Leaves Like Madness

By Chris J. Bahnsen 

Leaf pickup day. Most trees skeletal by November. But some carry the last hangers-on. City dozers scrape along the curb shoving the fallen to the intersection, bodies piled high as the house kitty-cornered to yours, where the old Mexican’s wife lost her grip on the World Tree. 

He enshrines her in music.     

        From every window, tower speakers broadcast his vinyls of mariachi crooners, albums from happier times, before he took her south of the border to the Oaxacan shaman who beat on a skull drum.

Now every song conjures her face.

Though he wants to forget.

Wants to remember.             

At all hours, he blasts the corner with morose ballads. When the stylus catches a scratch, he watches it leap the groove, back and forth, remembers her skipping rope on one pretty leg in the schoolyard. Their love goes back that far he told you once. You’ll never get your needle nose pliers back. Or his offer of friendship you refused because you didn’t want the burden.

Isn’t that your true regret?

Can friendship, neighborliness, save a man from bitter reclusion?

The volume rises with the sun while the old Mexican winds in and out of his house, tears up old carpet with his teeth, repairs cobwebs with model airplane glue, brooms dust off the big toes of his sugar maple. On his rider, he mows random etchings in his lawn.

This is grief gone luminescent.

This is grief gone mad.  

No one complains about his mohawked lawn, the incredible din. As if the neighbors have packed their cars during the night and bolted for quieter pastures.

You, the last canary in this cumbia coal mine.

Through the seasons his music crescendos into rancheras, boleros, huapangos. You’ve forgotten what birds sound like. So, you are glad, yet ashamed for your gladness, when today, leaf pickup day, the old man rolls his body across his lawn, silver head knocking the ground, plops over the curb then burrows himself into the leaf pile. And you hear his tortured cackle from inside the damp darkness, where the shaman’s voice hisses that he brought his beloved to the jungle too late … too late for the medicine to work. And when a returning dozer scoops the leaf pile into a trash truck you can’t help but notice how the crusher’s hydraulic whine sounds like the scream you’ve kept inside for so long.

 About the Author

Chris J. Bahnsen is an assistant editor with Narrative magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian's Air & Space, Hobart, Tupelo Quarterly, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. Recently, his short story "Octagon Girl" appeared in Palm Springs Noir, an anthology from Akashic Books. He divides time between Southern California and Northwest Ohio.