2025 Pushcart Nominated Story from Stanchion Magazine Issue 17
The world will end on a Tuesday, but that doesn't work for Owen. It takes him three days to mow his yard, starting on Mondays at 9:00 a.m. and finishing on Wednesdays. So, to suit him, the end will have to fall on a Thursday at the earliest.
I catch him in his driveway one morning, a few weeks before the big day, and try to bring him around. It's August in Houston, and he stands there, all five-foot something, an ancient Japanese man in a bucket hat, khakis, tennis shoes, and a short-sleeve button-up dress shirt. The morning dew rises off the grass like steam, and Owen stands in front of me, as calm as a mailbox.
"Nope," he says. "Tuesday won't do."
Somehow, it's my fault the timing doesn't work. It's as though I set the date somehow. Owen doesn't say it, doesn't imply it. He'd be upset to know I was upset.
"Can't you start a day early?"
He stares at his shoes, shaking his head and sighing as though I can't do math in my head. "No, sorry. I mow Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday."
"Owen, there's not going to be a Wednesday."
"There will always be a Wednesday." He turns to attend to something in his garage—something only an older man knows needs tinkering right now.
I leave Owen to his musings and walk back next door to my Aunt Celia's place, where I'm housesitting, eyeballing the grass on my side as I go. He sets a high standard – Celia's paranoid about an errant dandelion or two infiltrating his yard from our side. Some crabgrass and fescue hide in plain sight but are far from the fence separating our yards.
Celia took me in when I was a toddler after my parents died in a car accident. I lived here from preschool until my first year of college a long time ago. I'm back now because I'm in a decluttering phase that's gone too far and has left me without a place to live. Celia left a while ago for a beach in Mexico with a mysterious someone and had texted me when she'd heard of my predicament. "Why not come home?" she'd said.
It's just Owen and me on a cul-de-sac consisting of seven homes; all are single-story ranches built in the 1960s, the kind of houses you used to see on old TV shows, with earnest fathers leaving for work in the morning, followed by kids walking to school or the bus stop. Now everyone's gone, and the houses sit with curtains drawn and the half-asleep expression of grandparents on the couch at Thanksgiving. The police and military are watching for looters, but nobody seems to have the desire for other people's stuff anymore.
Apart from the tech and my clothes, the rest of the house's interior is a time capsule selected from the Sears Roebuck catalog circa 1980. The night before, I'd bent down to grab a pen and saw aqua-colored crayon scribbles all over the underside of the table. When I was five, I insisted on the giant box of 64 colors with the sharpener. I only used one color at a time. Lara, who was my age and lived on the other side of Owen, was partial to purple.
The nights are long, and the dreams are intense. I think it's all the meds they have us on, antidepressants, and mood elevators. The National Guard drives around in tan Humvees and leaves the stuff in the mailbox. That night, I dreamed it was Monday morning, so it was time for Owen to start mowing. The front yard and the back are arguing over who gets cut first. The grass in the backyard speaks up. Why should the front always get first dibs? The front yard says appearances matter; everyone sees the front, so it makes sense the mowing starts there. The back says the front is a pompous ass, and the front calls the back a crybaby. Owen says nothing as he stands in his kitchen, fiddling with his hearing aids, considering their points. He always listens to the grass; it's people he can't hear.
The noise of the Lawnboy mower wakes me up. I'd fallen asleep on the couch, and the racket drowns out the TV I'd left on. Its two-stroke engine reminds me of a dirt bike, with an annoying clatter sounding like change left in the clothes dryer. The mower's big selling point back in the day was less weight, more power, and easy maintenance. Owen has at least five mowers; I know them all. He usually favors the Snapper with its smooth four-stroke engine and a muted exhaust note from the whoosh of the vacuum action.
My back is like a poorly assembled IKEA dresser, so I shuffle around to the bathroom and the kitchen for coffee. I peer out the window to see Owen over the fence, starting in on the back. I imagine the front lost the argument. Celia's yard takes me thirty minutes using an old Sears reel mower. It's nowhere near the quality of Owen's equipment. My lawn care routine doesn't include edging or anything fancy, but the grass gets cut, doesn't embarrass the neighborhood, and keeps my aunt happy. Why on earth does it take Owen three days? I guess it makes sense; he's ancient, after all, and stubborn.
***
Work is still work. Everyone shows up for video conferences, little postage-stamp-sized images of people who are amazed to be getting paid. It's more of a support group now, but a few people drop off every few days. It starts with them turning their cameras off and leaving old portraits or Facebook profile pics as stand-ins. Then those disappear, too.
The phone on the kitchen wall rings, and I jump. I wasn't sure it still worked. It's an old-school cacophony of metal striking metal housed in avocado green plastic.
"Hello, Aunt Celia," I say.
"How did you know it would be me?"
"Who else would call the landline to check on me?"
"I'm not checking up on you. I'm checking up on the house."
"It's all still here. It's a beautiful morning. I've got the patio door open, and the coffee is brewing. You can hear Owen mowing next door."
"You should help him."
"I'm trying, Aunt Celia." I point out the conflict between his mowing schedule and the end of the world.
"It matters to him, you know," she says. There's the woosh of static on the line and the ghosts of other voices ebbing and flowing. "What else do you have to worry about?"
"I know, Celia." Everything's whittled away at this point. All that's left for me to fret over is the old guy next door who's determined to maintain his lawn care routine.
"You slept on the couch again, didn't you? I can hear it in your voice."
