Free Circle View by Brad Barkley

or the nights in the dark kitchen of the house. The gun’s hid for good this time, she thinks, away from his not needing it for six years until the day came and he found it as if he’d known it was there all along.
    She rubs the burnt part of the tree, feels the black rubbing off on her hand. The trees align their voices to ask, Where? —not so much a whisper this time as a moan, the wind stronger now. Always it’s nonsense she hears, always these questions not tied to anything, like the ones asked by the reporters who came for those months when the trees first started up, when the boys in the neighborhood playing hide-and-seek first heard them and ran home to tell their mamas and daddies. For that whole first year she couldn’t hear them, really didn’t know what all the fuss was about, and just wanted everyone to leave her to Garrett’s memory. Now the wind comes heavier and then the rain sounding in thumps on the roof of leaves and branches. She says “audi-ological illusion” out loud, the words empty, just something she says back to the trees. The thumps sound louder and mushy, a hailstorm outside, the ground inside the trees still dry. Etta , the trees whisper, then Garrett , twining their names like kudzu vines. She is scared, hearing the names, hearing them as clearly as words whispered over her shoulder when she sits in the church pew. She tries to find the words of her song but has mislaid them, the way she mislays potholders and letter openers. She notices she is cold and draws the housecoat tighter around her, the belt another thing long since lost. The balls of ice punch through the branches above her and make a short hop at her feet, as big as the crabapples, faintly blue in the dark. The rain finds its way in behind the hail and wets her, and she stands up next to the trunk of the tree to let it shield her. She remembers the peacocks shrilling in the lowest branches of the trees, their tails sweeping patterns in the dust at the base of the trunks. Soon , the trees say, and Etta finds her song and fills up her ears with it, lets her housecoat drag in the mush of rotted crabapples around her feet.
    By morning she has dried off, sleeping on the porch. Waking, she laughs at herself: an old woman without enough sense to put herself to bed, without enough to come in out of the rain. After a while the boy comes along the narrow blacktop, smoking a cigarette, wearing his headphones and bandanna, pushing the cart loaded with a lawn mower and a red gas can sitting on top, his shoestrings tangled around his feet.
    â€œGarrett, you tie up those strings right off before you crack your head,” Etta shouts, startled at the sound of her voice, how like someone else she sounds. The boy slows and looks at her, still walking. She thinks of Garrett Junior all grown in the city with its sirens over the phone, and this one just a boy yet, not war age even. Sleeping in wet clothes in the out-of-doors, not eating the food the county woman brings. She is cutting right through her good sense. When she waves, the boy pushes the cart into her drive. He is all in black, his T-shirt and dungarees, a hat turned around the wrong way on his head. Boys not knowing how to wear clothes proper! Garrett Junior is wearing his old wool suit, pulling at the starched collar while the preacher says his words over Garrett. The police are at the house, still trying to find fragments of bullet, shaking their heads over the peacocks in the absence of their cries while Etta cries at the graveside not feeling it, looking the way she is expected to look, as she will do for the Life photographer at a time still twelve years off from this graveside, a time of not-apples, she thinks, watching the boy crush out his cigarette away from the gas can, a time of not-cider, of not-Garrett. Garrett Junior turning away finally when the first shovelfuls fall on the copper and the old Negro men are talking baseball scores while they