Black Orchid
It was the summer of kinetic sand.
It was the summer of kinetic sand but it wasn’t Summer yet. It was not even properly Spring. It was almost May but Winter kept curving its slim wrist and grasping fingers around anything in the soil, anything that was trying to grow. Freezing the shoots into nervy articulations, spindled leaves raised like the hand of a questioner.
In place of smashed robin’s eggs, the sidewalks were littered with kinetic sand: purple, turquoise, and pink. Laced with oil and studded with carcinogens to make it sparkle, it stayed moist forever, and the children liked to pat it into crevices and surfaces—the concrete, the grooves of their jeans, their teeth.
There was nothing kinetic about this sand. It stayed patted into the shapes it was made on.
It glutted the sidewalks in clumps, it cluttered the gutter. It clung to soles and treads.
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