#wateredivies
She never noticed the climbing
ivy until after she rented out her condo. The stuff grew on the southwest
corner of the building she'd called home for a decade, but she didn't know
north from east or Alabama from Mississippi, despite her storied college
degree. From her sixth-floor studio's far-right window, she could make out one
vine of the ivy growing up the back brick wall. It had a few brown leaves on
it.
“They
just planted that. Hmm. Must've been a year ago. Hmm. Fast-growing, I'll kinda
miss it. Always fond of ivy, for some reason,” she smirked to herself.
She
was packing up the last of her things to make room for the new tenant and her
wife. She didn't realize she talked to herself at all, much less how much she did.
“I
guess the rain finally watered down all the dog piss. The way they put out
around here, I'm surprised it didn't kill the whole plant good and for all.”
The
vine now crept up higher than her own height, at five foot flat. She admired
greenery everywhere she'd lived and for a moment, she was back on her famed
campus, where the ivy grew. The back-and-forth of moving blurred her sense of
time and place. A/C on and off, condo door shut, push elevator button, wait and
wait and wait, only one car working, down down down only-working elevator, out
to car, hot-humid-as-fuck, open car door, throw Scheiße in, then all in
reverse back up, back to condo, back to getting it done before it got any
hotter. She should never have moved this far south.
“I
didn't know Princeton grads got only this far by age 30,” she murmured, shaking
her head.
R. P. Singletary
R. P. Singletary is a lifelong writer and a native of the
southeastern United States. His writings have appeared in Bumble Jacket
Miscellany, Iowa Summer Writing Festival Anthology, and elsewhere.
it feels divine.
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