At his house, dead leaves clogged the porch, a whole pile of dead leaves, heaped in front of the door.
“It’s like that place in the ocean,” he said. “Where all the trash collects in a huge whirlpool.” Sara had driven away. He was speaking to no one.
When he opened the door, leaves furled around his feet. He stomped them into tiny particles on the carpet. In his office, a green light shone from his computer, bright and eerie. Had his computer always had that light?
“Like a cat,” he said. “Going off and doing things without you.”
A tree toppled over in the night, slamming into the backyard, crumpling the chainlink fence and throwing bark fragments across the lawn. “Sinister,” he said, as he waited for the landlord to answer the phone. The girls were coming for dinner, and he wanted to cook something, something from their childhood.
“Well, my kids love grilled cheese,” the landlord said. “Why did you call me?”
“It’s an old tree,” William said. “Shattered everywhere. Probably completely hollow.”
Now that he was paying attention, there were a lot of dead trees in the forest, tall ones with massive branches. This tree had fallen in the yard, but another could easily smash into the house. Why were all the trees so dead, anyway?
“Is ‘forest’ even the right word for it?” the landlord wondered. William thought of the disintegrating houses on the other side of the forest. Only the idealistic or the desperate would live so close to tall, dead trees.
“They’re planning to reclaim the land, build condos,” the landlord said. “Luxury is coming. It’s only a matter of time.”
Approaching like a lava flow, William thought, in that city where everyone was mummified.
“Pompei,” the landlord said. “And I’m not sure ‘mummified’ is how I’d describe it. I’ll send some guys to deal with the tree.”
William went shopping for things the girls would eat: Alpha-Bits cereal, juice boxes, cheese and cracker kits with spongy lunchmeat.
“I’m sorry,” the cashier said. She was responding to something he’d told her, words he’d spoken without meaning to. “Divorce is never easy. I’m still processing my own.”
William considered her knobby knuckles and thin fingers, saw how her gold rings slid and twisted. Would his hands look like that one day? He jammed them in his pockets.
Sara and the girls arrived with chicken wings and french fries. “We brought dinner,” Sara said, setting the bags on the table. “Do you have napkins?”
Hannah looked at the pot of tomato soup warming on the stove. “Did you forget we were coming?” she said. Now that he considered it, that definitely wasn’t enough soup for all of them.
Celia surrounded her plate with small plastic animals. “The echidnas are hungry,” she said when he came to hug her.
William wasn’t sure what an echidna was. “Are they the ones who are scared of the dinosaurs?”
“It’s a family of plastic animals,” Hannah said. “They all love each other. Do you not have ketchup?” She hung on the refrigerator door, even as the refrigerator rattled and shook.
“No napkins, either,” Sara said, ripping paper towels. “This is your dad in his natural state.”
They laughed like it was a joke they were used to making. Sara had gotten him the buffalo flavor. It made the paper cuts on his fingers burn.
“What’s there to do here?” Hannah asked as he cleared the dishes.
“We could check on the tree,” he said.
He saw she didn’t want to, but she followed him into the backyard, pulled out her phone when Sara couldn’t see her. A thick mass of bracelets knotted both her wrists.
“You make those yourself?” he asked.
“They’re friendship bracelets,” she said, as if that explained it.
He stuck his toe into one of the chasms the branches had punched in the lawn. It was a black hole, sinister, bottomless. If he were lying in bed when a tree smashed through the roof, the branches would make similar holes in his body.
“I’d be stuck to the mattress,” he heard himself say. “Impaled like a butterfly on a pin.” But Hannah had gone inside.