REVOLUTION

Every spring she lifted the carpet in the lounge where the old boys sat drinking their single-malts.

She turned the good brown soil and planted seeds: radishes and lettuces, and as the days grew warmer, chard and onions, tomatoes and squash.

Still they sat, dozing, while the warm room filled with leaf and vine, the scents of ripening. Every day she came and watered and hoed,

and every day they sat, reading their papers, talking of business, the progress of their cold gray war.

She filled apple baskets in autumn and left them on the roadsides for squirrels and children and crows. The old boys grew thinner,

more querulous. When they rose to go to the bathroom or the bar they were careful not to dirty their shoes. They would not speak to her.

When winter came she tacked the carpet back down, swept up the last dry leaves and followed the boys to the sea.

There, while they sat in the sun on their private beach building castles of golden sand, she went to work with her tiny trowel.