by Lucy Zhang
Everyone lives in a glass box; he calls himself their keeper. The slightly curved glass panes extend up and around them, leaving the Munro’s Globemallow peeking from the side of the walkways and the freshly cut grass and artificial hills in plain view. Sometimes he imagines what they see: can they distinguish the Beaked Yucca from Aztec Pearl, the White Wood Sorrel from Siskiyou Snow? The stray duckling caught in the pond drainage? The rabbit whose fir just about camouflages with the mulch? He crosses the paved path each evening, just as the sun descends behind the glass leaving a bloodshot sky, and tries to peer into the glass, searching for another pair of wandering eyes, but he sees only the reflected light.
He settles the bucket of water and detergent on a spot of already flattened grass. Suds slosh from side to side, splashing the leg openings of his cargo pants. He attaches a squeegee head to an aluminum pole and grips the telescopic handle. After soaking the head in the bucket, he arches and straightens his back, and begins to drag the head up and down across the panes, water trickling toward the ground with each stroke. He notices a moth splayed against glass a few meters ahead like a dried flower pressed flat in a scrapbook. When he reaches the area, he scrapes its wings down–the moth comes off so easily he cannot tell if its body is pressed against the rubber blade or if it has fallen into the dirt where he shakes off excess water mixed with grime from the squeegee.
The occasional bugs and bird imprints decorate the otherwise transparent walls. When he finishes cleaning the walls, he makes another round walking along the edge of the pane, staring at his feet with one hand gliding on the pristine glass. He stops, bends down, and scoops up a hummingbird lying on a section of polished white concrete floor. Almost unnoticeable, he thinks. He himself would not have seen it had he not been accustomed to the avian graveyard that resided along the intersection of ground and glass. His hands cup a familiar corpse: the same needle of a beak, soft cotton ball of a stomach, triangular wings folded against its body, cradling itself like a baby. Although sometimes the wings fan outward, crucified through loss of flight.
He finishes his inspection. He calls himself the grim reaper.
Now, the sky too dark for anyone to see outside, he buries the hummingbird in a hastily dug hole hidden behind a bush. When daylight comes, it is just a bit of dirt–perhaps more loosely packed than the surrounding earth–lost to the grand poppies and orchards and whatever else the people inside the glass see. Maybe nothing. Maybe they don’t look outward at all and they only admire how the walls cease to exist in their transparency. He wonders what kinds of secrets they bury.
Lucy Zhang is a writer masquerading around as a software engineer. She watches anime and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter (@Dango_Ramen).