#waterdivies

 



#wateredivies

  

She never noticed the climbing ivy until after she rented out her condo. The stuff grew on the southwest corner of the building she'd called home for a decade, but she didn't know north from east or Alabama from Mississippi, despite her storied college degree. From her sixth-floor studio's far-right window, she could make out one vine of the ivy growing up the back brick wall. It had a few brown leaves on it.

            “They just planted that. Hmm. Must've been a year ago. Hmm. Fast-growing, I'll kinda miss it. Always fond of ivy, for some reason,” she smirked to herself.

            She was packing up the last of her things to make room for the new tenant and her wife. She didn't realize she talked to herself at all, much less how much she did.

            “I guess the rain finally watered down all the dog piss. The way they put out around here, I'm surprised it didn't kill the whole plant good and for all.”

            The vine now crept up higher than her own height, at five foot flat. She admired greenery everywhere she'd lived and for a moment, she was back on her famed campus, where the ivy grew. The back-and-forth of moving blurred her sense of time and place. A/C on and off, condo door shut, push elevator button, wait and wait and wait, only one car working, down down down only-working elevator, out to car, hot-humid-as-fuck, open car door, throw Scheiße in, then all in reverse back up, back to condo, back to getting it done before it got any hotter. She should never have moved this far south.

            “I didn't know Princeton grads got only this far by age 30,” she murmured, shaking her head.

  

R. P. Singletary

 

R. P. Singletary is a lifelong writer and a native of the southeastern United States. His writings have appeared in Bumble Jacket MiscellanyIowa Summer Writing Festival Anthology, and elsewhere.

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