Pot-Bound

by Sarah Lyn Rogers

Hans Eiskonen

All winter, men are yelling in the walls. The gas is out. Somebody smelled a leak. The ghosts of cigarettes waft stories high. This is how the year begins, already wrong. Was it in my stars that I would never think of now, that I would wall myself inside with looping thoughts?

My brother lives here for only one season, flown back to his home coast at the onset of the plague. Don’t think I will forget how we cloister us indoors to hibernate exactly when the daffodils burst through their winter confinements, heralding . . . what, exactly?

The men are gone. The scaffolding remains, keeping my seedling body from the sun. Some other season I’ll emerge — blinking, splitting off the husk of one who watched, who waited — and maybe will believe in now, then. Later.

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Sarah Lyn Rogers is an editor at Soft Skull Press and series co-editor for the annual Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize anthology. She is the author of Inevitable What, a chapbook on magic and rituals, and was the 2014 winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Virginia de Araujo Prize, as well as a finalist for the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award. For more of her work, visit sarahlynrogers.com.