D.J. Waldie

You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide.

You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.

People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims.

But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love.

You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.

A woman calls repeatedly about her Christmas tree.

The city’s trash hauler picks up the discarded trees. If a tree is taller than four feet, it must be cut in half before the trash hauler will pick it up.

The woman’s tree is over four feet. The woman has no one to saw her tree in two.

She is advised, gently, to ask a neighbor. But she won’t.

She says she no longer knows her neighbors well enough.

It is unlawful to tell the future in my city. One of the oldest ordinances in the city code book, adopted when the city incorporated in 1954, lists the illegal practices by which the future may not be foretold.

It is illegal to furnish any information “not otherwise obtainable by the ordinary processes of knowledge by means of any occult psychic power, faculty or force, clairvoyance, clairaudience, cartomancy, psychology, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind-reading, telepathy, or by any other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized substance, gypsy cunning or foresight, crystal gazing, or oriental mysteries.