I am sorting my old papers and finding some good writing
Hope brought a turtle down to the neighbor’s pond.
“That’s it, Snappy, Dad says you’ll be happy here.”
She started crying, two knees in the mud. Snappy headed for the water, unperturbed. Instead of going home, Hope spied on the neighbors. There was a woman on the porch, hunched over a notebook, writing and drinking out of a coffee mug and smoking, with two feet up on the porch rail. Remembering Snappy, Hope sobbed in the bushes at the edge of the neighbors’ lawn.
Her father had told her that the turtle would eat up the huge and filthy family of goldfish that had bred from the pair he had suggested she release there last summer. It was a manmade pond, fed by a spring but lined with plastic. The first summer after it was built, a hundred thousand baby frogs had beached themselves on the steaming black pond liner and created a crusty film of brown frog jerky. Hope bellied her way, sniffling, to a forsythia bush with a better view of the woman on the porch. It was a bright, breezy summer day and the neighbors’ grass was cut short and well tended. No sticks, no bare patches.
