A Long and Winding Line

On the shortest day of the longest year, as the light began to shrivel and disappear until spring, Zorka said hello to her neighbor. He half-smiled, moved on. He’d seen her last on Halloween. Be sure to turn off your porch lights, she’d said, so there’ll be no trick-or-treaters. Zorka, marooned next door, had apparently only two recent visitors: the gardener and a census worker. Please become my friend.

Some say I swam ashore, Zorka said to him while she stood in her front yard watering the grass. A dilapidated fence separated them. Excuse me? When I finally left my husband everybody told me I’d swam ashore after my great plunge, but I didn’t swim ashore. I was washed. He would pass no judgment. Zorka, whose life must be narrowing - admit it - a cityless woman whose past was an arcade of disenchantments. Zorka, whose eyes would dart from side to side like an unmoored chorus. Where can she look? Where can’t she? The tulip is a disloyal plant. The trick, you see, is to water them just enough to keep them thirsty. Does this man have any idea what I'm talking about?

The new year just as needling as the last so that Zorka must surely wonder if anybody can really be sure each day will end at all. Had she ever thought she would live forever? Just all the time. A storm is coming. That mean California wind. She held the garden hose at her side like a drawn gun. Zorka, who must have walked the streets at twenty, thirty, forty, with pure joy in her chest. A rich, opalescent biography before this torpor of age. Does he even know my name?

The days would grow longer and the darkness would dwindle just enough so that the tulips appeared again in their garden bed. Zorka’s relaxing hours consisted of knitting - he thought - of picking up the phone and dialing old numbers. Her childhood line. An ex-lover’s. Never an answer. She kept calling. I am not half as pathetic as this unkind man thinks I am.

He felt for her. Zorka - no doubt - must be kept awake at night, tormented by a sense of her own insignificance. He remembered her first hello, a year ago. His careless response must have hurt her, who would be - at her age - taking stock of what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. A life undecorated with passion, fire, heat. He knew this to be undeniably the case. But Zorka - who did have friends over, many love affairs, read daily, sent gifts to her nieces, subscribed to magazines, worshiped silent films, slept peacefully, woke early, had a green thumb, and a riddled and restless heart - seized the moment. Why do I feel the need to befriend this idiot?

Now, confronted with one another, the collapsed fence the only barrier between them, she looks the other way and pretends she hasn’t seen him. Another disappointing man, one in a long and winding line.

Nedjelko Spaich is a Serbian-American writer living in Los Angeles. His fiction has been published in Jellyfish Review, Maudlin House, Tiny Molecules, MoonPark Review, Cagibi Literary Journal, Reflex Fiction, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in LAist and LA Weekly. He is a graduate of Bennington College, a first reader for Pidgeonholes, and formerly served as the Membership Director for Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently at work on his first novel. Find him on Twitter @Nedjelko and nedjelkospaich.com.