LONELY FOR GOOD FORTUNE

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

The tub of water was not aware that it had a responsibility to its surroundings until the idea was right up on top of it. The tub hadn’t been thinking of surroundings, or of anything other than its own unhappiness. Things had been going wrong since the summer and it was lonely for good fortune. A part of the roof had collapsed and filled the tub with soot. A window had shattered during a construction project and sent sharp invisible shards of glass into the tub. While the tub was suffering—while it was being victimized, yes, that wasn’t too strong a word—everything else in the backyard just went about its business. The clothesline prevented the clothes from tumbling to the ground. The patio prevented the chairs from sinking into the ground. The chairs prevented people from sinking into the ground. The more the tub saw what everything else was doing, the more that it started to feel bad not just for itself but for the ground. Everything was in the habit of denying the ground what rightfully belonged to it.  The tub asserted itself against this practice. It was easy, in a way. The tub had a leak near its base which supplied water in small doses that were more like gifts than surrender or sacrifice. They attracted the notice of a bird that flew across the yard and alighted on the tub’s edge. The bird approved. The tub approved of the bird’s approval. Anything that could fly that high was right about more than nothing. The soot, the shards, the suspicion that self-protection was a sin, remained in the tub but their sully drained out with the water being given to the ground, to the point that the water that remained threatened to participate in purity.