1913issue6online

117 The soldier considered ways of using her medals as decals on the sweater she’d knitted for her niece whom she’d never met yet had heard loved turquoise. The soldier came from home from the war in February and come April there were tulips blooming outside her house, and she wondered if she’d planted them many autumns before, and they’d miraculously escaped being eaten by squirrels, or if her mother had planted them just this past year without hav- ing received any word of her return, and though she didn’t live there anymore, she figured the flowers were rightfully hers, so she cut them and wrapped their stems with a t-shirt from her car that she wet with a bottle of water. After the war, the soldier cancelled direct-deposit and had her checks mailed directly to the apartment so she could tear open the envelopes, inspect the contents for organic matter, and personally slip the lightly textured paper into the ATM at her bank. The soldier, ever since she had come home, fell in love easily with every solicitor that knocked at her door. It did not matter if they were man or woman, salesperson or proselytizer, but she could not get their faces out of her head while she knitted and watched television, and she would sometimes sit for hours at night repeating their pitch, over and over, in a quiet whisper between her lips. -Karen Lepri

1913issue6online

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