only the one squishwrite

Only the one with empty pockets and the other with a broken wrist came home today. I was waiting by the window sorting lint on the window sill. The tulip poppler in our yard was shedding petals like paint chips flecked onto the grass. When I look at them up close they are yellow fading to orange to pink to white, but from here they look grey as the ash in our fireplace, or the moths dancing and moaning beneath the porch light when I'm pacing the house searching for sleep. The floors are wood and I can see faces moving in the knots, like how bark feels like cold palms of hands against mine. I talk to trees when I'm alone. I talk to trees and press my ear against their bellies, listen like I listen to my three-year-old cousin, carefully enough to pluck the words from her lips and run my fingertips over them, to understand, to know what to say back. In my dreams, she cracks eggs into tiny cups made of wax. She cracks boiled eggs into the runny ones and my whole family glares at me for laughing. It's hard to know when not to laugh sometimes. There is a crack in the window that looks like a silver spiderweb. You're afraid to touch it, you told me once, because you might stick, might fall in and stay, waiting for a spider that moved on months ago when she reached all eight of her hands into her pockets and pulled them out empty. I touch your arm and hope I stick. I touch your arm so you come home. When the wind blows petals from the tulip poppler, you pull away and run to the yard, trying to catch them before they touch the ground.