By Jamey Temple
In other years, I’d hear the ting of a metal bat as it hits a ball, a crowd cheering. Car doors, opening and closing. Children’s laughs and squeals from the adjacent park. Those sounds now absent, I hear what has been there all along. The refrigerator’s hum. The clang of ice in my water bottle as I tip it back for a sip. My daughter’s feet as she dances in her bedroom, as if her wooden floor planks are a piano’s ivories. I hear the woodpecker drilling into our house, the mourning doves who, who, whoing to each other. I wonder who will answer the call.
I know when our neighbor is home from his nursing shift by the drone of his lawnmower. I rise when I hear a car slow down or voices on the sidewalk—people are rare now, even in town. I know the hour when a man and his wife ride their 10-speeds down Ridge Street, his bike’s radio playing, the gears softly clicking as the wheel spins, coasting. When they get to the corner of Ridge and Second Streets, they turn around and go back up. I hear their breaths as they pump the pedals, their bodies pitched forward. They never wave.
Another woman lets her dog loose in the empty ballfield. Dark aviators cover her eyes. Her dog barks as he makes his way from one boundary to the other. She sits on a bleacher seat alone, her finger swiping the phone.
A car whooshes going by, reminding me of the music a wave makes as it retreats, reminding me of trips taken in other summers when I had to leave my regular world to be still.
Jamey Temple is a writer and professor who teaches English at University of the Cumberlands in Eastern Kentucky. Her poetry and prose have been included in several publications such as River Teeth, Rattle, Appalachian Review, Bending Genres, and Still. She was named finalist in Fourth Genre’s 2022 Multimedia Essay Prize and finalist for Newfound Journal’s Prose Prize in 2016. You can read more of her published work through her website (jameytemple.com).
MoonPark Review 