Free The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) by Tina May Hall

the dirt of her backyard. Sunday night, he is jocular and somewhat abashed but with bird-wing gestures and subtropical magic, calls up a storm for the beginning of the week. She ignores the disapproving swirls of cloud on the Doppler scan and fantasizes forty-two spikes of color.
     
    It is so dry and warm the next few days that the mud hardens and cracks and a full two inches of split-cup daffodil emerge. By 10:12 p.m. on Tuesday, he is pale and thinner but doggedly insists on storm patterns and imported Canadian air. She visualizes her flowers basking in the heat and sends the jet stream spinning northward, away from her garden.
     
    As the week progresses, he grows more stubborn in his pronouncements. She feels a twinge over tricking him like this, like the wife who tosses her husband's favorite ratty sweatshirt and insists he has misplaced it. But the lines of green tongues tasting the air of her garden remind her of imbalance of their relationship, the way he has never had to wait for her, how he doesn't know the tense pleasure of anticipation.
     
    Wednesday it does not rain. Thursday it does not rain. On Friday, he is hoarse and shadowy as he traces storm systems and bungles computer overlays. As she watches him invoking humidity and cloud crystals, she finds regret deep like a stone in her throat and gives up willing the sun.
     
    All weekend she waits for rain. She sits outside trying to detect clouds against the pure blue until her eyes burn and the weight in her chest blossoms into full-blown remorse. Her daffodils grow under the painfully clear sky in seven arches of reproach.
     
    Sunday, he says thunderstorms and heavy showers, and she tries God and St. Swithun, the patron saint of rain, praying they will send another deluge and not disgrace the man who lives four and a half minutes each night to plot His terrible path in precipitation and hard freezes. Monday, she stands barefoot in the garden, her toes curled into the earth to hold her in place as she waters forty-two bright needles of shame.
     
    Three more nights he asserts rain. He is gray and wrinkled from the effort, and his hands shake beneath the weight of his sincerity. She can see the egg-white streaks of the high-resolution radar tracking system showing through his dark-jacketed midsection, and when he gasps the words moist air , she feels the impact of his breath on her forehead and the coolness of her tears as they evaporate into the expanse between the sofa and the television set.
     
    By Thursday, he has disappeared. A young man with perky hair and blanched-almond teeth who used to do the Sunday sports highlights hovers in his place. She switches off the set at 10:13 and goes outside. Beneath the heavy curve of the moon, the daffodil stalks are sturdy slashes.
     
    There might be a moral here. But it is nothing so simple as the impossibility of holding onto two imaginary things at once, a lover and a garden. It is a more difficult thing she is feeling as she stands outside in the dark, difficult in the way a daffodil bulb is difficult, gnarled and secret. The truth is, she never really could picture him here. He existed in rectangular spaces, and her garden is humpbacked and sprawling, irregular, unkempt, maybe the shape of her heart.
     

This Is a Love Story, Too
     
    This morning, when the rooster would not stop crowing and the first egg I cracked had a bloody yolk, I knew. Now the sun is rising to the end of its tether. Soon, it will be on its way down, and the woods will darken first.
     
    No one cares about the old lady. I was like that myself, before I became the old lady. They leave their offerings on the doorstep and sometimes they come in and beg a story and then I am in the newspaper again, the tired gory details dredged up anew, wrinkled black and white, a photo I search for signs of my former self.
     
    She is moving toward me today—I can feel her, the flame of her, her trotting steps, the basket swinging on her arm.
     
    Even