"I did, and it's no big deal." She lectures me about my back and how I should sleep in my old room with the model airplanes and science fiction paperbacks. She says I should care for myself, eat healthy, and brush my teeth. I say the same things to her, except for the oral hygiene comment. She goes on about household things and how the food remains fabulous in Mexico. Owen's making another pass, and her voice and the mower's noise blend into a cocoon of love, humanity, purposefulness, and safety. I want nothing more than to retreat under the covers of my room with a flashlight and a pile of comic books.
"I'm not going to say goodbye," I say.
"I'm not either," she says.
Celia's yard looks a bit ragged, and I want it to look as good as possible since Owen has already begun cutting his. I fire up the Sears mower and begin. The sweat pools on my back, humidity rises off the grass, and snakes upward between my jeans and ankles. The throttle's stuck and won't advance much past idle, but the wheels turn, so I go with it.
Everything is spinning, dizzying, as the green of the lawn blurs with the grey, chain-link fence and the blue sky above, and everything's turned into an impressionistic painting overlayed with the scent of grass and the smell of exhaust and hot metal. I must be dehydrated. I'm looking up at everything, my hands barely reaching the handle, and Owen's hands are on either side of mine. I'm seven years old, and we're on his side of the fence, not Celia's, and I'm cutting his grass. He's walking behind me, guiding me, but I think I'm in charge. I hear Owen over the engine's noise, "Good job," he says. I can only go so fast; my legs are short, but he says it's okay.
The silence rushes me as I finish where I started. With the mower shut down, a weird hiss rises, like when you're listening to a favorite song on a mix tape, and it ends, and you can't remember if there's another one after it. I knew she was there before I saw her. Wearing a periwinkle blue sundress, Lara stands by Owen's picnic table, holding a tray with a pitcher of her special, homemade iced tea. I remember the dress; this is Lara at fifteen. She'd just gotten her braces off.
"I came back," she says. But she's already gone. I catch a whiff of her green apple shampoo and think of the summer she worked at the 31-flavor ice cream place, her bending over the cooler in her pale pink uniform, a tan forearm flexing as she scooped chocolate chip into a waffle cone.
Fried chicken and Salisbury steak are the TV dinner options I bring to Owen's around 5:00, our version of the early bird special. He calls dibs on the fried chicken. Afterward, I clean up and join him on the couch. Owen always has the TV blaring with the closed captions on. He also has one of those appliance-like phones with the volume control on the handset and the light wired to the ringer. There's always a lot of shouting and gesturing when we're together. He stands and grabs my wrist to follow him to the back bedroom. There's something he's looking for, and he has me pull boxes out of the closet and flip open the lids. One carton is packed full of brand-new
Kleenex boxes and another is full of the short-sleeved shirts he likes. He selects a stained cardboard box, smelling of laundry soap, containing photo albums and a scrapbook.
Owen narrates as I leaf through it all. He was born in 1929 in Yokohama, Japan, and he's ninety-five years old. There's an image of him in a school uniform followed by photos of a leveled city, of nothing but rubble with notes and arrows pointing to what had been a school or a house. He points to a picture of a collapsed building and to his ears to explain how he lost his hearing. Deeper in the box, I find a ticket for his passage by boat to the US, extra passport photos, and a pay stub from the local golf course where he worked as a groundskeeper. There's a birthday card from Lara the year before her cancer, during our senior year of high school.
I wake up to Owen mowing on Tuesday because I've slept on the living room couch again. The Lawnboy's clamor fades through the screen door as he finishes the backyard and starts on the front. Today's the last day.
For dinner, we switch, and he takes the Salisbury steak, and I have the chicken. It's the last night for humanity, so he pulls out a six-pack, and we each have a beer. He's found a shoebox full of old photos from the neighborhood. Sure enough, there's me and Owen with my first bike. He's taking the training wheels off as Celia stands nearby, wringing her hands. There's a photo of Lara and me in junior high school; she was taller than me. I remember a few years later, sitting next to her on the couch at her parent's house, watching Twilight Zone reruns when we were supposed to be studying, and how her brow would furrow when she was mad at me. Owen sits next to me and smiles as I describe the photos, looking first at me and then over to Lara, sitting on the floor watching us. She's there, and then she's gone, but it feels better knowing Owen sees her, too. After dinner, we shake hands as men of his generation do and say goodnight.
The following day starts with me in bed studying the model airplanes on the ceiling and the books on the shelf. The water runs, the lights burn, and the coffee tastes like coffee. I keep thinking it's Tuesday, but Tuesday was yesterday, so none of this should be here. Is the end of the world the same as the world we had?
I walk over to Owen's. His garage door is down, and the rectangle of grass in the front yard is waiting. The air is still, the temperature is mild, and nothing is happening. The front door is unlocked, so I enter. The place is how we left it. The photo albums are all still there but stacked on the dining table. The lights in the hallway cast an old-school incandescent glow as I open his bedroom door. I almost don't see him. He's on his back, with the covers tucked under his chin. I think he's gone, but his eyes open, and he reaches for the lamp on the nightstand. He looks around, disoriented at first, but focuses on me, beaming.
"I told you. I always mow on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday."
It's time to finish the front. Owen says I can have a go, and I pick the Snapper. The vacuum action makes the yard look neater, and appearances matter. He sits in a lawn chair in the shade of the garage with a tall glass of Lara’s iced tea and supervises me. My watch stopped at midnight. I'm not sure we're here. I fire up the motor and set it in gear. The mower is the only sound in the neighborhood, maybe the only sound anywhere.
David Lanvert lives in Las Vegas.
Read more 2025 Pushcart Prize-nominated stories, including Black Balloon by Abigail E. Myers and Scattered Ghosts by Abigail Kemske.
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