The best place we lived was the house that had 67 steps, or was it 76 steps? I used to know it so precisely. I could hear the sound of your soles change to a duller tenor, five steps from the top, because it was a few centimeters higher than the others. In 30 more seconds you’d come through the door.
Because of Italian grandmother tradition, you grew a fig tree in our front yard. For that first summer, I picked one perfect fig two times a week, always growing just one at a time, like the tree was concentrating so hard on that one that it forgot to grow others. The raccoons ate most of the persimmons from the tree outside our bathroom window, but sometimes we managed to pick one before they got to it. I liked the star-shaped designs that revealed themselves when I cut it open, and secretly watching your face as you tasted the first one of the season.
The street dead-ended into Moon Canyon Park and we walked our dog up the slope every morning, before the fog burned off. Our favorite neighborhood dog was named Grandpa. The first night we moved into that bungalow you cooked and we didn’t have any chairs to sit in, so we ate steak in bed. The museum down the street went bankrupt and whoever locked it up forgot about the underground corridor. We snuck in to look at the light boxes with artifacts, you took photos of me dancing, and we yelled from opposite ends to hear our echoes. Our landlord fell in a hole he dug while gardening and called our dog’s name for help because he always mixed up your name and the dog’s, so he thought he was calling for you.
Our ancient next door neighbor asked us to mail letters for him, and we went to the post office feeling virtuous about being helpful until a week later when another old man furiously knocked on our neighbor’s door about the hate mail he’d been sent.
Because we were in a canyon, the sun went down and the chill came in by 3pm. The next door neighbor and Grandpa the dog died in the same week. The persimmon tree now barren, the raccoons moved to our orange tree. The tunnel under the museum was finally remembered by someone who held the keys. It was still fall, but the coyotes started coming out earlier and earlier. They used to wait until winter.
Lexi Kent-Monning (she/her) is an alum of the Tyrant Books workshop Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tilted House Review, X-R-A-Y, Little Engines, Neutral Spaces, and elsewhere. https://www.lexikentmonning.com/