day 1: in the beginning, bark peels off the sycamores, exposing dismal patches that should stay hidden. day 2: a fight with your partner who telecommutes and whose disposition sours when your kids are sent home from school because the air quality is poor, their eyes grazing the top of their masks, wary, frightened eyes, and as you pick them up, smoke from your Volvo drifts into the atmosphere, forming a pattern of exhaust plume. day 3: maybe if they called it something besides climate change, which sounds speculative, the word change suggesting not already here, unlike the first Superman movie where Jor-El and his wife wrapped the baby in a blanket and put it in a spaceship headed to Earth, not because of climate change, but because they had no choice. day 4: floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, a tropical storm named Ophelia, the world convulsing before skidding off its axis, event following event till they are uneventful, normal as gun violence. day 5: volcanoes erupt in Iceland, glaciers evaporate to puddles in Greenland, skeletons of bleached coral rot in the Seychelles, smoke from wildfires drifts down from Canada ahead of the fleeing snow geese who don’t know where to migrate. day 6: an earthquake destroys buildings in Afghanistan, children crushed under rubble and there aren’t enough bags for the bodies. day 7: the Lord rested; you await the next collision of gases, watching oceans smolder, mourning dead penguins and almost-dead polar bears until teary and exhausted, huffing through your mask, smelling singed, cancer-causing micro-particles, you go into the yard, lie on the patchy burnt grass, gaze up at the sky, and pray you’ll remember how it looked when it was blue. 

I look like the others – same white fluffy beard, same ridiculous hat. Hi ho. Hi ho, I sing on the way to the mines, pickaxe slung over my shoulder, darting behind trees in the tangled woods. While they go diamond hunting, I fling my small body under a pine, watch needles float on the breeze. Study the leaves that flutter and fall. Observe the tie dye pattern of the sky, the way caterpillars cling to the underside of vines. All the creatures that hide in plain sight – scaly lizards, an owl tawny brown against bark, a toad on his lily pad, a leopard blurry white in the snow, a diamondback snake uncoiling from the dust. Lazy, my brothers call me, under their venison breaths. But really, I’m Stealthy. Slipping between shadows, sliding between raindrops, I skulk. Melt into the background of the forest. A memory that won’t surface. A thought they once remembered. Think how the Girl’s hair reminds me of raven feathers, her lips a deeper scarlet than the wild roses blooming by the creek, the way when she cleans our cottage, she forces a smile. We’re alike she and I, peering at the cracked mirror over the sink, not recognizing the face staring back. Each day, I re-learn how to walk. Heel, toe, heel toe. How to sing – my breath expelling air on Hi, inhaling on ho. How to notice the pollen on a bee’s tiny stinger. How to carry the axe so it doesn’t scrape my neck, how to place the blade down gently, so it does no harm. The bitter taste of routine. These are simpler tasks than regaining my brothers’ affection, before they tired of my shiftlessness, before their careless blows pushed me into hiding. I rely on muscle memory. Heel, toe. Hi ho. The pine needles fall. The wind whispers the Girl’s real name. The brothers march in a straight line to work. The forest sighs. The easy shape of loss.