Jane Hanna's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The next morning Jane climbed to the roof with coffee and found the beds thrashed. Wind had come in off the flat expanse of tar overnight. Two of the alyssum flats lay tipped. A borage stem hung snapped at the base. The berry bush her boss had underlined in his notebook had shed half its blossoms across the concrete. She knelt and picked up the petals one by one. No ants. No jumpers. The roof was bare of anything with legs. She understood then what she had missed. There was nothing up here for a bug to hide behind. No wall, no crack, no hollow. The wind rolled straight across the slab every evening and scattered them before they could settle on a bloom. Jane went back down to the custodial office. Joe was at his desk sorting keys. She told him the wind was pulling the garden apart and taking the bugs with it. He listened, then set the keys down. "Windbreak," he said. "Doesn't have to be pretty. Has to block." "I've got no lumber money." He scratched his beard. "Boiler room. Back corner. Pots the old teacher left. Some are cracked. Lay them on their sides, tuck them in the beds. Bugs love a broken pot. Dark, warm, out of the wind." Jane spent the afternoon hauling terracotta up the stairwell. Most of the pots were split. One had a clean hole punched through the side, the rim chipped, the clay stained dark from years in the damp. She carried it up last. On the roof she worked along the raised beds. She laid the whole pots on their sides between the alyssum and the thyme, mouths facing away from the wind. She wedged the cracked one against the base of the berry bush and packed soil around it so it would not roll. Then she went down to the cafeteria and came back with a paper tray of fruit scraps from the lunch bins. She tucked apple cores and strawberry tops into the shade of each pot. She sat against the low wall and waited. The sun dropped. The wind pushed at her collar but broke against the pots and slid over them. Inside the cracked one, the shadow held still. An ant came up the drainpipe. Then a line of them. They turned at the first pot and went in. A pink jumper landed on the rim of the cracked one and dropped inside. Something small and gray followed. Then a moth settled on the berry blossoms above and stayed. Jane counted what she could see and stopped counting at forty. She wrote it in the green notebook. Pots as shelter. Fruit as bait. Wind broken. Then she saw the blossoms above the cracked pot were wilting fast. The berry bush was drying at the tips. She touched the soil. Bone dry. There was no water line on the roof.