The Swarm
Sandra Adams
Word Count 555
Some instinct told me to pack away my favorite of your things: the leather hat you wore almost daily, the blue sweater that made my heart leap when I turned to see how it illuminated your eyes. I placed them carefully into the boxes I’ve filled with my own belongings.
And then they descended, your daughters and their husbands. Like locusts stripping bare a field of wheat, they emptied your closets in a thrum of activity, carting your clothing to Goodwill; rifled medicine cabinets and desk drawers; and then packed your treasures – anything of value - into the U-Haul that would transport what was left of your life north.
The emptiness of your closet is too harsh a reminder. I ask them to please leave a few shirts behind. They said yes but didn’t. They drove it all away, leaving only a jangle of bare hangers, the sepulchral moan of hollow space, a scattering of trash.
I took our trash to the town dump, remembering your last day. Around mid-morning you said, “I’m going to the recycling center” and I said, “I’ll come with you.” I’m not sure why this surprised you, we usually tackled chores together, but you rushed towards me, a great delighted grin spread across your face and your eyes full of love half declaring, half asking, “you’ll come with me?” I laughed and replied, “Of course I’ll come with you, we’re a team.” We hugged and then went downstairs together to gather the boxes, bottles and cans, talking all the while about what a great team we were and always had been. It was true.
I can’t think of your daughters the way I used to. Only a month ago, in your obituary, they referred to me as ‘the love of your life’ but now there’s a kind of military precision in their eradication of our life together and of my importance to you, your fiancé but not-yet wife. Like an invading army, they set about dismantling what had been our hopes, our plans, our life, replacing our future with despotic pronouncements about how your estate will be handled: We want. We think. We have decided. They will sell your house, our home. A united front, your daughters and their husbands. In my journal, I begin to refer to them as ‘The Gang of Four’ and think of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
A steamy, endless North Carolina night. I listen with dread to the deafening drone of cicadas. They sound like a relentless and unstoppable army marching towards our house. I matter so little that they will never notice that their swarm has stripped me, us, our life down to bone. In my mind’s eye, I see them: jack-booted thugs at the command of the Gang of Four come to kick down my door in the dead of night.
Sandra is a Boston-born interdisciplinary artist whose creative practice includes textile-based assemblage, creative non-fiction, pilgrimage and documentation. A wanderer and septuagenarian outlier with a passion for meaning making, she works to make sense of and make peace with the life she has been given, with all its privileges and challenges. Recurring themes include belonging, love & loss, liminality, numinosity & otherness. Sandra currently lives on Noongar country in Fremantle, Western Australia and is working on a series of memoir-based artworks and essays.