By Michael Kozart

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A technician spins a flywheel that files down metal, scattering gold dust. The band that Beth placed on Brock’s finger thirty-three years ago—twenty-nine before she died of cancer—breaks apart. He feels relief. Is that wrong? He carries the halves in a plastic bag to the waiting room and waits for the orthopedist.

Brock is surrounded by others, whimpering, coughing, vomiting, many with injuries far greater than a broken ring finger. It’s enough to make him feel almost lucky.

He examines the gold halves through the plastic. If you summed their weight for each second of every day for thirty-three years, it would be an unfathomable number. Now, the ring’s as light as two feathers—one for each half. He glances up to the TV projecting football excitement. There’s a feature game later this afternoon, on the East Coast, to be played in snow. Here, in California, it’s spring.

A nurse calls him into the treatment room.

No surgery is required, but the fix is brutish, the orthopedist says, in not so many words. It’s implied by the copious anesthetic injected into Brock’s hand, which soon feels like ice. Oral hydrocodone spreads numbness throughout his entire body.

Under fluoroscopy, a ghostly X-ray video, severed bones are pushed back together. Brock leaves the hospital with an aluminum-backed splint and more hydrocodone, plus a printout for aftercare. The mainstay is no heavy work for six weeks.

It never occurs to him to hire a day laborer to finish the pruning.

~

Within the hour, he’s back home.

The sky is blue, the air crisp.

Winter rain lingered far too long this year, delaying orchard work by weeks, leaving Brock little time before the buds will burst, the sap will rush to the canopy, and the trees will risk bleeding if pruned. Beth loved these trees including their fruit—juiced, preserved, baked into pies or eaten right off the branch.

Brock wraps his hand in a pillowcase for extra padding. Beth had a thing for fine French linen, 100% Egyptian cotton. She celebrated organic, sustainable produce from any land, especially their small piece of Northern California.

He duck-tapes the handle of the shears to the cloth, sparing his finger any pressure, and climbs the ladder back to the perch from where he fell three hours ago, a free fall after leaning out too far to lop a gangly branch, hasty and reckless. It was an instant of weightlessness before smacking the earth, crushing his ring finger.

He thins the crowded, crossing, and unsightly branches, reducing the risk that the trees will split under the weight of all the fruit to come. With the injury, he cannot work fast enough: daylight fades and the waning crescent of an old moon rises resembling the gold halves of the ring jangling in his pocket. 

The pain? An eight out of ten.

He reasons that just as pruning generates fulsome trees, a severed ring can be remolded into a stronger band, and an old moon gives way to the young. So should a broken finger be like a…

He shakes his head, unable to solve the riddle of his pain. He yields to indecision and discomfort, not to mention dusk, and climbs back down.

The pain is now a ten.

~

Lying on top of the bed, in his clothes, Brock swallows more hydrocodone and then wine. Numbness returns.

He turns on the TV.

The football game is in its final throes—players slipping, sliding, tumbling in blizzard conditions. Yardage markers aren’t visible. The score’s pointless. The action’s all in the weather. Brock imagines a lost Arctic explorer or the man on the Yukon trail from Jack London’s To Build a Fire. No pain or sadness, just numbness before the deepest slumber.

Fuzzy headed, he can’t remember today’s date. He knows it’s spring, yet the clock—some doomsday device—has reversed. Spring has returned to winter.

He watches till one team wins, then it’s the post-game show, then the commercials: life insurance, gastric reflux pills, all-you-can-eat shrimp. And finally, the nightly news: Gaza, Ukraine, the stock market collapse, sadness, loss. 

He turns to the nightstand.

There’s a framed photo of the two of them in Tahoe, the frozen lake in the background. He and Beth. They spent most of that getaway hibernating in bed, while outside, it snowed. Next to the photo, still on the nightstand, a souvenir of the Golden Gate from a different road trip. Brock shakes the globe with his good hand and another blizzard erupts. He remembers where she is and where he soon might be—the cold earth. One more sip, one more pill. How numb can he be?

He’s startled by a squirrel springing from a limb outside the window, causing the branch to quiver and brush the pane. Opening the window, he smells citrus nectar. It’s from a neighbor’s orchard. Their trees—plum, apricot, peach, apple, and pear—have yet to bloom. They will at any hour, any minute, any second.

Beth would banish further talk of winter. Air out the bungalow. Taste the nectar in the breeze. Husband the land.

What does Brock say?

Land husbandry. The words roll from his lips with a nice ring.

He unplugs the TV, drops pain pills in the trash, pours wine down the drain, makes a pot of coffee, heads to the garage for an extension cord and halogens.

Climbing the ladder back into the trees, bathed in electric flood light, he resumes pruning and quite forgets the severed ring wrapped in plastic deep in his pocket.

The pain, the drugs, the spring—is that what makes him giddy? Yet, he’s careful not to fall again. Take care up there, she’d say, far below.

And he will, despite the pain, determined not to fall again.
With the thaw comes pain, and with pain comes spring. Regrowth shall be my vow, he says out loud, extending himself with each measured cut, the trees resplendent in their artificial glow like a lacy gown.