She is Coming

She's coming and I know it. I know because she has been touching things, moving them around. She touched my sycamore last week, reached deep in her pocket and drew out her number three flat brush, smeared first one, then the other. I found the evidence. It was blood red and resting on the walkway from my front porch. The next day there was another, then another. I am waiting for crimson to be splashed everywhere. She won't be content with dabbling much longer. She already is brave enough to kill what she can and the papery thin brown leavings of her kills are dotting the landscape.

She's coming and I know it. The grass knows it. It is dry and brittle with anxiety. She has been whispering to it in the dark, threatening, warning it away. I know she comes in the dark. She berates her who has been, backs that one away and grasps the neck of that one as she arrogantly shoves, squeezes balmy breath from a warm dry throat. She wants to breathe her own iciness and she does. The air is chill now at night and windows are icy to the touch and holding the moisture of her dank breath.

She's coming and I would not mind her so much except that her sister is right behind. I do not like that sister with her bony angular frame and her chilly airs. I do not like her knarled fingers clawing at a heavy gray sky. I do not like her frosted white mouth puckering to fling obscenities into the beauty until all is shriveled and dead, bones of its former self.

I really would just as soon live forever in summer. I would. But she is coming--and I know it.