The earth around the old house, when the spring rains come, has this habit of leaving gifts gleaming on the ground. Old bottle caps, smoothed hunks of glass, long-still snakes of baling wire, all suddenly wiggling and sprouting from the soil. No matter how I rake and rake, every new year sprouts crops of history, splinters working themselves out on their own. By late summer, all the bits are gone, nothing but stories I’d tell half-believing friends, laughing and drunk in the yard. By fall, the black walnut across the back fence makes fun of me, dropping hard green balls everywhere, looking down, watching their husks rot, the seeds sinking into the soil. Still, year after year, it stands alone, watching one cigarette wrapper after another lay in the grass like morning dew, then disappear.
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Ryan McCarty is a writer and teacher, living in Ypsilanti, MI. Recently, his writing has appeared in Cider Press Review. Coal City Review, Collateral, Dunes Review, Hamilton Stone Review, One Art, Rattle Poets Respond, The Scarred Tree, Up North Lit, and Writers Resist.