Jackhammering Limestone

Erika Meitner

You ask about the leaves and I tell you it’s been so dry here

the leaves are just giving up, turning brown, falling off the trees,

which all look dead. This might be a metaphor for the election or

might be a metaphor for nothing—it’s hard to say. Each morning

I wake up to machines across the street jackhammering limestone,

shearing away more rock-face and turning it to rubble strewn across

red clay soil so dry it heaves and cracks. It’s been seven weeks of

drilling and blasting, drilling and blasting, and that’s not a metaphor

for anything either except maybe my midlife crisis, which I’m surely

having as there’s whiskey next to me and I’m up all night wondering

if I can be hairless again in some risqué places. Most days I refuse

to believe we’re doomed, despite growing evidence to the contrary.

I mean, it’s like the 1970s down there. Trust me. Most days, I listen

to NPR on my car radio and talk to one son or the other in the back seat

and ask them questions they sometimes answer as we drive home

past the pile of rubble and the leafless trees, which vaguely resemble

the girl I saw on campus wearing an entire shaggy outfit made from

flesh-colored plastic grocery bags campaigning on an environmental

platform for student council president. Her amazing bag-suit was rustling

in the breeze and it looked like she might take flight, just soar over campus

with the drones delivering burritos this week as a test stunt because

our motto here is Invent the Future, which I think about a lot—not as

‘your future’ in the sense of what I wanted to be when I grew up,

which I figured out by process of elimination was not a banker or a

computer programmer, and I never saw myself as a mother either but

here I am. More like I would invent a future where my black son will not

get shot by police for playing in a park, or driving, or walking from his

broken-down car. I would invent a future where there was always

enough chalk to leave notes for the next class: we are starting a revolution

somehow; instructions to follow. What no one told me about programming

computers for Merrill Lynch to keep their front-end trading systems

running past Y2K was that I was simply a dominatrix of code; the disaster

that would take our building down came later, and had nothing to do

with language. My cashier at Kroger has an epigraph on her name badge

under “Paula” that says, “I Will Make Things Right.” I hope that girl

wins her election. I hope that someday someone else will enter my

hairless palace and find it marvelous. The photos of broken glass; the piles

of rubble. The future is throttling towards us and it’s loud and reckless.