“Your neighbour is in clear violation,” the City Inspector says, snapping a photo of Arlo’s tree on the other side of the fence. “A palm tree untrimmed is a fire hazard.”
Like me seeing you.
“One wayward spark could take down the whole neighbourhood,” she says. She talks and I imagine she says more than she does.
I still wonder what sparked you to leave.
When we moved in, we joked that the woman who died after forty years in here would haunt us, but you’re the only ghost left. I used to shake my head in bemused disapproval when you lit sage “just to be sure,” and I can picture you doing the same watching me inhale another joint, numbing my own unriddable spirit.
“The Santa Ana winds are an inevitable regularity,” the City Inspector says.
Like you were, before you blew away, too.
We used to sit on patio furniture whispering over our firepit’s electric cackle about how much we hated Arlo next door, his constant rustling and chainsawing and hammering in his treehouse full of loose dangling metal and boards. You’d say, “you need to call the City Inspector or else we need to get out of this house, away from this life.” Now I know when you said we who you were and weren’t including.
I exhale and hear Arlo over there now, like always, rustling. Smelling me: a skunk. The odour from the kitchen of his parents’ house wages a garlicky oppositional war. Dusk is falling. The coyotes must be confused, and salivating.
“You’re in violation, too, you know,” the City Inspector says. She hands me a citation: Smell Nuisance. $75.
I put out the joint, go back inside, and seek refuge in your old microwave oven, the one you found on sale to heat up meals for our child. It’s mine, now. I rest my hand on the glass and imagine I can feel the heat. I am the palm tree untrimmed, desperate to ignite.
