ABSTRACT
When I first see the house completed, nothing happens. I look, I look again. I see the same falling-down front porch and bird’s nest in the rafters I saw before. I see the newly slated walls covered with chalk drawings—partially erased, blurry, and beautiful. I see that the stairwell has been removed and access to the second floor blocked off. Last time, I went upstairs. I see the kitchen full of debris through a white scrim, and also that it can’t be entered except from the back of the house. I walk outside and see the windmill, the grass, the cottonwoods in the distance, the quiet, and that it’s going to rain hard very soon. I go back into the house, pass the wishing well, barely recognizing its shape, and walk to the back bedroom, which is completely empty and completely covered with shooting stars. There, I feel something stirring, but I can’t put my finger on it. The bus has taken the art tour back to Santa Fe. There are only a few of us left hanging around now. It does rain hard, but then it stops. There are no distractions. I walk through the house again. Nothing happens. I try to make something happen because this is the last time I will see the house before I return home. I walk through one more time, willing myself to try harder, straining in anticipation for a revelation, a whisper of a word, a fleeting memory of my own or another’s. I give up for the moment. I’m trying too hard. Sometimes the point is the sky streaked with the trajectories of thoughts someone scans and frowns at to see, to find, to hear. And it seems this has been the whole of her life, and when the sky peels away, drops and glides on a smooth wind, she asks the bird, “Do you have a message for me?” 1
