'Violets' by Iain Grinbergs

My fiancée leaps out of the armchair and raps on the living room window. “Hey!” she shouts.

I say, “What now?” 

“Look,” she says. 

A Pomeranian’s in the violets by our mailbox. It cocks its leg. She raps on the glass again. The dog slinks into the nearby azaleas.

“Whose damn dog is that?” she says. 

“The corner house’s.”

“Go talk to them,” she says. “I just planted those.” 

I open the front door and step outside. The dog pops its head out, almost grinning, and then yaps. “Get!” I shout, grabbing the broom and shaking it, my socks soaked from the grass. Across the road, a black-haired girl on a pink bike giggles. The iridescent streamers flutter. 

Then I realize: I’m becoming Mr. Walker, the old army vet from childhood who hated even the mailman. After his kids died, he got worse. I once saw him slash my dad’s tires. I never told my parents. I didn’t want to. They were too busy yelling, breaking things. I put the broom back and go inside. 

“It’s in my violets again,” my fiancée says. 

I tell her to stop as I sit down. 

“No,” she says. “My daddy would’ve kicked that dog into Georgia.”

I turn on the TV. A masked man’s robbing a bank. Gunshots. A woman screams and leaps out of her flats. 

“You always avoid things.”

“I don’t.”

“Like the other day,” she says. “It was just a question. For the future.” 

I get back up and grab my keys before getting in the car. My fiancée yells something out of the door and points as I reverse the car, flying backwards, feeling something give. 

 

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Iain Grinbergs (he/they) is a professor of English. Recently, Bottlecap Press published Vanity Twist, his first poetry collection.

'Violets' was first published by Furtive Dalliance Literary Review in 2018.