He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder. Niki took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and held her breath until her face turned red and her eyes filled with tears and got blurry and she started to see little black flecks flitting before her eyes like tiny insects hovering over something that’s died.
Then she let her breath out in a gust and, panting, let her red face drop to her chest.
Piece by piece they’re taking my world away, she said.
• • •
Late at night she saw headlights coming along the coast road. She was curled up in her chair, trembling from the cold, but her jacket was in her suitcase and she didn’t want to go inside to get it, she didn’t want to wake him. She knew he would wake up on his own at some point during the night. She was sure to hear him shouting, on this last night in the house he would wake up shouting again from some dream. For sure. Eminent domain.
The truck turned left and started up the dirt road, growling up the hill, then stopped in front of the gate. The driver’s side and passenger’s side doors opened at exactly the same moment. The men stepped out and glanced into the yard. She couldn’t tell if they saw her sitting there — but if they did, they showed no sign of it. They took something out of the truck and then came over to the wall and started to loosen the stones and load them onto the bed of the truck.
She curled up even tighter in her chair and wrapped her arms around her bare legs and in the darkness saw her skin filling with countless tiny goosebumps, countless blind eyes. Eminent domain.
She watched as the men walked back and forth through the beams of the truck’s headlights. They would work a stone loose from the wall and carry it to the bed of the truck and then come back for another. They worked calmly, without rushing, without fear. One of them said something and they both laughed and the laugh seemed to echo between the trees and the shadows of trees and Niki saw new eyes, blind eyes, sprouting from her skin.
And then, when they left, when the truck rolled back down the dirt road and went out onto the main road and disappeared, raising a cloud of red dust, Niki lifted her head and saw all the stars in the sky without really looking at any one of them — the stars are the sky’s eyes, what a fairytale, the sky has no eyes it’s blind blind blind — and she reached a hand toward the stars like a beggar and held her arm stretched out like that for a long time and when it got tired she lowered her arm and with it her gaze and she stared at the low stone wall, at the terrible gap those loosened stones had left in the wall.
Piece by piece they’re taking my world away.