There was frost on the ground, and it was too warm. Looking out from the porch, Abigail saw every blade of grass standing up, white, rigid. There was no bite in the air, no taste of electricity. Something else, maybe, a nectar smell, but not the scent of frost. There were no whorls on the windows, no ferns of ice tracing over the glass.
The grass moved in the wind, short and shorn but rippling like wheat. Abigail was an old woman, and the mornings seemed colder every day, but the sun had been out for too long already.
The school buses had come and gone, and so had the paper, and, eventually, the mail. It was the last that she had come out for, and she was in only a bathrobe and slippers, and this, even, was stifling under the heat of the sun, not yet willing to give in to autumn, kind enough to let the tomatoes and the dandelions die out in peace.
But there were no dandelions.
There was the grass, and the grass was rippling, and there was no wind.
She walked down the steps.
Closer, on an even plane, she could see the peculiarity clearly. What had yesterday been a dense, yellowed lawn, tufted and sprawled in nature's lax blueprint, was clinical today. Militant. She could see that what had looked like dying leaves in unkempt design was truly row after row of orderly blades pushing up from the dirt, even as teeth, rounded as rats' tails.
Abigail saw a lot of things these days.
A cursory glance from side to side showed that the frost had not just touched her yard. It hadn't inhabited every neat suburban lawn, but dotted from house to house, ignoring some, favoring others. Each house it had chosen had been completely retaken, filling every space where grass had been before. Where boundaries touched without fences, the lines ran straight, green and white as neatly divided as if with painter's tape.
Each icy blade rippled. There was no wind.
Abigail wanted her mail.
She stepped into the yard, and it retreated around her foot. The frost tails, rat tails, would not be trod on, instead sinking noiselessly into the earth. When she lifted her foot, they rose again, inorganically, pegs out of holes.
Her footsteps were cautious at first, but it continued to cede to her, and she put it from her mind. She'd become very good at putting things from her mind. The pills helped, but she worked very hard at her own part of it, and she was proud of that, and she thought the doctors were, too. She wouldn't put all her burden on the medicine; she would carry her own yoke like the Good Book said, and she would be blessed.
When she reached the mailbox, Abigail looked around again, resting against the wicker fence, hand on the wood. It was late afternoon, and soul unseen. Children in schoolhouses, men at work. Women at work. Old women like her, used up, at home, dozing through the heat of the day and huddling against the cold of the night. She hadn't slept through the night for some years, and it hadn't been any of the trouble that caused it, simply a lack of pressure. She slept and ate as she needed to, and the days evaporated.
Abigail opened the mailbox and sorted its contents. Catalogs, sweepstakes entries. Less each day.
She clutched it to her withered breast and returned to the yard, closing the gate behind her. The sea of blades gave way beneath her feet. She smiled faintly at that-she was a queen before her subjects, Moses parting the waters. Moving slowly, taking up a last drought of sunlight, Abigail went into her house and locked the door.
She was an old woman, and the pills dulled her senses. It wouldn't be until she bathed that night that she noticed the scratch on her ankle.
The pain wasn't bad that night, and neither was the TV. Abigail rarely paid much attention to what she watched anymore, but what was on was soothing. There were some shows about selling and buying strange old antiques, and those were the kind she liked best.
