lawn chair as he realizes he’s been staring at the tree for an unusual amount of time, then notices his neighbor peeping at him from his window. Hi, Tony. Good stuff, man. Can’t wait to show everyone. Oh. He remembers his assigned tasks for tonight’s barbecue, the roommate huddle at the kitchen table during breakfast. The sweet smell of bacon had distracted Wren as Bia told him to mop the floors. The dirt on the checkered tiles was getting out of hand, even he could agree with this assessment. In his altered state, he tries to think of what else he had been tasked with be-

fore his moving away party, but all he can conjure in his head is the haze of sunlight coming from the window beside the refrigerator. How he will miss that window. I’ll write a poem about that window one day. One day. He thinks about the magnets now, a random assortment of hundreds of words in small print stuck to the fridge door, how they liked to rearrange them depending on the time of week or how they were feeling. One time, when he and Eric got into a fight, they exclusively communicated through the magnets. SAD HUMAN SCREAM, it passive-aggressively read for about an hour before Wren changed it to WINE, MINE. He stares at Tony from his lawn chair until his neighbor steps back and fades into the shadows of his home. Wren suddenly realizes Eric put him in charge of letting Tony know. He sighs, wishing he had done this before chopping up the mushroom and drinking the tea. He sits up in his chair and turns to the large oak tree, hoping it can give him some sort of wisdom. Tony is such a strange man. Wren remembers the time he tried to let Tony know about the broken sprinkler system, how Tony somehow dragged him to his shed out back, unlocked his giant safe, spent an hour showing him his revolutionary war musket collection. Wren was moved by the fine engraving on the handles of the muskets, how Tony told him every single one had been custom made for each individual soldier. Tony spent years refurbishing them, and he did a great job. The collectible items looked pristine, as if they’d never seen a battlefield. Wren stares at the grass and wonders what it would be like to be so dedicated to a single thing for such a long time, doing the hard work to build a collection as vast as Tony’s. But working at Redstone every night pretty much drained his energy. By the time the sun came around, all he wanted to do was