MORNING AFTER

Heading outside and feeling the cool air mix with the warm sun against your cheek, you pause a moment to hear the door close behind you before carrying on. The streetscapes are silent this early on a Saturday—the morning's frosted dew still unstomped on the grass blades. You reach into your pocket and turn up the music in your ears before you walk away from the major arteries and into the residential area. Backroad by backroad, you carve a lightning-shaped path across town. People are just waking in their homes, but cats and dogs and birds mark the otherwise still scenery with sudden movements and with lazy movements. Some trees survive green and needly in this weather, but many are glorified twigs, reaching upward sans fioriture. And then you take a turn down an alley and walk naturally through a backyard whose owner you've never met. And there it is, as it has been every time before: in a small clearing at the border of four homes—homes shaped like they house kind families—there lives a small collection of rosebushes. It's unclear who watches over this patch, but the care is immaculately and invisibly performed. You bend to the flowers in an observant deference to the improbability that something so fragile and so red should survive in weather where your own breath is too foreign to go unchanged. Standing, you feel the second half of a vibration in your pocket and excitedly pluck out your phone, but it's only a message from a friend and you go back to imagining today as a healing experience.