

When she woke up each morning it was always the same. Sun filtering through the wooden blinds dusty like the ones back home and a blackbird outside like a rusty gate. After the coffee machine started hacking she would step out the back door to check over the plants. Just like the old man with her plants. The tomato stems twisting like thick braids between a shuffle of elephant-eared bean plants, waiting for rain that never fell. Not like back in Missouri. Earth crumbly and dry and where it wasn't crumbly like old bones it was thick clay that didn't even want the water. The plants kept alive just by being stubborn.

She lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl lazily through the wool blanket of hot summer air. Scruffy scrub jay landed on an apple tree and cocked an insolent eye to beg for peanuts. Why you want more peanuts, she asked and blew a tendril of smoke at the bean vine. You just bury em and forget em. Maybe the skunk eat em, but you dont. He just turned his other brown eye on her and stabbed at the branch a couple times, impatient. She blew the smoke at him and coughed and he jumped with his wings in one swift motion to a higher branch. His mate cackled from the cactus top.

Inside the coffeemaker beeped. She flicked the cigarette at the bird with a mean feeling and it bounced into the birdbath with a tiny hiss. She felt a kind of disappointment in the jay's rattle as he swooped past her head and disappeared into the neighbors yard. Inside the coffee machine was finishing its final gurgles in a robotic death rattle as she entered through the creaking metal door and poured a cup. Is today the day, she wondered. Out the window was another heavy morning, the sun itself thick and gray. 

She had the dream again last night. The faceless figure was both familiar and strange, like a road you'd seen only in the blush of spring visited in the dead of winter, the trees just black lines under a skeleton of snow but your mind could still feel the velvet blossoms. This time it was a car chase like in those absurd movies. Huge sedans launching over hilltops like ski jumpers. Impossible hiding places, a doorway no deeper than a brick but enough to shield three or four people from the metallic scanning eyes of the enemy. Dirty streets where the buildings ancient skin was covered in centuries of soot. Every time she learned a little more about the danger. Now it was a chip of coal red plastic lodged between vertebrae to monitor medical data. HE always knew. 

A hummingbird landed on a branch outside the window like a gray-green cottonball and fluffed his feathers. She knew then, today wasn't the day, dumped a little avalanche of sugar into the coffee and picked up the phone.

